I've been putting off doing this episode for a long time for a very simple reason.
It's one of the hardest episodes to cover.
It is a difficult topic because it's scary.
It is threatening to our livelihood.
It's threatening to our sense of worth, our sense of self.
And a lot of you are experiencing that fear.
And the reason I've been delaying this episode for so long is because I don't have a great answer for you.
I don't have the answer for how you can avoid losing your job because of AI.
But I do hope that in this episode we can frame this problem and give you some tools for ways to think about how your career can continue advancing and potentially take advantage of the unique shape that the market is taking because of AI.
My name is Jonathan Cottrell.
My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers.
And man, this is a big topic.
And it's changing rapidly.
We're going to try to make this episode as evergreen as we can.
So we're not going to talk about really specific things, about what AI is good at and what it's bad at, for example, because we're going to end up being wrong shortly, probably because what AI is able to do is changing all the time.
And if you've been following this topic which, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are following this topic pretty closely then you know that the state of the art is advancing rapidly and that our jobs are different today than they were even just a few months ago.
Right.
Agentic coding tools like Quad Code, Codex, even Gemini has has a similar tool out now.
These are tools that are making the process of writing code is very different than it used to be.
The process of designing software is different.
The process of ideating, of writing tests, the entire kind of workflow that I grew up learning as a software engineer has changed.
Now, that was true 20 years ago as well.
And I just want to talk about what's kind of different about this.
20 years ago.
If you didn't continue advancing in your skills, if you didn't continue staying close to what was being released as a front end engineer, if you didn't pay attention to the new working group specs that were emerging, then you would probably get left behind.
At the very least you wouldn't be on the cutting edge of what's possible again in front engineering in the browser.
If you didn't pay attention to new APIs being released for mobile applications, then other developers would have an edge on you.
They would know how to do things that you couldn't do.
And so it's always been true that this career is rapidly advancing, and perhaps much more than some other careers, not all other careers.
There are certainly other careers where this is true.
But if you contrast it to something like being a lawyer, the rate of change is Right.
And so. of course, we've always dealt with change.
We've always dealt with, you know, the goalposts, the target moving and us having to keep up.
And that's a core part.
In fact, on this very podcast over 10 years ago, we talked about learning being a fundamental skill that you, as a software engineer, you have to develop the skill of learning.
You can't learn enough.
Get a degree and then coast for the rest of your career on just gaining experience.
That's not going to be enough.
You're going to have to intentionally step outside of your normal work.
This isn't just oh, I'm going to learn some things or pick up some tricks along the way.
You're going to have to intentionally step outside of your normal work and learn new tools, learn new techniques, learn what's emerging, learn what's on the cutting edge.
That's how you stay relevant in your career.
Of course, that has always been true.
But now that has taken a different shape, because a lot of the things that you are learning are, you know, through adopting agentic coding patterns, for example, are fundamentally different in their kind of interaction modes right,
We're going to talk a little bit more about that, but I really want to focus in on developing a clear mental model, a clear understanding of of this economic trade-off, because that's really the underlying question here.
When you talk about whether a person will have a job or not, it is worth thinking about, at least at the micro level, the microeconomics and the governing kind of forces of what keeps somebody employed versus what would cause them to lose that job.
So we're going to set aside discussions about performance and we're going to set aside discussions about whether or not you are a good engineer.
We're going to assume that, if you're listening to this podcast hopefully this is the case for most people here that you are a capable engineer, that you're continuing to learn.
That that's not the problem or the consideration being made.
All right.
So I want to talk about kind of two major aspects of what makes you employable and this problem that you're going to encounter probably at some point in your career now of how you can remain relevant or how you can remain on that leading edge as AI continues to make an impact on the skills that matter to be a good engineer, to be in good standing, to continue again growing in your career.
We've been doing this career growth accelerator.
Really, this episode kind of goes beyond career growth accelerator and into this larger topic of how do you maintain a competitive edge?
That's right.
So this is the kind of scary picture here is that one day you're going to wake up and the skills that you built over many years many painful experiences, probably reading books, practicing writing tons of lines of code, maybe attending classes, attending online courses all of that suddenly becomes less valuable.
And now those things become like commodities.
And instead of paying a human to do those things, companies pay an AI company to churn out that stuff using tokens.
