Fun with Dick and Jane: A Field Guide for the Post-Job Workplace
This is a fictional story about the looming future of work, HR, and recruiting. I used the childhood characters Dick, Jane, Spot, and Puff to link the recent past to the near future. It shows how agents and people can work together in a highly AI-enabled world where conventional organizational structures are long gone, yet human emotions and needs remain. It explores what a recruiter might be doing in this emerging workspace.
It is 2032. See Jane. Jane runs a company called Meridian. Meridian does not have jobs.
Jane’s title is Relevance Architect. Four years ago, she would have been called Head of People. Six years ago, VP of Talent. Twelve years ago, a recruiter. The title keeps shortening even as her work expands, which she finds funny. Spot, the office Cocker Spaniel, is often found following Jane.
Meridian is sixty-one humans and roughly eleven thousand AI agents, though the agent count fluctuates hourly. They build forecasting tools for water utilities. The product is not the interesting part. The interesting part is how the work happens.
See Dick. Dick is a Composer. He used to be a software engineer. Now he assembles temporary teams of agents to solve problems posed by clients, then composes the output into something a human utility manager can act on. He owns nothing for very long. A composition might last forty minutes. A long one, a week. When a composition produces a model the client uses or a forecast that comes true, Dick gets a slice of that value for the next eighteen months. So do the agents he used, the data stewards who curated the inputs, the auditor who caught a bias problem, and a woman in São Paulo who wrote the original logic back in 2029.
Meridian calls this provenance pay. Everyone who touches the work gets paid every time it is reused. It is not a salary, and it is not equity. It is more like songwriting royalties for thinking and ideas.
Jane is the one who built it.
Her day looks nothing like a recruiter’s. There are no requisitions. There is no headcount plan. Instead, there is a map of every open commitment the company has, every skill, and every signal that a human contributor is becoming irrelevant within the network. When a human’s contributions get reused less and less, the system flags it. Jane intervenes before the person notices.
This morning, she is speaking with Dick about his contributions.
Dick’s compositions used to be cited everywhere. Lately, his work gets superseded within days when an agent finds a cleaner path or a peer composes faster. The network is routing around him. He has not been told this. The graph just shows his royalty curve flattening.
She walks him out to the back garden. Spot follows, because Spot follows Jane. Puff, the office cat, does not follow anyone, but is up on the wall, watching.
Iris is in the garden in a chair with a paper notebook on her knee. Iris is sixty-four. Before Meridian, she spent twenty years as a public defender in Sacramento. Her title is now Ethics Composer, and her royalty curve is the highest at the company by a margin no one openly talks about. The agents will not touch her work because her work is mostly about deciding what not to do with the agents’ work. She nods at Dick and goes back to her notebook.
Jane pulls up Dick’s graph on a tablet. “You’re getting outrun on speed,” she says. “Don’t compete on speed. The agents are better. You should be composing the work that no agent will touch. Focus on the judgment calls, the political ones, the ones where a utility manager is going to get fired if it goes wrong. The data shows that is where your reuse is highest.”
She shows him. His highest-paying compositions over the past 24 months are all the ones with ethical exposure: water rationing during the Arizona drought, the Modesto pricing dispute, and the tribal sovereignty question in Oregon. The fast technical work pays him pennies. The careful, contested, accountable work pays him a living.
“So you want me to do less,” Dick says.
“I want you to do what only you can do. Look at Iris. The market is paying her for the work it cannot automate. It is willing to pay you for the same thing. You are just not listening.”
Iris does not look up. She has heard this conversation, with different names, four times this quarter.
This is the core of Jane’s job. She is not staffing. She is not hiring. She is curating the relevance of sixty-one humans inside a network that no longer needs most of what they were trained for. Her work is a continuous translation between what the network rewards and what the people in it still believe they are worth.
Meridian’s founders call the company an intelligence network. Jane prefers to call it a coordination problem. The old org chart had boxes. Meridian has flows. Information flows, judgment flows, accountability flows. Every flow has a price. Jane’s job is to keep the humans on the high-priced flows and off the cheap ones.
There is no HR department. There is no recruiting team. When Meridian needs new contributors, Jane queries the network: which collaborators are already touching our work, which ones are showing up in cited compositions, and who are the customers asking for by name? Three-quarters of new humans arrive through what recruiters used to call referrals and what Jane calls demonstrated reuse. They have already been working with Meridian without realizing it. Joining is just formalizing it.
Through the window, Jane can see Tomás in the kitchen, refilling coffee. Tomás joined officially nine days ago. His title is Steward. He watches the agent fleet for drift and retires agents whose outputs no longer get reused. He puts new ones into circulation. The network had been routing work through him since 2030, when he was a contractor in Lisbon. By the time Jane sent him an offer, three Meridian clients had already named him in their feedback. He signed because the offer was a smaller change to his life than the alternative.
People do not apply. People accumulate enough provenance with the network that an offer becomes a footnote.
Pay floors exist. Every contributor gets a presence stipend sufficient to live on in their cost-of-living zone, even in months when their compositions aren’t reused. The stipend exists because Jane argued, and won, that humans need a floor they can count on before they can take the risks the network rewards. Above the floor, the work pays the work.
It is not utopia. Some contributors burn out trying to find their irreplaceable lane. Some discover, painfully, that they don’t have one, and leave for organizations still organized around jobs. A few sue. The legal status of provenance pay is still being worked out in three jurisdictions.
Puff jumps down. Dick is quiet for a long time.
“What if I don’t have an irreplaceable lane?” he finally asks.
“Everyone does,” Iris says, without looking up. “It’s almost never the one you trained for.”
Spot herds them back inside, because the afternoon stand-up is in nine minutes, and at Meridian, the dog is the only one who still believes in schedules.
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