>The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs.
depends on the assumption that technology must "transition" to "foundational models / LLMs". The author doesn't seem to interrogate this assumption. In fact, most of the career malaise I've seen in my work is based on the assumption that, for one reason or another, technologists "must transition" to this new world of LLMs. I wish people would start by interrogating this bizarre backwards assumption (ie., - damn the end product! Damn the users! It must contain AI!) before framing career discussions around it.
However,
>decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent
It’s important to understand how AI will affect your field and recalibrate your position or contribution accordingly
It is a big enough change for this to be a valid question for anyone in the world today
Leaving what you’re doing and going into “AI” will likely set you up for a crypto level disaster
Vibe coding is a thing but vibe business building or job hunting isn’t! So beware of hype and know that in the end money is made by serving people and it will be equally hard with vibe coding too because the bar is higher
AI will create newer opportunities for sure but follow the opportunity, not the AI is what the sentiment here is I guess
>It’s important to understand how AI will affect your field and recalibrate your position or contribution accordingly
In the case of my industry (middling cybersecurity) we're seeing the following "advances"
- When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow.
- All meetings now have not-useful meeting notes and no one reads these.
- People are considering implementing security co-pilot, which will introduce useful advances such as spending much more time building promptbooks so co-pilot can understand our logs.
- A lot more people think they're engineers, and vomit out scripts which do things the "authors" do not anticipate.
Our senior leaders have also been completely captured by this crap. Recently our CTO (public company in the US you've heard of) announced in chat that engineers with an aversion to relying on LLMs have an attitude problem that is incompatible with our company direction. I was blown away.
Only in the short term. In the medium to long term, false assumptions will kill a company. As an employee, you would be better off recognizing it before the crunch hits.
Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward. Hundreds of billions, the growth of the technology industry, the entire US stock market, and the global economy has been wagered on this technology. Imagine the turmoil when those in power realize the reality of what they're betting the farm on.
The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.
I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.
We've become so accustomed to the rip-roaring growth that came from widespread Internet adoption and now that it has piped down, we're desperate to find the next big boom. VR, crypto, blockchain, generative AI. And each time, like degenerate gamblers, we're feeling it, this must be it, the next Big 'Un, the bet that redeems all the bets that went wrong, bigger, riskier, bigger, riskier.
But it just won't be, nothing in our lifetime will ever come close to what the Internet boom was. The window for becoming a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg as easily as they did is closed now, and you just need to live with it. The title of this chapter till the end of our days will remain "After the Internet Boom" and it will chronicle this pathetic desperation.
That's an overblown claim. AI companies failing won't mean technology doesn't advance nor that companies betting against/independently from AI would recind.
Exactly my thoughts reading this article.
Luckily if next few years we will have thousands of projects written using 'ai' there will be need for someone to debug and fix all of that broken software.
Or maybe not, maybe it will be cheaper to just slap another ten k8s pods to mitigate poor performance...
I believe, we are beyond the point of “bad software written, bad software deployed, business as usual” point long ago when AWS/GCP/Azure became an important requirement in job description.
A bad piece of software can be decently hidden by burning more money in cloud bills, which gives the inflated sense to the leadership that their products are doing global scale ground breaking.
With AI, I would not be surprised if the quality actually improves and the cost comes down(or stays same). Of course, more bad software will be written by now many aspiring entrepreneurs to realize their dream idea of spotify clone, then sacrificing their life saving on complex cloud bills and ever so profitable rise of revenue of all cloud services citing this as benefit of AI while doing some more layoffs to jack up the stock prices.
The real revelations will come(it always does, nature and economy works in cycles), when excessive layoff caused damage will come due and now everyone will scramble to rehire people in few years. Unlike the Ford innovation of replacing horse carts, software is more prevalent in our every aspects of life, same as doctors and lawyers and civil service, hence we need to honestly play the game until the wave turns and then cash in by making in 200x killing just like the businesses are cashing in on right now.
No one knows what the "current market" thing really is, people are making wild guesses looking at the hands of other people who also make wild guesses.
