The industry is telling everyone to panic-sprint. The conventional wisdom right now is to skillmax, stay current, outrun the machine, and never stop. Every LinkedIn post, every tech newsletter, every career coach is selling some version of "get on board or get run over." And the result of everyone following that advice is a field full of people who are exhausted, anxious, can't sleep, and are doing worse work because of it. The medicine is making people sick.
AI is moving fast, the job market is contracting, and the cost of falling behind feels existential. When things are moving fast, focus becomes trajectory. In motorsports we say "look where you want to go." The technical term is target fixation — you fixate on the hazard, you go toward it. Keep your eyes up, keep your head on a swivel, and stay on track.
A lot of people are wondering where their next role will come from. The paradigm has shifted in ways that feel unfair. If you haven't been on the market in a few years, you will make mistakes. The best drivers are the ones who recover the quickest — mentally. If you're thinking about the last corner, you're already falling behind. Commit, analyze, and adjust; but keep looking ahead.
AI will bury us in work — more code to review, more to maintain, more to secure, more to debug. The output is endless. The chaos has created a vacuum, and someone needs to step into it. Be the person that creates opportunity. Seniors who can should start things. That act of starting creates room for the junior engineers who can't get in the door right now. Businesses are lost, systems are vulnerable, nobody knows what to implement. You don't have to wait for someone to create your next role. You can create it.
More than ever the industry needs people who give a damn. Technologists who remain engaged and don't hand over the reins when things get hard. Every industry pushing people out is simultaneously building a teetering stack of tech debt and vulnerabilities that will eventually collapse under its own weight. The short-sighted gains will prove more costly than the human talent they squandered under the promise that AI will solve their institutional problems.
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