What is work theater?
It’s the idea that at large companies the incentive to deliver something real to the customer becomes a small fraction of work, and is subsumed by things that internally seem like bigger or more substantial projects to management but often aren’t. Here’s a pretty good take on it.
Work theater is only the company owners’ problem
So what happens if a company continually builds the wrong thing. Let’s imagine we work at a company called Yahoo that offers free email and a terrible search product and a bazillion other small things.
Suppose this company has an actual problem – that the email is full of spam and has a limit of 10megabytes per customer. And that a competitor, google, is offering 1 gigabyte and superior spam filtering. Perhaps the problem is so bad that it’s going to lead to a hemorrhaging of the customer base unless they act within 3 months. Let’s even suppose that among the company’s own employees this isn’t uncommon knowledge, as most of them already switch to gmail within the first month of it opening.
Whose problem is it if the company doesn’t bother to pivot at all, but charges on mindlessly toward the exact same initiatives as before with full confidence and fury?
It’s not really going to be the engineer’s problem, they’ll still collect a salary. As will management, as will product. Really it’ll only become a problem for the employees themselves once the company is a husk of its former self and starts laying off, at which point most will find a job elsewhere without much fuss.
The only people who really lose out are whoever owns the company. And if somehow some engineers force a special behind-the-scenes project with no approval to actually add a decent spam filter and increase storage per customer, it’s quite unlikely that the engineer will receive even a single percent of the millions of dollars they save the owners of the company (if they weren’t aware that customer attrition toward a competitor was existential threat to their company, they certainly wouldn’t understand which project(s) prevented it).
Building more was never the answer
One of the biggest lies of work theater is “keep your head down, don’t ask questions, especially don’t challenge the direction, and if we aren’t succeeding just buckledown.” It’s sort of an odd lie, seeing as the actual software product most companies offer (gmail, facebook, discord, twitter, yelp, uber) aren’t actually very technically impressive. I’m quite confident that most readers of this website understand they could build a twitter.
The AI era promises a much faster 0->1 transition. But it does nothing to help with where to go from there. In fact, it makes it exponentially easier to play out the theatrics of progress (look at all this motion! So many tickets! So many changes!).
My prediction
In Recursive Middle Manager Hell Raemon proposes the primary factor of company waste is middle-management-layers. I’ve worked at a dozen tech companies, and this squares pretty well with what I’ve seen – it’s not the only factor that matters but it’s one of the biggest.
The anti-pattern of building-the-wrong-thing doesn’t get solved by a 2x or 3x speed-up. Thus my prediction (and experience) is that companies with more than 4 levels of managers (including executives) are going to see small or negative improvement from agentic work. The reason I could foresee negative is that AI expands the capacity of the most optics-driven career-oriented engineer to create incidental damage on everybody around them (by creating unreliable systems, bugs, and other tech debt that are hard to track back to them).
Conversely I think that companies with three levels of management or less will see significant acceleration, as fewer people can get more done. They will be able to achieve 0->1 more quickly, and build out numerous integrations and basic features.
Ultimately
This is probably a good thing. Competition forces a superior user experience, and large lazy incumbent companies (be it Yahoo in 2010 or Meta in 2026) should raise the bar on what they deliver or be replaced.