Beware of Boss Slop

We've all been there. Someone sends you a document and says “what do you think of this?” and you open it, and it just keeps going. Headers, sub-headers, a table, an executive summary, a section called Next Steps, all of it dressed up to look like real work was done. And you know, and they know that you know, that the whole thing started life as one sentence typed into Claude somewhere between two other meetings. One prompt made this monstrosity, and now it's my job to deal with it.

That's the trade nobody mentions. It took them ten seconds to make and it will take me half an hour to read properly, or thirty seconds to skim and reply “looks good,” which is its own kind of slop.

There is just so much of it now, and most of us are standing at the trough. I say this as someone with his whole face in it. Emails that used to be three lines have become novels. The PowerPoint is 75 slides, and you can tell around slide 12 that no human being has ever looked at slide 40. None of it is bad, exactly. It's fine, the way a trough is fine.

Bosses have a particular problem here, because we're the ones holding the bucket. When I get excited about a tool (and I get excited about a lot of tools), the excitement lands on my team as more stuff. I don't write long emails, slop or otherwise, for the record. My slop is the automated kind, the notices and alerts and little reports I set up one evening because I could, which now arrive in people's inboxes on a schedule whether they want them or not.

The other way bosses overdo it is the constant push to use AI for everything. I understand why that makes people nervous. If your boss keeps jamming it down your throat, it's reasonable to wonder whether you're training your own replacement. From where I sit, most bosses are thinking roughly the opposite. We aren't looking to replace you with AI. We're worried about the people who won't touch it, and if we're honest we'd replace them with people who will. Not much more comforting, I realize, but it is a different threat, and people should at least know which one they're facing.

So this is partly a note to myself. Before I pour another bucket, I should probably ask whether anyone is hungry.

My own boss, I should say, almost never sends me slop, and I appreciate that more than I've ever told her. When she wants something, she calls me. On the phone, like it's 2004. There's no deck and no pre-read, and no summary of the call shows up afterwards. It takes ten minutes, I know exactly what she wants, and I never have to wonder whether she read the thing she sent me, because she didn't send me a thing.

It's an older way of working, and I used to find it a little quaint. Now I think it might be the most considerate thing a boss can do, because a call costs her exactly as much time as it costs me. Slop is the opposite deal. It's free to make and expensive to receive, and the bill goes to whoever sits lower on the org chart. A phone call is about the only thing left at work that you can't generate, which is probably why it still works. Yes, I know AI can generate a voice, but you know what I mean.

And to everyone who reports to a boss, which is nearly all of us, watch your own slop too. The trough gets filled from both sides, and someone's got to eat it.