How are you dealing with anxiety with layoffs?

Question

Software industry is different today, then 4 years ago.4 years ago, engineers, even when laid off, could write code and maintain a legacy software for small agencies.Today, you can't charge for 2 weeks of work, because work is done in 2 hours with AI agents.Expectations became much higher, you must produce a lot of impact and output to be competitive. Problem with that is, while producing output, there is no attachment to the work you are producing, its one prompt away, in 85% of cases, and you are in next project. Jumping from one project to another, everything is prompt awayHow are you preparing for the future with higher expectations and higher competition?

karamanolev · Accepted Answer

I am a technical director in a non-tech, but high growth company. Our team of engineers is 15-20 people. We have so SO many more projects we'd like to do than what we have capacity for. It's hard to really do compress 2 weeks in 2 hours - our company is 10 years old, we're dealing with (some) legacy data, legacy systems, outside systems. We debug, trace, conceptualize problems, test them with people (often our own employees for which we write software). Agents can 10-100x small parts of this loop and have no effect on other parts. Am I worried? A bit. Does it impact my day-to-day work and do I see it having a severe impact in the very near future - not so much.Right now, as advice to other people, I'd say: "just don't work in pure-software, SaaS companies where you can rewrite the app in a week with agents". Plenty of such work, many people don't consider it "stereotypically attractive". I love it.