Every hire is a bet you place through proxies. You can't see whether someone has judgment, so you infer it: the logo vouches for the execution, the execution vouches for the judgment underneath. For a decade that chain held.
AI cut the bottom wire. Execution is free now, so it proves nothing. Every candidate's demo works, every prototype runs. If you run a team, you feel it before you can name it: the signals you trusted have gone quiet, and you're not sure what to read instead.
This is the third essay in a series I've been circling all summer, and it's the one where the argument gets personal, because it moves into your org chart. When execution was the proxy for everything, three leadership moves ran on it: who you hire, who you energize, and who you part with. That proxy is gone, and most orgs are still wired as if it weren't.
Watch the companies rebuilding hiring from the studs and you see what they now pay for. Ramp made half its recent PM hires ex-founders and asks candidates to build a working prototype where the old interview wanted a slide deck; its CPO says management is probably dead, be the best builder in the world. Sierra replaced coding rounds with a two-hour build you defend in a review, and its debriefs stopped asking whether to hire someone and started asking where that person would thrive. At Typeface we moved the work sample ahead of the interview, and the bar climbs every quarter. My first question now is how someone decided what to build. What they built, anyone with the tools can produce. How they decided separates the room.
Hiring is only the first move. The second is narrow: find the handful who bring real judgment to the tools, give them a stage, and let them pull the rest forward. The third is the one the cheerful version skips. Some of your best people by the old measure won't cross, and the blocker is rarely ability. Keeping them in a role the ground has moved out from under is the cruelest option dressed as the kind one. Done as denial, it's the layoff nobody saw coming. Done as leadership, it's honesty early enough that they still have runway to build toward the other branch.
All three moves sort along one line. The legible half of the work, executable and benchmarkable, is commoditizing. The illegible half, the judgment about what's worth making and whether it's any good, is what companies are paying up for. So if you run a team, the question is where each move is carrying your people. Their position today matters less than the direction you're moving them.
The part of the work hardest to measure or fake is now the part worth the most. That was always the human part. It took the machines getting good for the price to show.
Full essay, and the close of the series, link in comments.