Okay.
Okay.
So there's two sides to this discussion today that I want to dive into.
And really, we can't get to everything here.
Before we get into it, just a kind of an overall statement here.
Nobody not me, not any other podcaster YouTuber, no AI co-founder, nobody can tell you for complete certainty how you can keep your job.
That is part of what it means to operate in a market.
You're never guaranteed.
You're never guaranteed that you're going to have a job.
You're never guaranteed that your skills are going to be valuable.
You're never guaranteed that somebody is going to be willing to give you money to do a thing.
I can't offer you that certainty.
Instead, what we want to do is again look at the economic forces that a rational actor would make, or economic decisions that a rational actor would make.
And we can talk a little bit about how those decisions get made.
But first, I want to discuss something that I think is very important for us to recognize.
And it's the not-so-rational side of this argument.
When we look at this as a threat, it threatens a lot of our sense of self and very much begins to threaten our ego.
So what do I mean by this?
If you were to come to the table and say, my primary intent, my goal is to remain employable.
If that's 100 true and we're going to take ego out of the equation then you would be able to quickly discard your connection, your attachment to the skills that you previously had that made you employable.
In other words, all of the time that you spent learning how to code.
You would be able to discount that immediately, right?
If you could totally detach from your ego, if you could avoid a sense of defensiveness over your own skill set, if your only goal, if all you were optimizing for, was to remain employable, then a lot of the objections to kind of going all in on AI right.
Because there is a part of this discussion that software engineers may feel hesitant in pushing a lot of their time and effort towards learning and taking advantage of these new tools.
If you can avoid the ego complexity there and instead say I'm going to optimize for this goal, then the choice to move, you know, to pick up new skills becomes a lot simpler.
All right.
So in other words, Some of what we choose is to protect our sense of self.
Some of the pain or the fear that we feel is that we're losing something that we enjoy, that we care about, that we wanted to do, that we imagine.
We're maybe even grieving that.
We thought that we would be able to continue building our career on these same skills and now we're having to pivot.
There's a lot of reasons why our ego might be captured in this.
There's also potential for your values to be wrapped up in this discussion.
If you have ethical concerns, for example, if you have uh you know concerns about um the the kind of financial aspect of what this means for you know a bunch of other engineers for example let's say that let's say that we're uh you know that our hypothesis is that a ton of engineers are going to lose their jobs and therefore uh you know out of out of a sense of uh personal morals or you know your personal ethical framework You feel like you have to abstain from participating in something that furthers that, right?
So there certainly are potential objections that could be made on a values perspective, right?
So when we come to this discussion, it makes sense to be clear headed about what you want.
If you want to maintain your employability.
What I want you to do and this is the most challenging thing I'm going to ask you to do in this episode I want you to try to move towards a more rational expectation of what the industry will do.
And we're going to talk about the economics in the second half of the episode to help you gain a picture, or at least a model of thinking that will help you predict what the industry will do.
But it's very unlikely that the whole industry is going to say, you know what, never mind.
These tools have proven to be useful for a bunch of things, but we think that our ego and our identity as engineers and all of this time that we've spent building these skills, we think that's more worth it.
Protecting that is more worth it.
And so we're going to uh, you know, even though this is a, very useful um, you know and by useful I mean utilitarian wise, it's very useful uh, you know set of tools.
We're Setting aside the feasibility of that being nearly impossible at this point because of how much research and how diffused this is.
It's not concentrated on one company that has proprietary control over this technology.
Setting aside that, let's say that all of humanity agreed that we're going to treat this similarly to nuclear weapons or something, and we're going to have a bunch of shared policy that makes it illegal to use it.
If that were the case, then perhaps we can maintain a position that says I'm going to abstain from this because I don't think it's useful.
There's another potential route that abstinence from using AI.
You could imagine succeeding if you believe that there is a massive level of hype.
In other words, that all of this is a big bubble, that somehow it isn't as useful as people are saying it is, that it turns out that it's a bunch of smoke in mirrors or there's some kind of revelation that will happen at some point, where we say oh, what were we thinking?
This isn't even that valuable.
We're going to go back to our old way of doing things, or at least we're going to scale back significantly how much we expected this to grow.
We're no longer going to expect it to be able to do these things that we were trying to push it to do.
