I’ve been in tech long enough to think I’d already lived through the big shifts.
We went from on-prem to cloud. Then came digital transformation, where every company suddenly needed to become a software company (whether they had any business doing so or not). Entire stacks got rebuilt - .NET stopped feeling inevitable, Python spread everywhere, and everyone got weirdly excited about Next.js. Mobile came in hot (B2B, naturally, is still deciding whether a phone is a real device). Recurring revenue became our SaaS religion. Remote work exploded, then partially un-exploded. Product-led growth rewired how companies scaled.
Each wave felt big. AI feels 10x bigger. And 10x faster.
That speed is the part I can’t quite process. There are days where it genuinely feels like I need a full-time job just to keep up with what’s happening. And even then, I’m not convinced I am. Am I just getting better at being slightly less behind?? Haha.
And that’s really the feeling underneath all of this: behind.
Not “I should probably test that new tool” behind. More like “am I already operating on an outdated mental model?” behind.
There’s also a weird social dynamic to this whole thing. Everyone has a system, a stack, a workflow that supposedly changed their life, saved them from the burnout, and probably whitened their teeth. It creates this illusion that everyone else already knows what’s going on.
So you hesitate to ask basic questions, because it feels like you’re the only dumb one who doesn’t get it.
Which is almost certainly not true. But it feels true. And the result is a lot of fake confidence theater, a lot of noise, and very little shared truth about what’s actually working.
Then there’s the part that’s harder to admit: a lot of what I spent the last decade learning is losing leverage.
Growth, marketing, product management, sales - these used to feel like crafts. You built intuition over years. You learned what great looked like. You got good at pattern recognition. You earned judgment and respect by grinding through it all.
AI is flattening a lot of that.
It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes. Not the best version. But enough to make you sit there like, wow, okay then. And you don’t really get to process that shift. There’s no mourning period. You just move on to the next thing, because everything is changing too fast. (and don’t even get me started on how non-tech people are supposed to keep up with any of this - ‘mass adoption’ feels almost comical.)
Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?
Now, senior people still have some advantages, but some of the old signals of seniority are getting weaker fast. The hierarchy flattens. The ladder gets weird. Experience still matters, but not in the clean, linear way we got used to.
Honestly, I think that a lot of that is good. A lot of old hierarchies deserved to die. RIP politics and middle-management. Still, it’s disorienting as we are going through it.
And of course, the reward for becoming more efficient is exactly what it has always been: more work. If AI makes you 10x faster, nobody says, “Amazing. Please enjoy your afternoon!” They ask why you’re not doing 10x more. Productivity gains get absorbed immediately by the system, which is very on-brand for tech.
And underneath all of this is the part we really don’t want to talk about: the economics.
If output goes up while the cost of producing that output goes down, what happens to compensation? What happens to leverage? What happens to the premium attached to knowledge work when more of that work becomes abundant? What happens to company structures when fewer people can produce dramatically more?
My guess is the value shifts.
Away from execution. Away from being the person who can grind through the work manually. Toward taste, judgment, prioritization, and orchestration. Toward deciding what’s worth building, not just how to build it.
Which sounds elegant until you realize those are harder skills to build patterns on and really really hard to teach/learn.
The last question I keep coming back to is whether we are the last generation that built our careers around software as a medium.
We leaned all the way in. We learned the tools, the systems, the playbooks. We rode cloud. We drove digital transformation. We built careers on knowing how to operate software better than other people. We are also, unfortunately, the sandwich generation that has to explain software to our parents and now AI to our kids.
But if software starts getting built, configured, and operated by AI, what happens to the people whose edge was being good at creating software?
I don’t know. And I’m not convinced anyone else does either, despite the amount of confidence cosplay happening online.
And maybe I’m overblowing it. Or maybe this is just what it feels like to live through a real industry shift while still being expected to perform like nothing has changed.
The only thing I feel confident about is that the advantage is shifting.
It’s shifting toward the people who can see clearly, choose well, and adapt faster than the ground is moving beneath them.
No pressure everyone. Everything will be okay. (RIGHT?)
Agreed. Thank you for this. There are days I feel on top of things and then I read linkedin and I am like damn, I need to try this new tool!
But what you say on clarity is really interesting, I am trying to brace this period as a back to school case. As you say the playing field is wide open so its just like being back at school and being open to learning anything but with the clarity of experience. For me this at least helps reducing what I chase after. Tons of people can now do data science, but building the data stack behind that is where that clarity counts
From another millennial: thank you for this !