Politeness (and Its Death) in the Job Market. What Does Ghosting Really Reveal?

Hi!

Let me start with a question posed by Franklin Schneider in The Atlantic in his piece When Did the Job Market Get So Rude?

It sounds absurd: have you ever felt relief when receiving a rejection email? Not a thoughtful, personalized one—but the cold, mass-sent, template-heavy kind. For the author, that moment was revealing. It showed how gradual exposure to total indifference has lowered the bar so much that any form of communication—even negative—now feels like a win.

His hypothesis is blunt: if, in the job market, being treated with minimal politeness counts as success, then something fundamental has broken in the system that governed human interaction for centuries.

It’s Not a Lack of Manners. It’s a Lack of Balance.

The problem of widespread ghosting—disappearing without a word—has become seemingly symmetrical. Employers routinely cut off contact (research cited by Schneider shows that two out of three U.S. candidates were ghosted after an interview), but candidates are responding in kind: 62% say they plan to ghost a potential employer in the future.

But this symmetry is misleading.

What looks like a general decline in personal culture is actually a symptom. Politeness—or its absence—is a currency that reveals where real power lies. And in this equation, employers still hold it. The data is telling: ghosting affects the young most often—78% of Gen Z report being ghosted, compared to 55% of baby boomers. Those still building their market position are treated the worst.

Historically, manners acted as a buffer—a fig leaf—covering the rough edges of unequal relationships. In the 17th century, and later as cities grew denser and class mobility increased, etiquette evolved into a system of self-regulation. Its purpose was to eliminate “brutal displays of superiority” to avoid open conflict. A boss would ask an employee, even though both knew it was an order.

Today, that camouflage is evaporating.

The Screen Lifts the Burden

In the 21st century, technology entered the scene, bringing with it an illusion of distance—and moral loosening. Etiquette expert William Hanson, quoted by Schneider, captures it perfectly: “We’ve confused convenience with civility.” Screens allow us to avoid one another again, much like 18th-century aristocrats avoided lower classes—but without any of the old rituals.

Now that politeness is in retreat, the brutal truth surfaces. For years, we fed ourselves a sentimental narrative about work. We spoke of “family,” “teams,” and balanced relationships. Forms saying “we carefully reviewed your application” allowed us to believe the employer–employee relationship carried at least a trace of emotion.

Ghosting strips that illusion away. It reveals that the transaction is—and always has been—purely financial. Our anger doesn’t stem from losing a job opportunity, but from losing dignity: from a broken promise that even if we don’t get what we want, we’ll be treated with minimal respect.

And in a world where technology increasingly removes the burden of decision-making from us—AI in recruitment being a prime example—it seems to also remove the burden of being civilized.

What do you think? Is the loss of courtesy in the job market just a temporary crisis—or a revelation of a fundamental, uncomfortable truth about the employer–employee relationship? Let me know in the comments.

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How to Build a Career with a Catapult: Leverage as an Antidote to the Safety Trap

Above, I wrote about the brutal truth revealed by ghosting: a job market stripped of etiquette and illusions becomes a clear expression of power imbalance. If an employer feels comfortable treating you with indifference, it means they have leverage over you.

If we can’t count on a return to times when manners masked that imbalance, we need something better: mechanisms that reverse the dynamic.

In his essay Why You Probably Have a Low-Leverage Career (and How to Create More Leverage), Rick Foerster explains how to build a career that doesn’t follow a predefined track—but launches you forward.

Leverage, in his view, works like a catapult. It’s a situation where your work is valuable, hard to replace, generates outsized returns relative to effort, and has uncapped growth potential. The returns aren’t just financial—they’re autonomy, flexibility, and influence.

The biggest mistake? Many careers that look good or safe from the outside are, in reality, low-leverage careers. And that’s the trap.

Foerster divides careers into three levels:

1. No leverage

Purely transactional jobs. Easily replaceable. Often mediated by algorithms. The relationship is simple: the algorithm sets the rate, training is easy, supply is massive.

The outcome? Instability, low pay, and full exposure to automation risk.

2. Low leverage

This is the trap that catches huge numbers of talented people: most lawyers, doctors, consultants, corporate managers.

These careers are seductive. Clear paths. Defined steps. Predictable rewards. Parents approve.
The problem is that growth potential is capped and dependent on others.

At some point, you wake up realizing you’re on a track that’s hard to exit or expand. High short-term value—but a ceiling and long-term risk.

3. High leverage

Owners, investors, founders, key experts, or early employees in startups.

These careers are inherently high-risk. Interestingly, in terms of stability, they may resemble no-leverage jobs. The difference lies in upside. Your work may be difficult at first, but over time it compounds into disproportionate opportunities—because you’re no longer constrained by rules set by others.

How Do You Get on the Catapult?

If your goal is impact and autonomy, you need to actively move toward the last category. Foerster outlines key strategies:

• Be an owner. Gain equity. When the company grows, you grow. Ownership equals control—and control is leverage.
• Be first. Create a new process or product. You gain a unique perspective that’s hard to replace.
• Be exceptional. Become the only expert in a critical, hard-to-train domain. Your leverage extends beyond pay—to flexibility and terms.
• Build replicable things. Design digital products, services, or media (like this newsletter!) that scale effortlessly. Leverage lives in production, not just distribution.
• Work on outcomes, not hours. Seek roles measured by output, not input.