All right.
So those are kind of two kind of coexisting if you wanted to continue succeeding in your career and also abstain from adopting AI.
Those two pathways are the only two that really I can imagine existing.
One being that there's some likely false belief that all of society is going to say you know what?
No, never mind, we're going to move away from this.
And the second path would be as it turns out, it's not as useful, even though society doesn't reject it.
The market ends up rejecting it because it turns out to not be as valuable as we thought it would be.
All right.
Both of those seem incredibly unlikely to me.
And so I think it's important for you, as a software engineer and as a human being, to determine where you stand, if it is true that the industry will continue adopting AI.
If it is true that this is only going to ramp up.
At the very least, it's going to stay where it is, but it's likely that it's going to ramp up.
What is your personal position on whether that is an acceptable skill set for you to invest in.
Are you willing to take the steps that are necessary for you to take in order to maintain employability, if that is the future of the industry?
That is the critical question for you as an engineer.
If you can't answer that question then turn this episode off and spend some time journaling.
Go on a nature walk.
Do whatever it is.
I say that in jest.
But truly, get in touch with your inner self.
Get in touch with your values.
Try to imagine a future where this is a part of your skill set, a part of your tool kit, that you've adopted it, that you're kind of on board right.
Because it's very unlikely that an abstinent position is going to succeed for a very long time.
Now I'm being intentionally vague and non-prescriptive about what kinds of tools you'd be using, about to what level for what kind of purpose, because that is ever-evolving and we're going to continue seeing different use cases, different patterns of use.
But if you want to succeed in your career moving forward, you have to make a decision whether this industry, if it continues to adopt ai which i believe is very likely whether that's an acceptable future for you, can you be on board with that or not.
And if not, it's worth confronting that reality right, it's worth confronting whether or not you personally can move that direction.
I told you this was a hard episode.
With this part of the way, we're going to talk about the economics, especially the microeconomics of how you could maintain employability right after we talk about today's sponsor.
We'll be right back. your own selected JSON.
You don't have to get all the fields back.
You can limit the fields that you get back.
They deal with things like proxies, captcha, all the scraping that you would otherwise have to do.
You don't have to think about that.
You could just use SERP API.
They support dozens of search engines and platforms.
They're fast and they've been doing it long enough that companies like Nvidia, Adobe and Shopify rely on SERP API already.
There's a free tier to get started.
And you can try it before you commit to anything.
And it's enough that you can actually build something real to test it out.
Go and check it out.
Head over to SERPAPI.com.
That's S-E-R-P-A-P-I.com.
Thanks again to SERPAPI for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea.
Let's talk about one of my favorite subjects as it relates to AI, economics.
We're not going to talk about the macroeconomics, mostly because I'm not really qualified to talk about that.
Macroeconomics, for this particular discussion would be largely focused on, if you were to have everyone in the industry replaced.
What would that do to things like very large budgets?
Right.
Or, you know, the supply and demand of much larger scale things.
Would it collapse entire economies and that kind of thing?
And those are worthwhile discussions.
But again, I'm not, you know, especially qualified to have those discussions.
And I think there's too much noise for me to be able to speak to that with any credibility.
So I'm going to avoid the macroeconomic discussion, not because I don't think it's important, but because I think you can probably get better insight elsewhere, rather than this podcast.
Instead, the microeconomics I do think are worth talking about.
If you're thinking about the microeconomics of any employability discussion.
The first thing you should be thinking about is why would a company choose to give me resources?
The fundamental reality of any capitalistic kind of endeavor is that they don't want to give you money.
If you're working for a company.
When I say want, just to be clear, I'm not talking about the humans involved.
I'm talking about the kind of incentive, the business incentive is to maximize profit, right?
So if the company can theoretically eliminate jobs, the company is not thinking about that, The incentive structure is not thinking about that as eliminating people's employment.
They're thinking about that as a choice to improve profit margins.
They, again, being just the incentive system.
The system is designed to maximize profits.
It's an efficiency move.
So then the question you should be asking yourself is, then why do they give anybody money at all?
And hopefully, this is a very basic economics perspective, to be clear.
I don't have a degree in this subject.
I haven't done a lot of study outside of my own personal study on this.
