Who Will Be The Last Tech Worker With a Job (The Multicorn)?
I see every industry and role scrambling right now. They want to be considered “high value,” un-layoff-able, the humans you still need, and better than AI.
It’s getting so desperate that I’m increasingly seeing roles throwing each other under the bus.
“You don’t need THEM, but you need US.”
- Role A wants to prove their value and keep their jobs.
- Role A says we don’t really need Role B!
- Role A claims they can do Role B’s work. We supposedly don’t need Role B… but we need their work done… hmmmmmm.
- Role A hopes to be the Last Tech Worker With a Job.
- Role A can make their own jobs awful and impossible by taking on their own work and taking on work from a job they’re probably not good at.
It’s an ugly game, and I am not sure anybody wins.
Role A wants to be what I call The Multicorn™.
It’s not enough to be a unicorn anymore. You have to be multiple unicorns. You want to prove that you are great at content/writing, research, data analysis, information architecture, interaction design, visual design and branding, front-end coding, back-end coding, product strategy, and more.
Researchers are trying to design. Designers are trying to write and research. Everybody wants to strategize and make the roadmap. Product Managers are trying to write, research, and design. Everybody wonders: if they could also code, could they be the Last Tech Worker With a Job?
People who used to spend thousands of dollars with NN/g or Pragmatic are now spending thousands on online courses teaching them “product sense,” whatever that is, and how to be an “AI Product Manager.” I’m not sure if that’s a PM using more AI, if it’s a PM for AI products, or both. But these courses can sound attractive in a world where everybody scrambles to be the last un-layoff-able Multicorn.
Who will be the Last Tech Worker With a Job?
Product? UX? Engineer? Someone else? Let’s dive in.
UX could be The Multicorn, the Last Tech Worker With a Job.
But UX is already in a very disempowered place.
We in UX didn’t speak out enough against the things that created poor outputs, poor outcomes, poor working conditions, and other evil. We didn’t leave a bad review for that endlessly shitty book that was the opposite of customer-centric. And when non-UXers found that book and didn’t see enough of us speaking out against it, they figured that’s how you do UX.
Social media is full of articles and posts telling us that we have to save our job (or our industry) by being more strategic, doing more critical thinking, and proving our value. These posts blame you for where we are. Evidently you had endless support, budget, time, and autonomy, and you’ve just been doing it all wrong! You didn’t speak the business’ language!
It’s very late for that message, considering how everybody was gaslit by years and years of the previous trendy messages like, “Have everybody on your team do design thinking!” “Everybody’s a Designer,” and “Teach everybody what you do so that they’ll really value Design.” Newsflash: if you teach that what you do is quickly and easily learned, you can help devalue it.
I wish UXers could be The Multicorn, shepherding the future AI that tries to do everybody’s jobs, but my prediction is that it’s another role.
Product Managers love to tell me they are strategic.
They have the ideas! They have the solutions! Designers should just make the screens that PMs imagine because PMs know the most, they’re in charge here, and they will solve the problems.
Yet they are mostly order takers whose jobs are being moved or cut. They’re fighting about who they are, their role in a company, and what they do or don’t do. We have such high levels of product failure that prominent voices teach that you want failure, and high failure rates are good strategy. Newsflash: high failure rates are not good product management or strategy.
PM’s main course of action has been to announce that they do everything, hoping that’ll let them be the Last Tech Worker With a Job. They’ll be the UX Researcher, the UX Designer, the UX Writer, the Project Manager, the Business Analyst, some sort of product strategist, and maybe they’ll learn to code.
But this hasn’t solved their problems either. It’s only made them overspend on courses while burning out and scrambling to be the Last Tech Worker With a Job.
In the age of AI, what does The Multicorn do?
The above screenshot shows Claire Vo, LaunchDarkly's CPO, speaking at the 2024 Config (Figma) conference. The slide shows that a team of 1 Product Manager, 5–10 Software Engineers, 1–2 UX Designers, 1 Data Analyst, and 1 Engineering Manager might — in the future — just be “you,” the Product Manager.
In the AI age, The Multicorn would need to be able to prompt AI to do work in multiple areas: content/writing, research, data analysis, information architecture, interaction design, visual design and branding, front-end coding, back-end coding, and more.
The Multicorn would need to be good enough at all of these areas to know when AI gives them something false, the wrong solution, or overly derivative (since AI is rehashing what already exists, based on its training).
I also think about how many people should be on a cross-functional team if you want work done well… if we had high quality standards, and truly cared about outputs and outcomes… if you didn’t want UX to be a bottleneck.
