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I am Avy Leghziel, an organizational consultant and trainer with a knack for unorthodox ideas. This is Masters of Babel. Here, I play with the ideas that transform how we work, learn and manage.

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Three ideas worth exploring

01 • Geppetto is unemployed

Computer science graduates around the world are struggling to find jobs. My empathy goes to all those parents who told their kids to study computer science because it guarantees eternal employment.

They are jobless for two reasons:

1. AI makes them redundant. We feared that computers would take our jobs and that only those who build them would remain employable. It turns out the machines rebelled first against their own creators. A dark twist on Pinocchio (“I’m a real boy! You’re fired, Father”).

2. The experience paradox: Tech companies don’t want to hire rookies unless they have significant experience—which, of course, they don’t have because they’re rookies.

So yes, the tech job market is in crisis. It’s a particularly sharp crisis because it comes after two decades of almost continuous growth.

For years, hiring new people was a way to signal growth—even when the positions weren’t strictly necessary (looking at you, community managers). Now there’s no money to hire at the same rate, but companies still need to show growth to be perceived as competitive. That’s why they’re doubling down on productive strategies: hiring proven talent and leveraging AI for automation.

A couple of lessons here:

• For professionals: professional development needs to happen on two tracks: technological and cognitive. Especially in non-technological jobs, we need to integrate in our work the most relevant technologies. In technological jobs, having a proven expertise and in-demand non-technological skills will make us more attractive to the job market than random generalists.

• For companies: hiring sprees are a terrible strategic bet for growth. They work only within bubbles - until they don’t work anymore.

In times of rapid disruption, no field guarantees a career on its own and only deep relevant expertise keeps attracting good professional opportunities. A marketer who knows how to attract quality leads is far more valuable than one who needs AI to do so. A marketer who can do both? Success.

02 • Misaligned training

Half my time is spent structuring training experiences. “Training” is the corporate activity; the expertise behind it is called "adult learning", or “andragogy.” They’re not the same thing, but effective training is rooted in adult learning theories.

I am more fascinated by training programs that do not work, rather than those who work. 90% of new skills learned in training programs are lost within a year, and almost 50% of all corporate training is either forgotten, never understood, or never applied on the job.

In most cases, a training program is not effective because of one of the following reasons:

• Participants check out in the first 30 minutes because the speaker comes off as irritating or irreparably boring. Brains shut down, and hands reach for smartphones.

• The group dynamics are acutely dysfunctional. Intense conflicts, internal politics, etc. The group’s focus is elsewhere - it takes an exceptionally compelling trainer to keep them engaged.

• Forced learning. You can’t make people grow. If they’re only there because they have to be, and not because they want to do the work, the experience will be dry. They’ve fulfilled the requirement to show up. That’s where their effort stops.

• The most common reason: a misalignment between the training and the trainees. The trainees want to learn, the trainer is skilled and offers great stimuli—but there’s a disconnect. I’ll explain:

You can’t teach complex problem solving to junior project managers - it won’t help them overcome their daily challenges. You can discuss prototyping techniques with a team of corporate VPs but how impactful will the training be? The ideas might resonate but they probably do not align with their priorities.

The design of most training programs often starts from the wrong point: a manager asks “What do I want the team to know?”, and the whole experience will be based on that, even if it’s detached from the needs, experience and curiosity of the team.

Learning experiences work when they align with the participants’ profiles. If this alignment is missing, the learning experience becomes either too abstract, overly intellectual, or painfully obvious - resulting in no real progress.

03 • Is work-life balance a choice?

In a recent interview, Reid Hoffman (who founded LinkedIn and is considered one of the key figures in the tech scene) says that there’s no such thing as work-life balance if you work at a start-up. You can get dinner with family, but you’ll go back to your laptop straight afterwards.

The interviewer asks if this way of thinking isn’t toxic. He replies that it’s a choice: if you want to work in a startup - including the opportunity to make heaps of money - it means working all the time, weekends included. He acknowledges that some people see this as an unhealthy option, drenched in toxic capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we should take away the choice to live like this from those who prefer it.

We’ve been hearing about work-life balance for decades. “Work-life balance is a myth”, “Work-life balance is a necessity”, “Work-life balance is a right.” Rarely do we hear, “Work-life balance is a choice.”

I’ve always thought the term “work-life balance” makes no sense. In my lectures, I often use the phrase “personal life and professional life,” but even that feels imperfect: work is part of life, in every way. If managed well, work can be a source of satisfaction, growth, and joy - just like it can bring stress, exhaustion, and intense emotions. It’s no different from family or social life in that regard.

Some of us choose to live our family lives intensely, while others opt for the same intensity in their professional lives. It’s probably not a coincidence that every example I’ve come across recently involves people without kids (academics like Luciano Floridi and Ann Christina Nobre, Reid Hoffman himself, or entrepreneurial duo Alex and Leila Hormozi, to name a few).

Hoffman’s perspective reminds us that one of the perks of living in a market where anyone can invent a new job for themselves is that lifestyles once considered taboo are now legitimate options and for some, they’re the realization of a dream.

Maybe it’s more accurate and liberating to stop talking about work-life balance and instead focus on different ranges of work-life balance. It’s an alternative approach that doesn’t require a neat 50/50 split. Some people choose to live their lives 90/10, in one direction or the other. We’re privileged to live in a time where, for many of us, that’s a choice and not a necessity.

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One more thing

I have no patience to watch a 10-minutes YouTube video that could have been explained in 2 minutes, but it gets stretched to please the algorithm. If you are like me, you might enjoy Sider.ai - a Chrome add-on that summarizes YouTube videos and lets you even chat with them.

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