But the only reason in a completely rational system that somebody who is incentivized to not give you money because of profits would give you money is because their choice to give you money is in exchange for something that you do that enables them to gain more profit than they otherwise would have.
In other words, their spend on your salary is returning them more net, more margin after the fact than if they hadn't paid you in the first place.
In other words, you're making the company more money than you're costing them.
This is the basics of microeconomics.
Now, of course, it can get complicated with things like cost centers.
In other words, the company is going to pay you money even though you're not directly making a profit, because you're enabling a profit center somewhere else, right?
Very simple example here is software engineering.
Most of our work is not directly enabling profit.
It is indirect.
And the sales cycle is actually where we see that profit realized.
But setting those things aside, we want to think more abstractly about this problem instead of trying to nitpick.
The abstract idea here is that the incentive that a given actor has in a capitalistic system in other words, they're trying to maximize their profits by selling something in a market The incentive that they have is to not give you any money at all, unless giving you money makes them more money.
Now again.
This is setting aside things like value and mission statements that organizations have and is assuming that those things are met, for example, right
In either case, that they're met, so that the decision factors come down to how do we meet those mission statements and make the most profit.
Okay.
So if that's the case, then this decision about AI would be the same, in theory.
The decision would be, can we pay the same amount of money or less?
Can we reduce our risk?
Can we somehow make it more efficient to use artificial intelligence to do what this person otherwise would be doing?
So there's a distinct decision if you were looking at the absolute micro scale.
There's a distinct decision about which thing is better at doing some particular job.
If the human is better, are they better enough to justify the differential in their cost?
Again, this is going to assume that the cost to pay a human is going to be more than the cost to offload to AI.
These are all assumptions that have to be made in order for this kind of job loss scenario to play out.
If it turns out that organizations are incurring an enormous amount of risk despite a low upfront cost.
What would that look like?
It would look like AI delivering code that turns out to one out of a hundred times have catastrophically bad data leak type bugs.
And one out of a hundred companies are now leaking data and causing massive lawsuits.
And You know then, the upfront cost of the AI integration, or you know investment, is low, probably relatively low, but the long-term cost because of the risk curve here is very high right.
You would do some kind of utility function and find out what is the cost of that major data leak.
And then, you know, the one out of a hundred, multiply it by that.
That's probably our utility cost.
What is the risk that we take on by allowing AI to take on the responsibilities that this human once had?
So when we think about the economics of this, we think about value generation.
And it's important to recognize that it's not always an either-or scenario.
This is because the one of the kind of fundamental features of a capitalistic market is that it's not zero sum.
In other words, there's not a fixed amount of value that needs to be generated in a capitalistic market.
The value continues to grow.
Again, this is all theoretical, but the value can continue to grow.
In other words, if a company could get more value out of, let's say, a human plus an AI, they may choose to do so.
There's no rule that says that they can only generate a certain amount of value and then they're capped.
This is actually the fundamental kind of governing factor for why a capitalistic market continues to grow over the long run.
Right,
It's because we continue to build new things.
And there's not really a natural limit per se on how many things we can build.
There is a natural limit, but we haven't hit one.
Okay.
Okay.
So if we have this system set up so that it's not zero sum, that means that one of the options on the list is what we just said.
That it's you know, you could have.
There's kind of three options.
If you were to consider one AI, one human, there's three total options then, right?
Yeah.
I guess there's four total options.
There's zero, right?
So we're going to quit.
We're no longer going to generate anything or into this particular department is no longer needed.
That's an option.
There's just the human.
There's just the AI.
And then there's human plus AI.
A rational, capitalistic business decision-making algorithm would look at this and try to determine which of those is going to generate the most return on investment over the long run.
And so it's worthwhile for you to try to identify.
If this is the economic picture, how can you identify ways to position yourself such that the total value generated either with just the human or the human plus the AI is the rational choice?
How can you position yourself so that the single AI potential or option is not compelling to the business?
And so there's some things that you can think about here.
And this starts to get into some skill stacking or skill portfolio thoughts.
For example, what are you good at?
What do you enjoy doing?
What are you not so good at?
These are things that hopefully you already have a pretty good idea of.
And then cross-reference those with what AI is good at.
Again, we're going to be very careful to not list that here, because that could change as soon as next month.
Right.
