Confessions of a Millennial in Tech

Author is (was?) a Growth Product Manager at Dropbox.

https://www.elenaverna.com/p/growth-at-dropbox

This is a completely fake piece where she poses as a programmer, cites inevitability and finally comes to the conclusion that the skills she possesses will be the more valuable ones in the future.

This is really a "generation-sell" caricature.

I feel this as well. I’m using these tools to be extremely productive and drive more customer value than ever in shorter timeframes (code. Shipped code and features end to end). But I’m not sure if that means I’ll be extremely valuable in six months, or if I’ll be obsolete when the tools improve enough and founders decide to outsource their thinking to them.

I guess we’ll all just need to be our own founders and grab as much value as possible before the revolution? Haha

As for org flattening: the org structure of most companies - even “cool” or “modern” ones is just gone now. Anything remaining is cultural inertia until money gets tight.

Outside of all of this you have to remember why we’re on this earth and it’s sure as hell not to serve AI or feel pressured to be in front of a screen and max everything.

If you’re productive take your breaks. Be human. Remember that the narrative is not the truth, and you’re doing good work.

> It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes

> Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?

I've been grappling with the same thing the last few weeks. It's easy to say "don't put your job at the center of your sense of self" but I've been writing software professionally for twelve years now and I like to think I've gotten pretty damn good at it. It's part of who I am. What happens when the value of the thing you're best at decreases sharply?

The answer is, in the Darwinian sense, adapt or die. Same as it ever was.

> Away from execution. Away from being the person who can grind through the work manually. Toward taste, judgment, prioritization, and orchestration. Toward deciding what’s worth building, not just how to build it.

> Which sounds elegant until you realize those are harder skills to build patterns on and really really hard to teach/learn

They're also really hard to objectively measure. That means they are very difficult to interview and hire for, which will lead to even more "let's hire my buddy, I already know him and trust that he really has good taste and judgement"

It's probably not a good thing

This right here is exactly where I've been at mentally and emotionally for the last couple of years.

I worked so hard to break into web dev in the very late 2010s because the deal supposedly was:

1. Learn to code 2. Get your first real job as a software developer 3. Enjoy your comfortable middle-class lifestyle

but I barely got to enjoy any of this before the calendar switched over to 2020 and it's been one fucking thing after another.

Probably not what the author intended, but this article highlights exactly where Millennials (of which I am one) went terribly, terribly wrong. And the last piece of advice at the end is unfortunately the exact opposite of the remedy we need.

The MOAR FASTER OMG CAN'T KEEP UP CHANGE COMES AT YOU FAST FOMO WEEE mindset is what got us into this terrible situation in the first place. I'm not here to bash on my generation, but if we could gently take a piece of advice (probably good for GenXers as well) it would be this:

Slow the ever-loving f*** down.

You will succeed by ignoring nearly all hype cycles, intentionally not jumping on the next big thing, skipping past virtually all "influencers" online…in fact you should probably just spend the bulk of your waking hours offline entirely.

Cal Newport has been one of the leading voices of this corrective movement (Deep Work, Slow Productivity, etc.), and I pray to the gods above that Gen Z rightly rejects so much of this hustle porn that Millennials came up with in the first two decades of this century.

Slow dooowwwnnnn. Focus on real-world values which last, not fleeting spikes in viral activity. Build meangingful community IRL. Learn tangible skills with your brain and your hands. Interface with people who are not at all like you. Talk to more people in different generations. Realize the hazards of "software brain" as The Verge's Nilay Patel wisely has talked about.

We have a lot to answer for I fear. And if we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the Boomers, we really need to shut up and listen to what the kids are telling us. There's a reason they now hate AI and want iPods for Christmas.

I can agree with a lot of that, and I'd add I'm frankly fed up playing the betatester for bananaware. Even before AI got all hyped up - keeping up with the constant churn, the constant feeling of "don't these people even test their own fucking code examples" was nerve-wracking. And AI made all of that infinitely worse because so, so much stuff just smells like someone had thrown a prompt into Claude Code or Openclaw or whatever and didn't even try to test it out of their specific usecase, much less actually understand it.

I left the field for good, going to study electrical engineering. Even if the planning part of that will be taken over by AI (it's inevitable), good luck to the vampire bloodsucker capitalist elites trying to design a robot wiring up plugs. Trades are the future.