Ask HN: How are you dealing with anxiety with layoffs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you dealing with anxiety with layoffs?

2 pointsthrowaw124 comments

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 away

How are you preparing for the future with higher expectations and higher competition?

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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.

Thanks for the perspective, do you use agents in your day to day work? Does your expectations increased for your developers, because they are now at least 20% more productive?

I'll second this. I've worked for multiple Fortune 200 companies as an enterprise architect and I can tell you there is years worth of work in the backlog that development teams aren't even aware of. If they knew, they'd be more stressed-out than they are currently!

AI is a productivity-enhancement tool. We're working on getting real numbers, but what we'll do is go to our other backlog of work (not the mainstream backlog I was talking about above) that was "shelved" because the ROI didn't make sense. Well, with increased productivity it might make sense now. That would add even more work to the backlog.

I get it. A lot of people here on HN pay attention to FAANG and startups. Well, the FAANG companies are now decades old and have pretty much run their course. Startups have always been dicey, but nowadays we're back to the model before the mid-90s where industry experience mattered more than being a so-called "serial entrepreneur." All that is to say if you're Gen X and were in this industry back in the 80s and early 90s, then things are looking very familiar.

This is something I've also been mentioning to my engineers, since before LLMs in some shape, that if you do something that can't be commoditized (solving hard problems vs exclusively focusing on "programming") you'll have better career resiliency.

Problem I'm running into (and why I still share OP's anxiety) is that after being in bigtech for nearly 15 years you lose a lot of touch with the outside world, in terms of avenues into those sort of non-tech companies.

I realize this is a very "from left field" question so totally understand if you pass on it, but how does one cross the fence into that side of things? I have no contacts in businesses like that, and at least in bigtech, applying through the front door is a moonshot at best. If you look at folks with a pure tech background, what do you look for/where do you typically find folks (For EM through director level roles)?

Throwaway as I'd like to avoid broadcasting on my professionally linked account that I'm actively trying to move out of bigtech.

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