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The Art of Not Getting Fired
Paul Skallas
June 09, 2025
It’s been 15 recession-free years but the economy is still stable.
People think we’re due for another recession soon, or that AI will disrupt jobs. That’s one of the reasons I monitor the monthly jobs report.
Last Friday’s jobs report showed 139,000 jobs added in May. That’s solid. Not great. Just steady. 124,000 jobs were added per month this year, down from 168,000 last year.
But hidden in the numbers is a shift worth watching, unemployment is starting to rise for young, college-educated graduates. You’ve probably seen it, viral tweets from grads who’ve sent out 200 resumes without a single callback.
The nervousness isn’t just about the next inevitable recession. It’s also about AI. If AI eats the bottom rung of the job ladder, entry-level roles disappear. And that matters. Your first job sets the story of your career. If that’s gone, the path collapses.
But I don't think AI itself will replace people. Someone using AI better than you will. That's why the real career strategy today isn't just about working hard or being useful. The useful are the first to go. You need to figure out how to be valued. The valued stay.
Interestingly, just as we’re having the “AI taking all the jobs” conversation, we’re also having a renaissance in content about people living normal lives. The 9 to 5. Not the social media influencer fantasies you are usually fed, which only apply to 5 percent of the population.
@hubs.life Life is truly simple, we just insist on making it complicated #normalizethenorm #simplelife
This shift is healthy. But getting the job is only step one. To stay in and move up, you have to understand how companies actually work.
Four Frameworks that Explain the Deeper Logic of Modern Workplaces
1) Parkinson's Law (1955). Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give someone two days to do a one-hour task and it’ll take two days. Bureaucracies grow even when there’s nothing left to do. Deadlines stretch. Systems bloat.
@conquer.discipline Parkinson's law. #conquerdiscipline #selfmanipulation #parkinsonslaw #mentality #mindset #success #briantracy
2) The Peter Principle. People get promoted based on their performance in their current role, not whether they’re suited for the next one. So high-performing salespeople become sales managers. The skills don’t transfer. Eventually, everyone hits a level where they’re no longer effective. But they stay there. Companies tolerate it. No one wants the mess of a demotion.
@dougiesharpe If you’ve thought "wow, my boss is a complete idiot." You’re probably right and that can be explained with the Peter Principle. #peterprin... See more
3) The Gervais Principle. It says corporations aren’t engines of talent, they’re arenas of survival. The people who rise aren’t necessarily competent. They’re socially fluent. They manage up. They control narratives. Hard workers stay in the middle. Cynics and manipulators drift to the top.
4) Consistency vs. Payoff Space. Most career advice comes from the wrong world. Founders. Investors. People living in what you could call payoff space. They take big swings and wait for returns. Employees don’t live there. They live in consistency space, where survival means showing up, performing reliably, not missing. Advice from one world doesn’t translate to the other. It actually gets people in trouble.
The Useful Employee vs the Valued Employee
It’s time to add a new framework to the workplace canon. Understand the difference between being useful and being valued.
If you want to last, stop thinking like someone who needs to be useful.
The Useful Employee
Who is the useful employee? Many people are useful. It’s the goal. Useful employees are reliable executors. They're good at getting specific tasks done, which allows managers to delegate completely and forget about those responsibilities. They're efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But they're seen primarily as gap-fillers, people who handle necessary work that isn't core to company strategy.
The useful employee's mission is simple: "Take care of that and don't screw up." The fewer headaches they create for leadership, the bigger their rewards. At first glance, this seems like a path to success. These employees often receive promotions, bonuses, and recognition.
But useful employees are fundamentally replaceable. Their value lies in executing standardized processes that can be systematized, automated, or handed to someone else. When AI can handle their tasks, or when someone using AI can do their job better, they become expendable.
The Valued Employee
Valued employees shape direction. Their role isn’t confined to a job description, it expands over time, quietly, until they’re part of the bigger conversations. This kind of value isn’t written into performance reviews. It’s built on perception, timing, and trust. Leadership sees them as extensions of themselves, people who “get it.” That’s why they’re often the ones who get brought along when a senior exec moves on. Their reputation travels ahead of them. Their name carries weight.
They make sure their work is seen. They document well. They make their manager’s job easier without making it obvious. Mostly, valued employees create leverage. They automate routine work. They teach others. They quietly remove themselves as bottlenecks, and in doing so, become more essential, not less. They don’t protect tasks, they build structures.
Valued employees often pair good enough metrics with something harder to quantify: strategic access and trust. At my last job, I watched two people get evaluated for promotion. One hit every performance metric. The other didn’t, but they were in every important meeting. Guess who got the bump.
That’s the straightforward interpretation of the useful vs valued lens. But there’s more to it. Here are four more ideas that build on this framework
1) Killing Your Own Usefulness Can Raise Your Value: This sounds backwards, but it's one of the most reliable paths to advancement.
2) Cost Center vs Profit Center Fate: Sometimes you're seen as an investment. Sometimes insurance. Other times, you're a luxury or even an impulse buy.
3) Loyal to People, Not Corporations: In layoffs, it's often personal loyalty, not corporate policy, that saves your job.
4) Attachment Theory at Work: Sometimes, your career isn’t shaped by strategy, it’s shaped by history. People tend to recreate their earliest emotional environments at work, often without realizing it.
