How I Think About Career Anxiety in the AI Era
The headlines lately are relentless. People are guessing left and right what AI is doing to the tech industry, to society, to the world. Junior engineers questioning what they just got a CS degree for. Senior engineers wondering if the job they fell in love with still exists. People with rent and families and plans, watching an industry reshape itself in real time. A layoff isn’t just a financial event. It’s an identity event. And the fact that it’s virtually unpredictable makes it harder to hold, not easier.
I’m not writing this from a place of having figured it out. Anyone who tells you differently is bluffing their way through this. I have small children and a decade in this career and I read the same articles as everyone else. The articles that say we won’t need engineers, and the ones that say we won’t need managers.
Someone asked me recently how I approach the anxiety of this particular era. How do I sit with not knowing what’s coming?
I told her I think about two things.
The first is that history repeats itself, and not always in the ways we fear. When ATMs were introduced, people predicted they’d replace bank tellers entirely. The opposite happened. The number of tellers actually increased. The cost of running a branch decreased so banks opened more locations. Tellers’ role shifted. The technology changed the shape of the job, not whether or not it existed.
Maybe that’s what this moment is for engineering: not destruction, but a transformation. A shift in what engineering looks like, instead of an elimination of the people who do it. I don’t know that for certain. But history gives me enough ground to stand on that I can stop catastrophizing long enough to breathe.
Which brings me to the second thing: I have no control over this.
That may sound bleak. I mean it as an act of radical acceptance.
When I really sit with the fact that I cannot predict what happens next — not to the industry, not to my company, not to my role — the vice-like feeling in my chest loosens. The anxiety doesn’t disappear but it changes shape. It stops feeling like a problem I need to solve and starts feeling like weather I need to dress for.
So I try to prepare for multiple possible futures. I try to leave doors open. I don’t need to walk through them necessarily, but I can keep them unlocked. For me, options change how uncertainty feels. And then I try, as much as I can, to just go along for the ride.
It’s a roller coaster a lot of the time, but the history piece is what reminds me the track doesn’t end in a cliff. It just goes somewhere I haven’t been yet.
I can’t promise certainty, and I won’t. But I can say this: hope isn’t a plan. It isn’t nothing either. Hope is what keeps you moving when the ground won’t stop shifting.
