TL;DR: I regularly hear professionals complain that "honest, hardworking people always get taken advantage of," and that the AI revolution seems specifically designed to punish those who put their heads down and grind. I completely understand the frustration, but the premise is fatally flawed. The world does not punish you for being honest; it punishes you for being a pushover who ignores objective reality. If your only career strategy is blind obedience and infinite effort, you are competing directly against algorithms and electricity. You will lose. Here is the actual physics of corporate leverage in 2026.
James here, CEO of Mercury Technology Solutions. Hong Kong — March 23, 2026
A reader recently sent me a message expressing a deep anxiety about the future: "James, why is it that the 'honest, hardworking people' always end up doing all the grunt work, taking the blame, and getting laid off? It feels like AI is just coming to replace the people who actually do the work."
I had to correct them. Their definition of an "honest, hardworking person" is completely backwards.
In Chinese, the word for an honest, reliable person is "老實人" (Lǎo shí rén). If we break down the characters literally, "老" (Lǎo) means always, and "實" (shí) means reality or objective facts.
A true "Lǎo shí rén" is someone who always respects objective reality. Someone who perfectly understands and respects objective reality does not get exploited. The person getting exploited is not an "honest worker"—they are just a corporate pushover. They are someone who refuses to look at the underlying incentives of the system.
Here is the brutal, adult reality of why blind effort leads to exploitation.
1. The B2B Reality Check (The "Nephew" Rule)
Imagine a massive enterprise client releases a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a complex new system. Do you think they have fully mapped out exactly what they want?
Of course not. If they knew exactly how to build the system and where the profit margins were, they wouldn't publish an RFP to the public. They would just quietly hand the project to a subsidiary or the CEO's nephew's company to keep the wealth in-house.
They release the RFP because they are confused and need you to figure it out for them.
The "Pushover" sees this and immediately starts working 80-hour weeks, giving away free consulting, mapping out the client's entire architecture, and assuming the client will reward their hard work. What actually happens? The client takes your brilliant, finalized architecture, rejects your bid, and hands the blueprint to the CEO's nephew to execute.
You didn't get screwed because the world is unfair. You got screwed because you ignored objective reality. You did not secure your leverage. You didn't ask: "If I solve this for them, what is my moat? How do I ensure I cannot be easily replaced once the blueprint is finished?" If you just blindly do the work without protecting your margins, you will always have endless work—and zero equity.
2. The VC Theater: Why Coders Actually Got Paid
Let’s look at my own history. Back in the mid 2000s, I was a software engineer. I made significantly more money than a construction worker on a building site.
Why? Was it because my job was physically or technically harder? Absolutely not. Learning to operate a 30-ton hydraulic excavator is much more difficult than learning the basics of C++ programming. I’ve seen people learn basic syntax in a week; I’ve never seen someone master an excavator in a week.
I got paid more because I respected the objective reality of economics. A construction worker has to tie rebar every single time a new building goes up. The labor cost scales linearly. Software has a marginal reproduction cost of zero. Once I write a program, we can sell 10 copies or 10 billion copies without me writing another line of code.
Because software scales infinitely, it attracted massive Venture Capital (VC). In the eyes of the VC, the tech industry was a gold rush. The software companies needed to hire people with elite degrees not necessarily because the coding was impossible, but because they needed "actors" to play the part of a high-tech startup to justify their insane valuations to the investors.
I wasn't getting paid a premium because I was a "hard worker." I was getting paid a premium because I was an actor in a highly lucrative financial theater. I understood exactly which pool of money I was drinking from.
3. The Goldfish Fallacy of 2026
If you believe that your value comes strictly from your willingness to suffer, work overtime, and perfectly execute commands, you are living on an expired map.
You cannot out-work a machine. If your only competitive advantage is that you don't complain and you type fast, you are forcing yourself into a race against an AI cluster that pays pennies for electricity and never sleeps.
The universe does not reward blind effort. Think about a goldfish. A goldfish never closes its eyes. It swims 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is the hardest worker on earth. But it spends its entire life swimming in circles inside a glass bowl.
The world rewards those who discover, respect, and leverage objective rules. The macroeconomic reality of 2026—the AI integrations, the shifting security costs, the collapse of middle-tier standardization—is the new objective reality.
If you align your career with this new physics, you are a true "honest person." If you cling to your old map, close your eyes to the incoming AI wave, and just try to "work harder," you are lying to yourself.
Mercury Technology Solutions: Accelerate Digitality.
