I think one of the biggest mistakes people made over the past twenty years was believing specialization created safety.

For decades, the career advice was simple. Specialize. Become difficult to replace. Become the person who understands the system better than everyone else.

So people did exactly that.

They became the Excel person. The CRM person. The pipeline person. The workflow expert. Entire careers were built around learning systems most people found exhausting to navigate.

And to be fair, that strategy worked for a very long time.

Companies rewarded people who could survive inside complexity. If you were the only person who understood how the machinery worked, you became valuable almost automatically.

But I think many people are about to realize something uncomfortable.

A huge amount of modern specialization was not actually deep expertise.

It was familiarity with coordination systems.

A lot of workers thought they were becoming indispensable to the business when they were actually becoming indispensable to the software.

Because many people were not building judgment.

They were memorizing systems.

Learning where buttons lived.
Learning approval chains.
Learning how to keep operational machinery moving.

The problem is that operational machinery is exactly the kind of thing companies eventually want automated.

And I think this is where the conversation becomes psychologically brutal.

Because people rarely build identity around abstract value. They build identity around usefulness. Around being “the expert.” The reliable one. The person everyone depends on when the system breaks.

That identity becomes very hard to let go of after ten or fifteen years.

Especially when your self worth quietly fused together with the workflow itself.

That is why I think people still cannot see what is happening clearly. Too much of their identity depends on believing the thing they mastered must continue mattering.

But history is filled with people who mastered systems right before those systems disappeared.

Many people still think the system needs them.

What it actually needed was someone willing to operate it.