You know that person on the team who always has an opinion—even on topics outside their expertise. When I started my career, you’d run into them occasionally. Now they’re everywhere.

The social media effect#

In the age of social media, everyone has a platform. Competence matters less than audience. And this has bled into the workplace.

That person who constantly shares their opinion—whether informed or not—is now omnipresent. In meetings, on email, on Slack, at the coffee machine, in standups. There’s no escape.

Why this is a problem (and for whom)#

If you’re like me—someone who stays quiet when they don’t know something—it becomes hard to survive in this environment.

Think about it: when you’re surrounded by people who seem to know everything about everything, how can you not question yourself? And let’s be honest — if you stay silent when you don’t know, it’s probably because you hold yourself to a higher standard. You question your own knowledge before questioning others.

And yet, the benchmarks you once used to measure yourself against others no longer work. You’re left without reference points. Listening to someone rattle off the countless things they’ve accomplished makes you wonder about the little you’ve produced. Watching giant pull requests fly by — written with heavy AI assistance and barely reviewed — contrasts sharply with the modest amount you ship, code you’d actually stake your name on.

You oscillate between what you know about yourself from past successes and a daily reality where you seem outpaced by everyone and everything.

A telling example#

The other day, I stumbled upon the first PR from a young intern who had joined the team just two weeks earlier.

Interesting—I took a look.

Two nice screenshots showing a well-designed UI built with a well-known library. I opened the code and found concurrency patterns and other fairly complex stuff.

Now, maybe this intern is exceptional and has been writing concurrent code since age ten. Or maybe—like so many PRs I see these days—it was AI-generated and accepted without truly understanding what’s inside.

I genuinely don’t know. But I know which one I’d bet on.

But here’s the thing: when you’re surrounded by people producing this kind of output constantly, it makes you question your own abilities.

Yet let’s be real — I saw someone the other day bragging about producing 5,000 lines of code per day with AI. Five thousand lines that nobody could seriously review in a day, let alone someone who isn’t just reviewing code all day.

The real divide#

We now find ourselves with, on one side, more and more people who want to produce a lot and fast. And on the other, the “old guard” (and some younger folks too) who value work done well.

This isn’t unique to tech. It’s the same in journalism, where too few verify sources. In the automotive industry, where recalls are rampant. And countless other fields.

So when you catch yourself thinking you’re no longer up to par, remind yourself: don’t compare apples to oranges. Quantity or quality—you have to choose.

Our society has been championing the former for a few years now. That’s not how great things get built.