I do think some transitions are inevitable and not because AI must be used, but because once enough companies figure out where it genuinely improves efficiency, the competitive pressure to follow suit becomes real
The same holds true for software developers imo. If you can't figure out how to use LLMs to improve efficiency, your likely a dinosaur of the past soon (unless you work on somethink __very__ specific where LLMs dont help much).
This guy probly doesn't doesn't do any actual work just reads ppl like Mario Damadai who are out there claiming 90% of coding will be done by llms in next 3-6 months.
> I’m a software engineering leader and writer, currently serving as Carta’s CTO. I’ve worked at Calm, Stripe, Uber, Digg, a few other places, and cofounded a defunct iOS gaming startup
> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs
On the contrary, here in my corner of EU nearly 60% of new jobs are frontend or full stack.
Anything else left is mostly SAP consultant or DevOps.
I think, the whole WebDev is dead end is just false lies to dissuade new entrants. Literally most successful business with a digital solution is web stuff with some automation that would otherwise be ms excel sheets shared via email.
Also this whole panic over LLM is overblown, I know of some brilliant experienced people in other professions like Electronics, Mechatronics, Aerospace, Material Science and literally all of them are finding the job market “very difficult at the moment”. It is the bad global mood in general used deceptively by opportunists to spread false fears of their LLM/AI.
At the end of the day, an insurance seller has hundreds of concerning reasons to convince you why everything is dangerous around you and you really need their product. Now apply that to AI sellers.
Web element feel similar to PHP or wordpress development in 2010.
There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work.
As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, especially front end, will be like knowing HTML and CSS in 2015. Like everyone should know it, and thus not even worth putting on your resume.
There's another factor here I forgot to mention - web development, as a specialization, tends to be paid less and has a lower career ceiling in many companies than backend and infra engineering. This is a personal observation on my part but I've seen many other people remark on this. True full stack engineering, I think, is reasonably safe from the robots at the moment.
If someone likes building products, I'd basically recommend that they not go 100% full-bore on frontend engineering, definitely go for "full-stack", and accept that a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days. I would also recommend that they develop solid product management and UX skills.
> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs.
You had it going well there but then had to ruin it with a take like that.
If you’re talking about your trivial, github-filled example scenarios of frontend, sure. But then we could say the same for all other roles, including backend logic that’s regurgitated all the time.
Like with everything else, the non-trivial bits need work and skills.
> Look for work in major U.S. tech hubs like the Bay Area. Pay is better and network effects are strong, so your next job will be easier to get.
Jobs and the network effects happen all across the country. As you get older and maybe don't want the grind, or have a family, or just want a better work/life balance, this will become apparent.
Basically, always have at least two people who will support you for your next job.
There are plenty of tech hubs besides the Bay Area, that's for sure. But I can tell you that when I moved from a small company in a small economy to a moderately-well known startup in the Bay, the rate at which recruiters contacted me jumped from maybe a few times a year to multiple times per week. And after a few years, many of my coworkers started their own companies and invited me to join them.
By contrast, I have very talented friends who did not make the jump to work at a tech hub, and they don't have the same kind of network or opportunities.
With that said, I very much agree with you about wanting work life balance, making sure there are people who will support you in your next job, etc. However, I think that this is much easier to optimize for when you do have an established career and an extensive network already.
Good advice in general. I would add - try to pick a skill which gives you a deep understanding in something fundamental which will always be relevant, rather than a particular shiny tech.
I would love the bay area, but unfortunately it is extremely inaccessible for me and others once you have a family. Trying to find a place to live in a good school district seems like it takes minimum $2M for a house. Renting is less long term secure when trying to maintain consistency for kids. That's not even get into earthquakes and wildfires!
If you’re usual child-raising age then you probably have 6-10 years of experience, and there should be lots of jobs that pay $500k in the Bay Area. Buying a $2m house on that salary is pretty doable.
Amazingly enough, I and millions of other developers have managed to find jobs outside of the Bay Area.
Personally, I’ve been finding jobs quite easily 10x since 1996 - the last 2 in 2023 and last year.
> Look at the requirements for your dream job and figure out what you need to learn to qualify.
