The Feelings
Dread, anxiety, sheer overwhelm, and the constant, nagging question: Am I going to last?
We’ve all heard it, felt it, and lived it. Whether you’ve personally survived a layoff, watched a close friend pack up their desk, or are currently white-knuckling it through the aftermath of the latest corporate culling, working in tech right now is deeply unnerving.
Am I Bothered? Not Really.
Listen, I feel like I might look back at this post in five years and have a 60/40 shot at being right, but here goes: AI isn’t going to take our jobs. However, it is going to radically force us to shift how we work.
We are living through a massive paradigm shift. Instead of spending hours fussing over the tedious meta-steps required to build something, we’re being forced to focus entirely on the end output and the big-picture design. It’s no longer about how you build the thing, but the ultimate impact of what you ship. You might launch a new piece of software or a sleek new feature, but what actual value are you driving? Are you hunting for better user engagement, higher SEO, or whatever the new AI-search equivalent happens to be, like RAG points?
We have to pivot how we think. Honestly, this whole shift reminds me of the late 90s when consumer fiber-optic internet started rolling out. Suddenly, physical card catalogs and endless library searches weren’t our only resource, which used to take forever. We had to totally reinvent how we accessed information.
Granted, that era felt a lot easier than this new wave. Back then, we were just learning how to find data. Today, we have all the data; it’s just that the timeline to reach an end result has been completely compressed. Take this blog, for example. The framework, minus the actual content, was AI-assisted. Yet, even with access to some of the best models on the market, it still took me over a day of messing with configurations and style guides just to produce something this basic. And even then, I still managed to screw up the comments section.
Law and Order
I don’t have the emotional bandwidth or the word count to fully untangle the legal nightmare of all this, but we need to talk about it.
First, you have local municipalities, counties, and entire states pushing back and drafting laws to halt data center development. The environmental toll is massive. These massive server farms are draining local power grids and consuming millions of gallons of water, and local residents are the ones paying the price.
Right now, AI companies have it incredibly easy with the current administration, and they know it. The landscape feels completely laissez-faire. Plus, the previous administration stacked the courts, from state levels and federal circuits all the way to the Supreme Court, with judges who heavily favor corporate capitalism.
But the free ride won’t last forever. There are numerous privacy and data-usage lawsuits winding their way through the system right now. Eventually, one of these rulings is going to cause a massive upheaval for these tech giants. If the courts don’t do it, a shift in the administration or the House will.
Something has to give. We are sitting at the very tail end of a free-for-all capitalism paradigm, and something is bound to break. I’m not even judging; it is just how it is.
All About the Benjamins, Baby
I’ve spent the last six months rewriting my own professional playbook. I spend way more time reflecting on the ultimate goal and identifying steps I can automate. What actually requires human insight, and what can just be run through an edit cycle?
A huge chunk of my day-to-day writing involves summarizing events. Tasks that used to take me a solid 20 to 30 minutes now take about five. You’d think with all this magically reclaimed time I’d be living the dream of a four-hour work week.
Sadly, no.
When the velocity of shipping products increases, the mountain of work required to promote, sell, and deliver those products grows right along with it. We are running ourselves ragged just trying to keep pace with this new speed of business, and the worst part? No one seems to have an actual, overarching strategy. Sure, the massive players in the AI space probably have a roadmap, but right now, their only real priority seems to be getting IPO-ready.
So no, AI might not steal your desk tomorrow. But brace yourselves, because San Francisco is already starting to get quite a bit more expensive as everyone braces for those impending IPOs. There is already not enough space for those in this very niche, very lucrative specialty.
More money, more problems.