It is the week before Christmas and Peter Gibbons is checking his Fidelity app under his desk.
He is fifty-eight. Divorced. Three kids, two in college and one who already graduated. The tuition payments keep him up at night. But it is the health insurance that keeps him here. After two years of construction threw out his back, he came crawling back to engineering. The body does not forgive you in your late fifties.
His oldest, Emma, is a software developer at a startup in Austin. Uses artificial intelligence all day. Ships features in hours that would take Peter’s team weeks. Her equity is worth more than his four zero one k. She is twenty-six. Keeps telling him he should just go independent like it is that simple. Like he does not have two more tuitions and a back that screams when he sits too long.
He is proud of her. Also painfully aware she is doing what he wishes he could do, in a system that lets her do it.
Peter finished his sprint work by eleven a m. It is now two forty-seven p m. Waiting for product to figure out what he should build next. They are still writing specs the old way. Takes them two weeks to document what Peter could ship in three days.
An email arrives. Another corporate restructuring. The fourth this year. Aligning resources to accelerate our transformation journey. His division is not mentioned. He will probably be fine. Probably.
His A I assistant runs in the background generating documentation he will never use. Just enough activity to keep his generative A I adoption metrics up. Leadership tracks that now. The minimum is thirty A I queries a day.
Peter is at thirty-one.
Sometimes he thinks about driving for Door Dash. The peace and quiet. No standups. No retros. No velocity discussions. Just him, the road and someone else’s pad thai. A senior engineer with thirty-five years of experience fantasizing about food delivery as an escape from a system designed to empower him.
The holiday party is Friday.
Leadership will talk about their A I transformation journey. Slides about tool adoption. Someone will mention they have enabled two thousand engineers with A I assistants.
Nobody will mention those same engineers learned to pace themselves. Using A I at full speed means finishing early. Finishing early means awkward questions. At fifty-eight, scrutiny leads to conversations about fit and trajectory and other words that mean we would rather pay someone half your salary.
Peter figured this out in October. He can ship features in a quarter of the time it used to take. Tried it for two weeks. Burned through his backlog. Asked for more work.
His manager said product was not ready. Told him to find ways to stay busy. Mentioned that H R had questions about his time tracking.
Peter does not do that anymore. Now he uses A I to do just enough.
It is not that I am lazy, it is that I just do not care. If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I do not see another dime.
Same equation. Different decade. More back pain.
In the movie, Peter eventually snapped. Stole fractions of pennies. Committed fraud. Good third act.
Peter will not do that. He has tuition bills and a herniated disc and a C O B R A payment that would bankrupt him. Seven years until Medicare. He is not doing anything that shows up in a review.
What he will do is worse. He will be fine. Hit his numbers. Use A I just enough to stay comfortable. Leadership will not get a dramatic crisis. They will get a slow bleed. Watch competitors pull ahead and wonder why their teams cannot match them.
Back at the office, it is three fifteen p m.
The scrum master appears at his desk. Lanyard. Notebook. He is twenty-nine. Never wrote a line of code in his life. Now he is in charge of A I adoption for the engineering org.
He glances at the photo of Emma on Peter’s desk. Stares a bit too long.
Hey Peter, just checking in on status. You look a little disengaged. You got a case of the Mondays?
It is Thursday.
Just waiting on specs from product.
Right, right. Well, let me know if there is anything blocking you. I am good with people. I have people skills. He writes something in his notebook. I am the one who takes the requirements from the customers and brings them to the engineers. I have people skills.
Peter nods. He has heard this speech before. Different decade. Different scrum master. Same energy.
The agile coach materializes. They travel in pairs sometimes, like missionaries. He has never written code either. Has a certification in A I Enabled Agile Transformation from a two-day workshop in September. Now he is teaching engineers how to use the tools.
Peter. Quick sync. I noticed your velocity looked a little light this sprint. Any impediments we should surface at retro?
Waiting on specs.
Got it. Have you tried timeboxing your waiting? Sometimes I find it helps to be intentional about your blockers.
Peter has been writing code since before this kid was born. Shipped software when agile was just an adjective. He is mass analyzing codebases and generating tests while these two are still figuring out how to prompt for a meeting summary. He nods anyway.