Those jobs in the Bay Area mostly require you to “grind leetCode” and system design. They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc
Hey, as I said in another thread, I did not start out working in the Bay, and ended up here somewhat by accident. It shocked me how much easier it was to find good jobs here, and I'll stand by that. With that said, of course I say this with no judgment to anyone not in the Bay or other tech hubs, it's friendly advice from personal experience.
> Those jobs in the Bay Area mostly require you to “grind leetCode” and system design. They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc
Hmm, it sounds like you have a negative opinion of Bay Area jobs in general. I'm asking people to first figure out what work sounds interesting to them, and then learn the relevant skills. If you have the skills, the Bay Area probably has the right job, too. Of course these jobs also exist elsewhere, I'm not sure why I'm triggering this reaction...
> They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc
The latest "framework, databases" are constantly changing. Being good at leetcode and system design is a better signal (ofcourse, not perfect) than knowing specific tools.
Being good at system design implies you are aware of tradeoffs across various systems, and that coupled with willingness to grind means you can at pick up new tools and probably deliver on projects. I have used 13 languages and an equally absurd amount of tools across 4 orgs in my 5 YOE at FAANG. It's constant learning, or you're out basically. Doesn't make sense to quiz on anything specific. The interview process is quite fair actually.
I'm mostly thinking of frontend dev work, but also some types of light backend work that you might see in a CRUD app. And listen, I've done that work, I've done a lot of it, and I saw that it's mostly a career dead-end, becoming more and more automated/copiloted away. It's not a career moat to be a mid-level React developer. By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats, etc, and I've spent the last few years pivoting into those areas.
An interesting counter-point is that if you have great product and design skills, this is a great time to learn frontend development, because it's more accessible than ever and can supercharge your existing skills. But the days of being a pure frontend coder are probably fading.
On avoiding web dev: I get the concern, but I wouldn't write it off completely. LLMs are changing the game, but they're not replacing deep expertise in architecture, scalability, or understanding real-world business constraints
I don't think they meant architecture, scalability, or understanding real-world business constraints
I think they meant literally web developers, or, aka, frontend folks doing html and css.
I've worked on backend systems that run web sites and apis, for over a decade, and I've never once referred to myself as a web dev. That title has always been frontend specific imo
Good advice -> but is an error or blindness
> * Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs.
funny enough all the hyped YC / Bay area startups don't make as much as your typical CRUD webapp.
Devs we tend to be attracted to tech. but what makes good tech doesn't mean it's a good business. That's why your typical bay area startup depends on vc funding & will likely spend 10 years without being cash flow positive.
"decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - Very correct. Whether or not AI actually comes for your job, the fact that enough people at the top think so is enough to cause trouble.
A non-technical friend was asking about the prospects of AI 'taking over' jobs. I told him that I'm less worried about 'Skynet' than I am about 'Slopnet', where bad takes on the applications of 'AI' just make life harder for all of us. That'll come more from decision-maker irrationality than from the tech itself.
This is the problem. Right now we're not in the, I need AI to work or get out stage. We're in the AI might completely upend reality stage.
It's just people telling stories to find bigger fools. Like the ads claiming they sell an AI employee that never needs sleep and never talks back.
Those ads are the same thing as those ads shoved in the lawn near the mcdonnalds drive through that look like they were drawn with sharpie, but are really mass printed. "Real estate investor looking for pupil, trade my money" kind of stuff.
They are purposefully looking for suckers that would overlook the sketchyness. They don't want normal people applying, that reduces the pitches effectiveness.
then why don’t they co-locate teams when they get RTO’d? I keep hearing about people who have to go sit in a mandatory hot desk but are still stuck on Zoom all day. Seems like the worst of both worlds
RTOs generally have nothing to do with any of the things they say. They are just layoffs.
You can't argue with them about the effectiveness of remote work. They aren't trying to optimize work. They are trying to fire people.
Working from home doesn't fire people, being more productive and happy doesn't fire people. Your mental well being doesn't have any bearing on how many people they need to fire.
Exactly. It’s less about whether AI can replace certain jobs and more about the fact that companies are making decisions as if it will. That alone reshapes hiring, budgets, and job security
We are still doing scrum-like stuff after all. And they are dragging people back to the office. Decision makers have billions at their disposal to be inefficient with.