That would be:
- 1 PM
- 1 Data Analyst
- 10 Engineers + their Lead or Manager
- 1 CX Strategist or Service Designer
- 2 UX Designers, one is a Lead
- 3 UX Researchers, one is a Lead
- 1 UX Writer and 1 Visual/Brand/Design System Designer would probably be part-time, a shared resource across a few teams
The Last Multicorn With a Tech Job replaces 20 people, possibly more. AI isn’t up to the job in 2024, but when will it be “good enough”? Could it be as soon as 2025 or 2026?
Who will be the future Multicorn?
Could it be the PM? I don’t think so.
If the company were to keep one person to replace 14, 20, or more workers, I think they would keep a Senior Engineer. They can prompt the AI for the design and writing, handle the data, manage themselves, code and fix AI’s code, test the code, and manage the product based on mandates from above.
The PM who recently learned to code won’t be as strong an option as an experienced Engineer.
A Multicorn “team of one plus various AI tools” could be the not-so-distant future, but I don’t think that role will go to a strategist. I think critical thinking will sadly be optional. Companies will want the order taker who gets the most done in the least time.
Tech companies care mostly about working software. It’s amazing to think of how many people saw Agile Manifesto Principle #1, “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable solutions,” and only took “continuous delivery of working software” away from that. Zillions of people who claim to be Agile seem to have little or performative care about customer satisfaction and valuable solutions.
The best person to make sure we have working software is an Engineer. Therefore, I think the future Team of One is an experienced Engineer.
We’ve already been shown the future.
Figma is fine-tuning everything for the PM who wants to do a little design (but mostly prompt AI to do the design). And that could easily instead be an Engineer running the AI. Ultimately, Figma doesn’t care who buys the license, but Designers haven’t been Figma’s target audience for some time.
Miro is fine-tuning everything for someone who wants Miro’s AI to pretend to be cross-functional teammates. Perhaps this person is a Team of One, our Multicorn. The following October 2024 screenshot shows Miro’s new AI acting as an Agile Coach to give you feedback on the content of your sticky notes. They call them AI Sidekicks, and seem to have started with AI “Agile Coaches” and “Product Leaders.”
The screenshot shows AI being activated on a sticky note. It says, “Agile coach provides expert advice, trained on the work of tech industry thought leaders.” I wonder if that awkwardly-written blurb came from a person or AI.
Congrats, thought leaders! AI read your books and articles, and will now pretend to be you, making suggestions on product roadmaps, ideas, and plans.
Miro is also starting to offer “AI-powered prototyping,” also aimed at Product Managers. Here’s a sentence from their Innovation Workspace announcement, “Your product manager can build a custom AI action shortcut to trigger turning user research questions into a full interview script with a single click — no coding ability required.”
Can you imagine being a Researcher or Designer at Miro, and watching them undo your entire industry with AI features for Product Managers? I can’t.
What about all of the AI startups that plan to be your co-workers (or replace you) in the near future?
At this point, it’s unhealthy to imagine or say that your job is safe. Or that AI can’t or won’t take your job. Or that [insert human action or emotion here] is so important to your job that AI can’t do your job without you. Figma and Miro already disagree; AI can do these jobs without the people they were trained and modeled on.
This argument only works if your company cares about quality. If your company mostly cares about deadlines, money spent, money saved, and profits, then your company might not care that AI doesn’t do your work that well (yet).
What is your plan?
Most people I speak to are waiting. They are waiting for things to turn around. They expect companies who gleefully laid people off, saw their stock price rise, and managed to maintain good revenue and profits to suddenly believe they need lots of people to come back… and at their old salaries.
Some jobs have come back, but have you seen these salaries? I have recently interviewed for Senior-level UX Researcher jobs paying as low as $37.50 per hour. Before 2024, the least I had been paid as a Senior UXer was $40 per hour. We seem to be moving backwards, especially if the company needs you in an expensive city… and especially if they expect you to move there at your own expense.
Don’t wait. Don’t wait for your next layoff, the anniversary of your last layoff, or for you to feel more desperate and afraid.
Start planning what is next, or what else you can do in addition to a tech career. That’s the focus of my new book, Life After Tech. You don’t have to leave tech. But you should have a plan, and you might want to take action on it. I’m trying to stay in tech, but I’m also actively working on non-tech work areas that are just starting to make me a little money.
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🐦🔥 https://lat.link Life After Tech is a book, exercises, coaching, community, and more. You are the phoenix. It’s never too early to plan what you’ll do when you’re done with tech… or tech is done with you. Or you want to add non-tech work outside of a tech career.