In a world where technology relentlessly standardizes and commodifies anyone who is “just another” lawyer, doctor, or recruiter, leverage becomes the only antidote.

This isn’t advice to quit your job and start a startup tomorrow. Foerster recommends small steps—gradually increasing risk and autonomy.

Choosing between a low-leverage and high-leverage career is ultimately a choice between the illusion of safety and realautonomy.

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Mastery Is Not a Sprint

Once we accept that leverage matters and that rigid, predefined tracks are limiting, another question emerges: what does the path to top-level competence actually look like? Early specialization—or broad exploration?

A new analysis published in Science by a research team led by Arne Güllich sheds light on how mastery in science, sports, and music is truly built—challenging the paradigm of early specialization.

Two Roads to the Top

The study examined over 34,000 top performers worldwide (including Nobel laureates, Olympic champions, and elite chess players) and identified two fundamentally different—and largely separate—success populations:

1. Early talent

Individuals who peak quickly. Their success comes from intense, specialized practice and rapid early progress.

The catch? Early talents rarely become adult masters. The study shows that top youth performers and top adults are largely different populations. A fast start often leads to an early ceiling.

2. The adult master

Individuals who peak later. Their path is slower and marked by less early specialization and more multidisciplinary practice—multiple sports, academic fields, or instruments. Early results are often worse than their peers’.

Paradoxically, this broader, slower development is associated with the highest adult achievement.

Multidisciplinarity as Adaptive Leverage

This finding mirrors the idea of career leverage. A low-leverage career resembles the early-talent path: clear track, fast validation, but a fixed ceiling.

A high-leverage career—open-ended, autonomous, innovation-driven—resembles the adult master’s path. Multidisciplinary practice isn’t wasted time. It’s the accumulation of educational capital: adaptability, synthesis, and fast context-switching.

In an era where AI will automate not only simple but also specialized, repetitive tasks, being excellent in one narrow domain may become risky. True leverage belongs to those who can synthesize, transfer skills, and adapt quickly.

This isn’t an argument against specialization—but for delaying it until a broad base is built. Even in domains where early starts are necessary (like Brazilian judo, sailing, or football), the goal is often just to survive selection—so adaptive leverage can be built later.

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Jevons Paradox in Knowledge Work: Why AI Won’t Take Our Jobs

Many predict that AI will automate knowledge work and cause mass layoffs. Aaron Levie (@levie), CEO of Box, suggests viewing this through the lens of Jevons Paradox—which flips the narrative.

The More Efficient, the More Demand

In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that improvements in coal efficiency increased total coal consumption. Lower costs and higher availability created entirely new use cases.

The same pattern repeated in the digital era. From mainframes to cloud computing, efficiency and cost reduction democratized technology and exploded demand. Accounting software once reserved for Fortune 500 companies became accessible to every small business.

AI Dismantles the Advantage of Scale

Levie argues that until now, software mainly automated repetitive processes. Large firms held an advantage because they could easily reallocate resources and hire top experts for new projects.

AI agents, he believes, democratize expert work—coding, contract review, marketing campaigns, advanced research.

The key shift lies in the “I” (investment) in ROI.

“The mistake is focusing on ‘R’ (return) when the real leverage point is lowering the cost of ‘I’ (investment),” Levie notes.

For small companies, every project used to be a painful trade-off. AI obliterates that constraint by dramatically lowering the cost of attempting almost anything. A 10-person team can now build custom software in days because prototyping is nearly free.

The Work We Don’t Do Yet

Just as tools like Figma or Google Ads didn’t reduce marketers but multiplied them, AI won’t eliminate work—it will multiply it.

Levie predicts demand for many types of work will increase 10x or 100x, as barriers fall for tasks companies previously couldn’t afford.

AI will take over tasks—but humans will still provide judgment, context, oversight, and orchestration.

“Ultimately, today’s jobs will become tomorrow’s tasks.”

Most AI tokens in the future will be spent on things we don’t do today—projects never attempted, contracts never reviewed, research never conducted.

Jevons Paradox has arrived in knowledge work. By making tasks radically cheaper, we’ll simply do far more of them.

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In Short

• Addy Osmani, a Google engineer with 14 years of experience, shares 21 lessons on what separates top performers from those who “just do a great job”—including why the most important work is often invisible.
• John Carmack predicts a recruitment revolution: your chat history with an LLM could become the ultimate reference letter—revealing how you actually think. Fascinating, unrealistic, and likely to incentivize performative AI use.
• Sam Gerstenzang, drawing from Stripe, distills the essence of being a strong operator: resisting easy work, continuous recalibration, and why real strategy means saying “no” to exciting ideas—and even raising the temperature in discussions to build psychological safety.
• Ben Yeoh explores the strangeness of desire, combining Tyler Cowen’s economic paradox with Temkin’s philosophy of value intransitivity—why flourishing can’t be spreadsheeted, and why our choices increasingly pull us away from happiness.

Until next time,
Wiktor