I started my own business last year that has happened to go quite well. As I’ve watched the software industry over the last year, all I can think is… “damn, what lucky timing.”
I keep looking for what you claim to be doing. I feel like reality continues to smack me in the face with “no one cares about quality”. I have tried big enterprises. I have tried 8 startups in 18 years. I watch the leaders / founders make the same mistakes over and over.
Anyway - your profile resonates with me. Would love to grab a virtual coffee if you are up for it.
The blog confused me. The author opens with senior leaders but does not distinguish between ic and managers. That is a very important difference and the way they are written is somewhat interchangeable at the start but I don’t think that’s necessarily correct.
Managers and senior ics are both facing unique challenges now. However, they are very different and don’t have a lot in common.
For me, as a senior ic, it’s having the right skills and staying afloat in this challenging environment. For the middle managers, from what I can see, it’s not being redundant as Mark Cuban recently pointed out.
I get why someone would want to tell people this, but I think it fails to be advice, as it describes the current state of affairs without much actual guidance for how to do better in it
Which, to be fair, no one really seems to be able to answer that meaningfully
The real answer is, leaders chase trends, so to keep them satisfied you need to also chase trends.
Some advises can be:
* learn prompt engineering to impress your boss and next employer
* adapt AI IDE at work, of course don’t go for cline or freemium ones, go for max expensive tier of Cursor/Windsurf/v0 etc
* Take some expensive(more the better) courses and workshops on Agentic topics, build some small projects. Justify your expenditure by citing being more well prepared for AI transition and adapting to new paradigm to strategically beat the competition businesses who will be extinct without employees with such trainings
* build some proof of concept projects to convert the smaller trivial projects to use agentic workflow. Then show these to your boss and put these up on github for future reference
* learn to train smaller models on your own internal documents, build a chat interface on top and give access to your boss(trust me, they will be blown away and will sell this to their superior)
* seed fear in your colleagues’ minds by using AI stuff where possible
Think of this AI as a new trend we must adapt to, just like FE moved from jQuery to React. Life and work goes on, just this wave nudges the complacent bunch to finally get out of their comfort zone and learn something new or get left out.
The shift in what's valued (moving from team-building and hiring prowess to sheer execution speed and adaptability) has been stark. It's also unsettling to see so many senior folks feeling -left behind- not because they lack skills, but because the rules of the game have changed so quickly...
Readit News
>The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs.
depends on the assumption that technology must "transition" to "foundational models / LLMs". The author doesn't seem to interrogate this assumption. In fact, most of the career malaise I've seen in my work is based on the assumption that, for one reason or another, technologists "must transition" to this new world of LLMs. I wish people would start by interrogating this bizarre backwards assumption (ie., - damn the end product! Damn the users! It must contain AI!) before framing career discussions around it.
However,
>decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent
is unfortunately painfully true.
It is a big enough change for this to be a valid question for anyone in the world today
Leaving what you’re doing and going into “AI” will likely set you up for a crypto level disaster
Vibe coding is a thing but vibe business building or job hunting isn’t! So beware of hype and know that in the end money is made by serving people and it will be equally hard with vibe coding too because the bar is higher
AI will create newer opportunities for sure but follow the opportunity, not the AI is what the sentiment here is I guess
In the case of my industry (middling cybersecurity) we're seeing the following "advances"
- When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow.
- All meetings now have not-useful meeting notes and no one reads these.
- People are considering implementing security co-pilot, which will introduce useful advances such as spending much more time building promptbooks so co-pilot can understand our logs.
- A lot more people think they're engineers, and vomit out scripts which do things the "authors" do not anticipate.
Neither do my senior leaders, so it might as well be true.
I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.
But it just won't be, nothing in our lifetime will ever come close to what the Internet boom was. The window for becoming a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg as easily as they did is closed now, and you just need to live with it. The title of this chapter till the end of our days will remain "After the Internet Boom" and it will chronicle this pathetic desperation.
Yes
> the growth of the technology industry
That's an overblown claim. AI companies failing won't mean technology doesn't advance nor that companies betting against/independently from AI would recind.
> the entire US stock market
Probably yes
> the global economy
Probably no
Or maybe not, maybe it will be cheaper to just slap another ten k8s pods to mitigate poor performance...
