When Meta Became the Work

Large companies have spent years promoting people who excel at representing work rather than doing it, creating a systemic bias toward process, documentation, and stakeholder management over actual building and shipping. AI has now made this a crisis: small teams can attack established markets faster and cheaper than ever, while large orgs remain trapped in planning cycles, layered approvals, and cultures that actively reject the decisive, action-oriented people they now desperately need. The path forward requires rewarding builders again, compressing idea-to-ship timelines to weeks, treating direct market feedback as the primary input to decisions, and maintaining a consistent shipping cadence. Companies that fail to do this will drift further from their markets until the gap is too wide to close.