About PlotGround
No company names. No corporate spin. No paywall. Just firsthand accounts from the people whose jobs are being reshaped, kept honest by the fact that they're the ones telling them.
The big publications interview executives. Consultants survey themselves. Twitter is dominated by founders selling tools. Meanwhile, the actual work — what a paralegal does on a Tuesday morning, what a copywriter's calendar looks like now, what a translator does after their team got cut from seven to one — is changing in real ways, and the people doing it have no central place to compare notes.
PlotGround is that place. It's slow journalism, sourced from the only people who actually know: the workers themselves. Read enough of these stories and patterns emerge that no executive memo or research report could surface — because the patterns live in the small details of a real workday.
If you're considering a career change, hiring, or simply trying to make sense of what's happening, this archive exists for you. If you have a story to add, the archive exists because of you.
Stories describe roles, industries, and workflows — never specific employers. This protects contributors from retaliation and keeps the focus on systems and patterns instead of corporate gossip. We edit out identifying details if they slip in.
Most contributors choose to publish without their name. Some use pseudonyms. A few attach their real first names. Whatever feels safe is the right answer. We never publish identifying information against a contributor's wishes.
This isn't a layoff blog. It's an archive of how work itself is changing — including stories where the change is good. Workflow shifts, role redefinitions, promotions, career switches, layoffs, and unexpected reliefs all belong here.
We edit submissions for clarity and to remove identifying details. We don't smooth out anger, ambivalence, or contradiction. We don't bury hard truths in optimism. The contributor sees the final version before publication.
PlotGround is reader-supported and ad-free. We don't sell email addresses, run trackers, or share data with third parties. If we ever need to charge for something, it'll be a small voluntary subscription that funds editorial work — never a paywall on the stories themselves.
Contributors retain copyright to their stories and can request removal at any time, no questions asked. We license the right to publish; we don't take ownership. If you change your mind in five years, your story comes down within a week of asking.
You control what's shown. The default display name is "Anonymous." If you choose to use a pseudonym or first name, that's your call. We never publish your email, IP, region details beyond a general area, or anything else you don't explicitly include in the story itself.
During editorial review, we actively scrub out identifying details — even ones you forgot you mentioned — and we send you the edited version before it goes live. If we ever flag a detail as risky, we ask before publishing.
Most NDAs cover trade secrets, customer information, and unreleased products — not generic descriptions of how work is changing. That said, we are not your lawyer, and the safest approach is to write about your role and workflow without referencing anything specific to your employer. Don't quote internal documents, don't name internal tools, don't describe proprietary processes.
If you're worried, the test is: would your story still make sense if you were describing this same role at any other company in your industry? If yes, you're probably fine. If no, simplify until it is.
PlotGround is run independently. There's no VC funding, no parent company, no AI lab sponsorship, no consultancy paying for placement. Operating costs are covered out of pocket and (eventually) by reader contributions.
This independence is the whole point. The moment a tech company pays for this archive, the archive can't be honest about what tech companies are doing.
We edit for three things, in this order: privacy (removing identifying details), clarity (fixing typos, awkward sentences, run-on paragraphs), and length (trimming if a story sprawls). We don't edit for tone, opinion, or rewrite anything to be more positive or negative. Your voice stays your voice.
Every contributor sees the final edited version before it's published. If you don't like an edit, we change it back or pull the story.
Your story enters a moderation queue. Within a week, an editor reads it carefully, suggests light edits, and may email you (if you provided an email) to ask a clarifying question or flag a detail to reconsider. Once you approve the edited version, it's published.
If we decide not to publish — usually because a story is too brief to be useful, or duplicates an existing one too closely — we'll email to let you know. Most submissions are published.
Yes, anytime, no questions asked. Email hello@plotground.com with the URL of your story and we'll remove it within a week. Your story is your story.
Especially yes. PlotGround is not an anti-AI archive. The goal is honest documentation of how work is changing — and a lot of that change is positive. Promotions, more interesting work, better hours, freedom from drudgery, new careers opening up. These stories are as valuable as the hard ones. Often more so, because the dystopian framing is everywhere already.
Yes — citing brief excerpts with a link back is welcome and encouraged. If you'd like to quote a longer passage, interview a contributor, or use the archive systematically for research, please email press@plotground.com. We can sometimes facilitate introductions to contributors who've opted in to journalist contact.
I've spent the last year watching friends in copywriting, design, and translation describe the same shifts — same surprises, same anxieties, same small reliefs — to me one at a time over coffees and texts. None of them were writing it down anywhere. None of their employers were going to write it down. And the public conversation about AI and work was being conducted almost entirely by people whose own work was unaffected, or who had something to sell.
This site is a place to write it down. If you have a story that future job-seekers, students, or just curious peers might learn from, I'd be honored to publish it.