Deprecated Human

What happens when your abilities extend far beyond the job title employers use to define you?

Mariel Sanchez began her career in psychology before moving into technology as a research assistant at Meta Reality Labs. She went on to become a UX researcher, helping teams understand people, identify unmet needs, and make better decisions.

After being laid off, Mariel spent more than nine months trying to return to the profession she had ...

What happens when the career you built can still provide an income but no longer reflects what you want your work to contribute?

Andrew Baek is a Bay Area writer and filmmaker whose career has spanned educational technology, digital media, and nearly five years producing video at Uber. After becoming a father and then experiencing a layoff, Andrew began reconsidering how he defines success, which principles should guide his work, an...

What happens when the career you spent decades building is no longer the future you want, but the business waiting on the other side is not yet able to provide the security you need?

In this episode, Lauren and Jess discuss the changing value of consulting, the personal cost of pursuing the corporate ladder, and what happens when someone accustomed to solving complex problems for global organizations must build every part of a small...

What happens when hiring systems are designed to recognize one kind of candidate?

After leaving her role as Director of Strategy and Analytics at Kickstarter, Laurie Stark applied to more than 100 jobs. She used AI to polish her cover letters, prepare for interview questions, and tried to package her nonlinear career into something hiring systems could easily categorize. It wasn’t working—and the person she was presentin...

What happens when you learn that your job is ending before you know what comes next?

After nine years as Program Director for Research at MIT Sloan Management Review, Allison Ryder learned that the publication would be winding down—even though its work remains respected, valuable, and successful. With seven months of notice, Allison is navigating an unusual in-between: continuing to do meaningful work, helping her colleagues c...

What would you say or do differently if you stopped organizing your life around the judgment of a future employer?

In Part 2 of Jess’s conversation with former programmer and Tech Workers Coalition organizer Simone Robutti, they examine the fear that keeps many experienced workers silent. Simone calls it “the HR in your head”: the internalized belief that speaking openly, challenging harmful decisions, or expressin...

Tech workers were taught to see themselves as individual innovators—not as workers with shared interests and collective power.

In Part 1 of this conversation, Jess speaks with former programmer and Tech Workers Coalition organizer Simone Robutti about why that distinction matters. They explore how layoffs, ethical concerns, and the harmful uses of technology are driving more tech workers to organize. Simone explains what a uni...

After more than two decades in motion design and advertising, Pal Moore began asking a difficult question: Why keep trying to return to an industry that never made room for all of who he was?

In this episode, Pal joins Jess to talk about the challenges of being a multidisciplinary creative in a workplace that rewards narrow specialization, the ageism he encountered after being laid off, and the grief of letting go of a professional ...

We've all had interviews we'd rather forget. But sometimes the worst part isn't being rejected—it's beginning to believe the rejection says something about who we are.

In this special solo episode, Jess Lowry shares one of the most bizarre interviews of her career and uses it as a starting point to explore the emotional reality of today's hiring process. From power dynamics and performative leadership to AI-generated job descr...

What happens after the layoff?

After nearly two years inside an organization experiencing repeated waves of layoffs, former global HR leader Rachael DiGiovine came to a difficult realization: organizations know how to manage business change, but they often don't know how to support the people living through it.

In this episode of Deprecated Human, Rachel shares what she learned from both sides of the employment relationship—the...

What gives a story its power?

In this episode of Deprecated Human, Jess Lowry sits down with strategist and storyteller Ross A. McIntyre to explore why storytelling remains one of our most essential human capabilities in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

Ross represents a generation of digital practitioners who helped build the modern technology industry before there were degree programs in product strategy, expe...

What happens when experienced professionals decide to stop waiting for the job market to tell them what comes next?

In this episode of Deprecated Human, Jess Lowry sits down with Lindsay Vetell and Angela Anderson, co-founders of Friend Group and creators of Effective Immediately, a peer-support community for people exploring independent work, consulting, fractional leadership, and new ways of building meaningful careers.

This conver...

What happens when organizations stop investing in curiosity?

In this episode of The Deprecated Human Podcast, Jess Lowry sits down with UX leader and UX Murder Mystery co-host Eve Eden to explore the role of creativity, research, and human understanding in an era increasingly defined by automation and artificial intelligence.

At its core, this episode is a conversation about imagination. As organizations race to adopt AI, many are re...

What happens when organizations stop understanding how value is actually created?

In this episode of The Deprecated Human Podcast, Jess Lowry sits down with Brian Crowley, a UX design leader and co-host of UX Murder Mystery, to explore a question at the center of today's technology industry. As AI transforms how work gets done, are organizations learning from history, or ignoring it?

Their conversation begins with an observ...

In this episode, Jess Lowry sits down with Jody Martin, a community organizer, writer, and creator of The Snarky Correspondent⁠, to explore the emotional reality of today's job market. Together they discuss ageism, AI-driven hiring systems, automated rejection, and what it feels like when the rules you've followed for years suddenly stop working.

But this conversation isn't just about frustration. It's about agency.

Jody shares how a...

This episode explores Nic Brill's perspective on navigating uncertainty, career transitions, and the changing nature of work in an era shaped by AI, economic disruption, and rapid technological change.

After taking an extended sabbatical with his wife, Nic returned to the workforce with a different perspective on work, success, and adaptability. Rather than treating uncertainty as something to eliminate, he approached it as a design...

This episode explores Abby Margolis’s career journey—from academia to public radio to design, strategy, and consulting—and the thread that connects it all.

Trained as an anthropologist, Abby began her career focused on deeply understanding problems. Her transition into public radio introduced a new constraint: making those problems relevant and meaningful to a broader audience through storytelling. Moving into desi...

Let’s examine what happens when a million people with highly in-demand skills lose their ability to get hired.

It’s hard to know the exact number, but from 2022 to May 2026, more than 1 million tech workers have lost their jobs.

In software, when something is deprecated, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It still works. It still does exactly what it was built to do. It’s just been decided — by whoever...