A bad piece of software can be decently hidden by burning more money in cloud bills, which gives the inflated sense to the leadership that their products are doing global scale ground breaking.
With AI, I would not be surprised if the quality actually improves and the cost comes down(or stays same). Of course, more bad software will be written by now many aspiring entrepreneurs to realize their dream idea of spotify clone, then sacrificing their life saving on complex cloud bills and ever so profitable rise of revenue of all cloud services citing this as benefit of AI while doing some more layoffs to jack up the stock prices.
The real revelations will come(it always does, nature and economy works in cycles), when excessive layoff caused damage will come due and now everyone will scramble to rehire people in few years. Unlike the Ford innovation of replacing horse carts, software is more prevalent in our every aspects of life, same as doctors and lawyers and civil service, hence we need to honestly play the game until the wave turns and then cash in by making in 200x killing just like the businesses are cashing in on right now.
It isnt always a bad idea to wait until trendlines are clear.
LLMs will not go away but it's still not at all clear what skills investment should be made to respond to that.
Ive learned a ton about obsolete tech in the past and ive even learned a ton about LLMs in the last year that ended up becoming obsolete.
"thought leaders" are a plague on working ppl.
He's worth paying attention to IMO.
> I’m a software engineering leader and writer, currently serving as Carta’s CTO. I’ve worked at Calm, Stripe, Uber, Digg, a few other places, and cofounded a defunct iOS gaming startup
Dead Comment
* Try to get at least one job offer every year, even if you don't accept it.
* Look at the requirements for your dream job and figure out what you need to learn to qualify.
* Pick one skill and get very good at it. Spend an hour a day on it for a year.
* Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs.
* Look for work in major U.S. tech hubs like the Bay Area. Pay is better and network effects are strong, so your next job will be easier to get.
On the contrary, here in my corner of EU nearly 60% of new jobs are frontend or full stack.
Anything else left is mostly SAP consultant or DevOps.
I think, the whole WebDev is dead end is just false lies to dissuade new entrants. Literally most successful business with a digital solution is web stuff with some automation that would otherwise be ms excel sheets shared via email.
Also this whole panic over LLM is overblown, I know of some brilliant experienced people in other professions like Electronics, Mechatronics, Aerospace, Material Science and literally all of them are finding the job market “very difficult at the moment”. It is the bad global mood in general used deceptively by opportunists to spread false fears of their LLM/AI.
At the end of the day, an insurance seller has hundreds of concerning reasons to convince you why everything is dangerous around you and you really need their product. Now apply that to AI sellers.
There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work.
As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, especially front end, will be like knowing HTML and CSS in 2015. Like everyone should know it, and thus not even worth putting on your resume.
If someone likes building products, I'd basically recommend that they not go 100% full-bore on frontend engineering, definitely go for "full-stack", and accept that a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days. I would also recommend that they develop solid product management and UX skills.
You had it going well there but then had to ruin it with a take like that.
If you’re talking about your trivial, github-filled example scenarios of frontend, sure. But then we could say the same for all other roles, including backend logic that’s regurgitated all the time.
Like with everything else, the non-trivial bits need work and skills.
Jobs and the network effects happen all across the country. As you get older and maybe don't want the grind, or have a family, or just want a better work/life balance, this will become apparent.
Basically, always have at least two people who will support you for your next job.
By contrast, I have very talented friends who did not make the jump to work at a tech hub, and they don't have the same kind of network or opportunities.
With that said, I very much agree with you about wanting work life balance, making sure there are people who will support you in your next job, etc. However, I think that this is much easier to optimize for when you do have an established career and an extensive network already.
I would love the bay area, but unfortunately it is extremely inaccessible for me and others once you have a family. Trying to find a place to live in a good school district seems like it takes minimum $2M for a house. Renting is less long term secure when trying to maintain consistency for kids. That's not even get into earthquakes and wildfires!
Personally, I’ve been finding jobs quite easily 10x since 1996 - the last 2 in 2023 and last year.
> Look at the requirements for your dream job and figure out what you need to learn to qualify.
