The Good Enough

A man in his late thirties did a job nobody else could do quite the way he did it. He saw the field before the field knew it was a field. He moved people without telling them they were being moved. The thing he was best at couldn’t be coached, couldn’t be measured, didn’t show up on the stat sheet, and didn’t have a column on the spreadsheet.

The company replaced him.

Not because he got worse. He didn’t get worse. The replacement got hired because the replacement was good enough. Good enough is a phrase that does a lot of work in English. It usually means cheap enough.

The replacement could do most of what he did. Not all of it. Most of it. The 80 percent that showed up on the stat sheet. The remaining 20 percent — the seeing-before-seeing, the moving-without-telling — that 20 percent didn’t have a metric, so it didn’t have a price, so it didn’t have a budget line, so it didn’t exist in the conversation that ended his job.

He was good. The thing he was best at was invisible. Invisible things don’t survive cost-cutting cycles.

This happens to humans now. It used to happen mostly in sports and music. It moved into law in the 2010s, when document review went to a piece of software that did 80 percent of what associates did for 5 percent of the cost. It moved into journalism when content management systems did 80 percent of what desk editors did for 0 percent of the cost. It moved into accounting when something with a chatbot face did 80 percent of what bookkeepers did for twelve dollars a month.

In each case, the 80 percent could be priced. The 20 percent couldn’t. Because the 20 percent didn’t have a metric, the 20 percent didn’t exist in the meeting where the budget got drawn.

The man in his late thirties found other work. The work he found used the 20 percent he was best at. It wasn’t called the same thing as the work he lost. It paid better, on net, because the 20 percent turned out to be rare. But it took him three years to find. Three years is a long time when you have a mortgage and a kid who is suddenly tall enough to need everything to fit.

I want you to think about the people in your line of work who are best at the part nobody can measure. The therapist who hears the thing the patient didn’t say. The teacher who knows which kid to ask. The nurse who walks in and the room calms down. The mechanic who finds it by sound.

That work doesn’t disappear. It gets unbundled. It gets stripped out of the job it used to live in. It gets exiled to consulting, to contractors, to the gig economy, to the freelance market. It stops being a job and starts being a side hustle. The 80 percent stays inside the company. The 20 percent gets pushed out into the world to fend for itself.

You used to have to fire someone good to lose what they did best. Now you just have to redefine the job around what a machine can do, and the rest leaves on its own.

That’s the human labor tax in slow motion. Not the bulk layoffs. The unbundling. The quiet erosion of the part of the work that made the work worth doing.

The cheaper version isn’t worse. It’s narrower. The thing it doesn’t do is the thing nobody wrote down.

The story stands.