I have been thinking a lot lately about a conversation I had last spring with the technology writer Ed Zittron.

It was a Slate Plus episode called The Rise of the Do Nothing Middle Manager.

And Ed's main point was that if you notice your experience on tech platforms and internet search getting worse, you're not alone.

And he argues that it's because a lot of

managers these days and all kinds of workplaces have become less focused on making stuff

that's good and more focused on making sure revenue is going up. Everything must grow.

Everything must grow at all times, even if it means chopping people off, even if it means making things worse. It's why so many companies in tech are not really innovating. Because think about it. If you replace all the people whose job is to build the future, replace them with people who answer the question of how do we make software make us money, you're not going

to build much of a future. You're going to build the future of business, which is an entirely

different thing. Obviously, there are economic implications to what Ed is talking about here,

but he's also describing something simpler, just a lousy workplace, one that isn't very creative, where it can be hard to take pride in your work, where you might become an expense line item that's eliminated.

And that's why we wanted to include Ed as we answered some of your advice questions about when to change careers and pivot to

something totally different. For the last few months, we've been getting your questions about

career pivots. Some of you have already made big changes, and others of you are at a crossroads,

wondering if a big leap is worth the risk.

And others of you just needed to vent about how so much of how you make money is feeling

precarious or under threat in the very near future.

Along with Ed, to help me answer your questions, we invited on two other savvy people who have been both

observers of and participants in the current economy. One of them is Sophia Chang, who is a

mainstay in the New York City Arts and Culture scene. She spent years as a talent agent for hip-hop artist

and now works as a life coach and started a nonprofit mentorship program for women of color.

And we also hear from Luke Peterson, who's a farmer in Minnesota, who grew up in an agricultural

community, but is the first in his family to try to make it in farming. He started off with

...