Those jobs in the Bay Area mostly require you to “grind leetCode” and system design. They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc
> Those jobs in the Bay Area mostly require you to “grind leetCode” and system design. They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc
Hmm, it sounds like you have a negative opinion of Bay Area jobs in general. I'm asking people to first figure out what work sounds interesting to them, and then learn the relevant skills. If you have the skills, the Bay Area probably has the right job, too. Of course these jobs also exist elsewhere, I'm not sure why I'm triggering this reaction...
The latest "framework, databases" are constantly changing. Being good at leetcode and system design is a better signal (ofcourse, not perfect) than knowing specific tools.
Being good at system design implies you are aware of tradeoffs across various systems, and that coupled with willingness to grind means you can at pick up new tools and probably deliver on projects. I have used 13 languages and an equally absurd amount of tools across 4 orgs in my 5 YOE at FAANG. It's constant learning, or you're out basically. Doesn't make sense to quiz on anything specific. The interview process is quite fair actually.
What do you mean by web development?
Would backend qualify? Would microservices qualify?
A complex application is much more than coding.
An interesting counter-point is that if you have great product and design skills, this is a great time to learn frontend development, because it's more accessible than ever and can supercharge your existing skills. But the days of being a pure frontend coder are probably fading.
I think they meant literally web developers, or, aka, frontend folks doing html and css.
I've worked on backend systems that run web sites and apis, for over a decade, and I've never once referred to myself as a web dev. That title has always been frontend specific imo
funny enough all the hyped YC / Bay area startups don't make as much as your typical CRUD webapp. Devs we tend to be attracted to tech. but what makes good tech doesn't mean it's a good business. That's why your typical bay area startup depends on vc funding & will likely spend 10 years without being cash flow positive.
Five years from now, ask yourself the same question.
It's just people telling stories to find bigger fools. Like the ads claiming they sell an AI employee that never needs sleep and never talks back.
Those ads are the same thing as those ads shoved in the lawn near the mcdonnalds drive through that look like they were drawn with sharpie, but are really mass printed. "Real estate investor looking for pupil, trade my money" kind of stuff.
They are purposefully looking for suckers that would overlook the sketchyness. They don't want normal people applying, that reduces the pitches effectiveness.
Only desperate people who will fall for anything.
You can't argue with them about the effectiveness of remote work. They aren't trying to optimize work. They are trying to fire people.
Working from home doesn't fire people, being more productive and happy doesn't fire people. Your mental well being doesn't have any bearing on how many people they need to fire.
Anyway - your profile resonates with me. Would love to grab a virtual coffee if you are up for it.
Managers and senior ics are both facing unique challenges now. However, they are very different and don’t have a lot in common.
For me, as a senior ic, it’s having the right skills and staying afloat in this challenging environment. For the middle managers, from what I can see, it’s not being redundant as Mark Cuban recently pointed out.
Which, to be fair, no one really seems to be able to answer that meaningfully
Some advises can be:
* learn prompt engineering to impress your boss and next employer
* adapt AI IDE at work, of course don’t go for cline or freemium ones, go for max expensive tier of Cursor/Windsurf/v0 etc
* Take some expensive(more the better) courses and workshops on Agentic topics, build some small projects. Justify your expenditure by citing being more well prepared for AI transition and adapting to new paradigm to strategically beat the competition businesses who will be extinct without employees with such trainings
* build some proof of concept projects to convert the smaller trivial projects to use agentic workflow. Then show these to your boss and put these up on github for future reference
* learn to train smaller models on your own internal documents, build a chat interface on top and give access to your boss(trust me, they will be blown away and will sell this to their superior)
* seed fear in your colleagues’ minds by using AI stuff where possible
Think of this AI as a new trend we must adapt to, just like FE moved from jQuery to React. Life and work goes on, just this wave nudges the complacent bunch to finally get out of their comfort zone and learn something new or get left out.
You mean make them terrified of debugging your code after you have moved on?
Jikes
This resonates with me.
I find that the current crop of new tech (AI) produces a lot of cognitive dissonance for me in my day-to-day work.
Most initiatives/projects/whatever around AI seems to be of the "digging your own grave" variety - making tools to replace software engineers.
Definitely not fun.