So it's very likely that humans will always have some kind of thing that we are better at than AI.
I say very likely because I'm not sure, but I believe that we probably will always have an edge on AI for for something.
OK.
OK.
But perhaps the most under-discussed piece is not us versus AI, but what are we better at with AI?
This is multiplicative value.
Rather than competing linear value, you want to start thinking about... And again, this is...
This is assuming that you've already set aside the discussion in the first half of this episode, that you are willing to kind of change your skills, that you're willing to set aside or retire skills that are no longer competitive, right?
Okay, so what are you going to be better at if you use AI to make you better?
If you combine yourself Combine your skills with the things that AI is better at than you are.
What is the multiplicative value there?
Because now you're no longer competing with, but you're competing as a multiplier of value of that particular thing.
If you're a manager, you know this is true.
You know, this is true if you're a manager, if you're a good manager, especially because you're not a profit center if you're a manager,
You are a multiplier of value for your direct reports.
So if you were to think about how can I make my direct reports indispensable to the organization, if you were to shift that thinking or apply the same mental model or same type of thinking to how you can make AI a more valuable thing to the organization, now you're becoming again a force multiplier, but you're becoming more indispensable because Again, the option, the option of only AI well, that's no longer going to be as valuable to the organization, right?
If you can make multiplicative value happen, then you begin to create a little bit more indispensability in your role.
It's also important to recognize that this is all changing and we've said it a hundred times already.
But as you're doing the skill portfolio evaluation, think about where this is going right.
What will you become better at or worse at over time?
It makes sense to pay attention to the studies on this because it is changing so quickly.
One of the things that studies are looking at right now is whether your coding skills will degrade over time if you start using AI more often for coding.
There's some signals saying that your coding skills may atrophy over time.
Is that valuable to you?
Is that part of that ego thing that we were talking about earlier?
Do you want to still continue coding by hitting keystrokes?
That's up for you to decide.
It's yet to be determined whether that particular skill is going to be critical for you to be able to be an engineer.
It's shocking that we're even saying that.
But over time, we will learn how much those coding skills maintain their critical hold.
And it's very possible that at the very least, they'll become less important in the future.
Again, if you're a manager, you already know this.
Your skills that made you successful in your early career.
You probably one, have atrophied in those skills and two, they're not as critical anymore for your current role, even though the organization has found you valuable enough to maintain your employment.
Why?
Because your total effect, your economic impact on the organization is, in a rational world at least, right.
Your economic impact on the organization outweighs whatever it would have been had you just continued using those skills.
So if we are willing to be flexible with what kinds of skills we're willing to adopt, if we are willing to set aside our attachment, if we are willing to move forward with AI despite any of our misgivings or concerns on the ethical or moral fronts, then I do believe I'm an optimist.
In this particular way, I do believe that we can have long and fulfilling careers and that our potential with AI can continue to grow.
I believe that you still have the opportunity to walk this career growth pathway.
And I hope that you will take the time to really dig in with the concepts here.
Of course, there are other sources that you should go and listen to.
This was sort of from a specific perspective, kind of an American capitalistic perspective, in terms of the economic forces and the incentives.
And there are other forces and incentives out there that are worth looking at.
But I'm an optimist.
I believe that you can continue thinking about your career not as bulletproof nobody should ever think about it as bulletproof but as employable.
I do think the vast majority of software engineers can maintain their employability as long as they can look at this from the perspective of incentives and determining how to create multiplicative value in the long run.
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer tea.
Thank you again to today's sponsor SERP API.
It is your solution for a web search API.
You just send it a query.
It'll send you back JSON.
You don't have to worry about parsing anything.
You don't have to worry about scraping or it captures.
All that stuff is taken care of across dozens of search providers.
Go and check it out.
Serpapicom that's serp api.
Thank you again to serp api for sponsoring today's episode.
If you enjoyed this episode, there's so many places you can find us now.
Uh, we are.
We are uh active on youtube now.
We have the podcast in pretty much any podcasting provider.
That includes spotify, includes apple podcasts um And, of course, you can always email me at developertea at gmailcom if you have questions.
And finally, please leave reviews in all these places.
Subscribe in all these places or just choose one, whatever your preferred format is.
Subscribing is the number one way to help us continue doing this show.
Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
