Eng manager. This is March or Die scenario. I love building software products, but if I won't be able to do it at any decent company, I'd start my own.

- micro SaaS

- consulting for AI solutions

- robotics or other hardware

I work for a consulting firm that rebranded itself as an AI solutions firm. So yeah, I'm pretty much expected to use A.I. pretty heavily to keep working here, and so I do.

So I'm guessing that experience will help me get whatever my next job is, but I also think my next job might end up being my last job in the field.

I'll either go into management, or just semi-retire and work on my own projects, or leave the field entirely and start working in the board game industry, I don't know, something.

If I switched fields I'll probably take a major pay cut though (if I go into the board game industry I'll probably be lucky to make a quarter of what I'm making right now). But paycuts might be coming anyway to the software engineering field as a whole before too long anyway.

Keeping up the motivation was already difficult before A.I., I'd already dealt with so much startup, small business, and corporate crap over the years it was starting to pile up. I might need to take a sabbatical at some point, or at least a couple of months off.

I've been working in software engineering in some form or another for a little over 20 years now.

Mine? I retired in February. I'm 64. (This isn't advice for how to handle the changes. This is saying I didn't have to personally figure it out.)

Welfare mooch.

I have no education outside high-school, my entire career has been in software with no valuable domain or specialized experience.

Its either that or gig work slave.

I am a founder of a software company so I am not a traditional software dev anymore. However, we are doubling down on AI and improving tons of internal and customer facing solutions with AI. This will impact some people for sure.

Anyone who is just an order taker or bills by the hour or keeps people waiting too long is going to be eliminated by AI. That is the brutal and honest truth. Companies have always wanted to move fast and now AI removes the dependency on humans to a great extent. I personally have started coding again with AI to move things faster at our company. Not in everything but for anything new/experiements/product dev work.

Tthere are tons of opportunities for senior devs to adjust and use AI to make them more valuable. If you work a regular corporate 9-5, your options may be limited unless you have a say. But if you work for yourself or smaller companies, get on the AI bandwagon if you want to keep you job and excel further. For example, one of my close friends is very senior level at a company and she is now vibe coding in house tools and working with her management team to show the ROI. She otherwise manages a team of over 1000+ people across global locations.

Remember, if you can't beat them, join them. Good luck.

I'm a 12yoe dev but don't work at FAANG/Mag7. I think the extent to which companies have pulled out all the stops and sacrificed any order in their systems by pushing devs to vibe up massive amounts of code is a tech debt bill that will come due quickly.

I think comprehension debt will keep people employed and make for many opportunities. We will be using AI to make refactors, but the reputational risk being taken on by so many companies is something that hasn't been priced in.