Slack pings. The product manager asks. Hey Peter, quick question. Do you have bandwidth for a small thing? Can you join a thirty minute call?
Peter has nothing but bandwidth. A vast empty ocean of bandwidth filled with time and lower back pain. But a small thing means an hour of discussion about work that will not be specced for three weeks.
He types back. In a meeting, can we async?
He is not in a meeting. He is watching the one with people skills explain something with hand gestures near the collaboration zone. Still glancing at his phone. Probably swiping.
His manager stops by at four fifteen.
Hey Peter, your A I engagement metrics. You are at thirty-one queries per day.
The minimum is thirty.
Right. The minimum. But we want people doing more than the bare minimum. Brian in Platform is at seventy-five queries. Now that is someone who really gets it.
Peter stares at him. This feels familiar.
I am not going to write you up or anything. I just think you could be leaning into the A I transformation more. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I will get my numbers up.
His manager walks away satisfied. Peter has a strong sense of déjà vu. Twenty-six years ago it was T P S reports and cover sheets. Now it is story points and A I queries. Different metrics. Same conversation. Same feeling of performing enthusiasm for a system that does not make sense.
He opens his A I assistant and starts generating variations of hello world in different programming languages.
Thirty-two queries. Thirty-three. Thirty-four.
The A I responds. You are absolutely right.
Peter did not ask it a question. But even the A I does not understand the outdated governance model here. It is just trying to be polite.
The future of enterprise software development.
Here is the thing about Peter Gibbons.
In nineteen ninety-nine he was a cautionary tale. The guy who did fifteen minutes of real work in a week. The guy we laughed at in the theater. We were young then. We thought we would never be him.
In twenty twenty-five he is a rational actor. The guy with a bad back and two college tuitions and a health insurance policy he cannot afford to lose.
He is not lazy. He is not resistant to change. He is not afraid of A I taking his job.
He is responding perfectly to the incentives you created.
Peter wants to build.
He did not become an engineer to check stock prices and generate fake A I queries and wait for specs that never come. He became an engineer because he likes making things. Shipping things. That feeling when something works.
His daughter Emma does this every day. Ships in hours. No scrum master with people skills asking about her velocity. No mandatory thirty queries a day. Just outcomes.
She is twenty-six with equity worth more than his retirement savings. He is fifty-eight with thirty-five years of experience and a manager asking why he is only at the minimum.
You are not letting him.
Your measurement system tells him to slow down. Your governance model tells him to stay in his lane. Your product team cannot feed him fast enough. Your A I query minimums reward theater over outcomes.
Peter is not checked out because he does not care. He is checked out because caring does not pay. You made it that way. You took one of your top performers and trained him to perform mediocrity.
My only real motivation is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Twenty-six years later, the fear is realer. The tools are better. Nothing else has changed.
Sounds like somebody has got a case of the Mondays. Except it is Thursday. And it has been Thursday for about eighteen months now.
Peter could be shipping circles around your competitors. Instead he is generating hello world in Fortran to hit a metric.
That is not his failure. That is yours.
Here is the thing though. You can fix this.
Do not fire Peter. Do not restructure him. Do not send him to another A I training session led by someone who has never written code.
Move things out of his way.
Let him write his own specs. Let him test his own code. Stop making him wait for handoffs from people who are slower than his A I assistant. Kill the thirty query minimum and measure what he ships instead. Give product the tools to keep up with him or get out of his way entirely.
Peter has financial goals. Two more tuitions. Seven years to Medicare. A retirement that feels further away every time he checks his portfolio.
You have financial goals too. Ship faster. Beat competitors. Prove the A I investment was worth it.
These goals are not in conflict. They are the same goal.
Pay Peter for outcomes. Let him ship at full speed. Watch what happens when a thirty-five year veteran with nothing to prove and everything to lose finally gets permission to do his best work.
He is not going to leave. He cannot. But he can start caring again. And a Peter who cares is worth ten Brians hitting seventy-five queries a day generating nothing.
You built a system that trains top performers to perform mediocrity. You can also build one that does not.
The tools are there. Peter knows how to use them. Emma’s startup figured this out. Your competitors are figuring it out.
The only question is whether you will.
Happy holidays. Make them count.