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ISSUE 08 · AI + COMPENSATION

A NOTE FROM GIAC

I'm back at my father's place, before the move to Madrid at the end of the month. The English countryside in August is very hard to argue with. The light holds until nine, the hedgerows are completely out of control, and I'm going to miss it more than I currently admit.

Anyway.

The thing I keep coming back to is a question I asked on a call a few weeks ago. I asked whether anyone else had lost track of what they'd built. I couldn't tell you, without going and looking, how many automations I have running right now between my Mac and a server, and what each one actually does.

Then a wave of job ads turned up describing that exact job, one of them at £180k in the UK, and I stopped finding it funny.

I hope you enjoy the 4mins you take to skim this and get something useful out of it! And then you can get on with your Sunday Roast or BBQ. Enjoy this week's edition!

Giac

THE BREAKDOWN

Three roles landed in front of me last week. Read them next to each other and the differences aren't subtle.

STACK Infrastructure is hiring a Director/VP of Reward for EMEA, up to £180k base, and in the experience section you find this:

Proven experience, in the past tense, from somebody who's already done it. Not curiosity and not a willingness to learn. The responsibilities section says the same thing twice in different words, once about efficiency and once about knowing where human judgement still matters more.

Quince is hiring a Compensation Intelligence Lead at $180,000 to $220,000, and the ad calls it a foundational, technical build role. Two of the required qualifications sit next to each other like this:

The second bullet has an escape hatch and the first one doesn't. Elsewhere in the same ad Quince say comp expertise is a plus and that curiosity about how compensation works will take you far, which tells you which of the two halves they're expecting to teach.

Atoms posted a Compensation Business Partner role in LA this week at $150,000 to $180,000 base, and the AI ask sits somewhere different again. The qualifications are what you'd expect from any comp BP job, five to seven years of experience and expert level Excel, and AI appears in none of them. It turns up in the responsibilities.

Atoms build robots for a living, so an AI first mindset is house style rather than a surprise. What's new is where the sentence sits. Nobody gets screened on it, they're just expected to do it once they're in the seat.

None of the three asks us to produce answers faster. All of them ask us to design and run the system that produces them, decide what it's allowed to touch, and own it when it drifts. Orchestration and architecture, in other words, and neither word appears anywhere in a comp job description I've read before this year.

While you're here, answer this question

Microsoft made its GitHub Copilot harness generally available on 3 August, which is what dragged a piece of engineering vocabulary into everyone's feed this month. The idea behind it belongs to nobody in particular, and it's the cleanest explanation I've found for why the same model behaves like a completely different colleague depending on where you meet it.

The rest of it is stack specific, so it lives in the guide rather than here. If you're on Microsoft, we rewrote the licence section this week, after a member told me he was on Copilot enterprise from his firm. That phrase maps to at least three different products, and one of them is a coding assistant for software engineers that reads none of your files.

Read the updated Copilot guide, including the three checks above →

FROM RANGE

Three members went public on LinkedIn about joining this month.

Shirley Rawson at VF Corporation wrote that AI is evolving daily and we can't afford to sit on the sidelines. Wendy Trongone at Aqualis said she's looking forward to the people more than the tools, and specifically to practitioners who are honest about what isn't working. Alexandra Lerebours at RGA thanked her employer for funding her seat.

Now find out what your own employer allows. You get your score the moment you finish, and the full cross company results before they go public, which feels like a fair trade for twelve questions.

It closes on 31 August. After that the scoring comes down, so you won't be able to see where you land, and the full results go only to the people who took part.

This is a genuine ask on my side. If you've seen a reward or comp job ad doing what these three are doing, hit reply and send it over. I've started collecting them and I’ll keep you in the loop on what I’ll find.

ON THE RADAR

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