The Last Promotion
Most knowledge workers no longer hold the job they were hired for. Not because they changed roles. Because the role changed under them.
A year ago, seniority meant something specific. You carried tribal knowledge. You knew which systems broke on Tuesdays, which stakeholders needed the meeting before the meeting, which corners of the codebase no one else dared touch. Companies paid for your judgment — the ability to choose wisely when there were only two paths forward.
But judgment is valuable when the options are few.
When you can do two things, picking the right one matters enormously. When you can do a hundred, when the cost of trying both is nearly zero — the value of picking drops. It doesn’t disappear. It drops disproportionately.
We don’t talk about this enough.
Anthropic is testing a model called Claude Mythos. It reportedly outperforms everything before it in coding, reasoning, and cybersecurity by dramatic margins. Not incremental. Step-change. The kind of leap that makes you redraw the map, not just update it.
We are one mega-release away from reshaping what it means to be a senior data scientist, a CMO, a CPO, a CTO. Not because these people lack skill. Because the scarcity that made their skill expensive is evaporating.
The old equation was simple: rare knowledge plus good judgment equals high compensation. But when knowledge is no longer rare and judgment is no longer scarce, when an AI can hold the entire tribal memory and evaluate a hundred options in the time it takes you to evaluate two — the equation breaks.
This isn’t a prediction. It’s arithmetic.