At 25 I could code until 3am, sleep four hours, and do it again the next night. I had endless energy. I also had no idea what to do with it. I would start projects and abandon them. Chase every shiny new framework. Rewrite working code because I read a blog post that made me feel bad about my architecture. The engine was running hot but the steering was all over the place.
You spent years building expertise. Learning the domain. Mastering the tools. Understanding the nuances that only come with experience. This expertise is your value. It is why people pay you. It is why you have a career. It has an expiration date. And that date is approaching faster than you think. This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition. The half-life of expertise is shortening. The skills that were valuable for decades are now valuable for years. The knowledge that used to compound is now depreciating. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.
Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this. And they will be the last. This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.
Go look at job boards. Filter for junior or entry-level developer positions. Notice anything? There are barely any. And the ones that exist have requirements that would have been mid-level a few years ago. Two years of experience for an entry-level role. A portfolio of shipped projects. Knowledge of seventeen different technologies. The junior developer job, as a category, is disappearing. We have not admitted this yet. Bootcamps are still selling the dream. Universities are still churning out CS graduates. Everyone talks about the skills shortage.
For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later. Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it. The new skill is prompting. Not in the narrow sense of writing clever queries to ChatGPT. In the broader sense of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answer. The people who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who can extract value from these tools. Credentials are becoming less relevant by the day.
I am going to be bleak for a moment. You should probably sit down. AI is going to take a lot of jobs. Not in some distant science fiction future. Soon. Maybe not your specific job in the next twelve months, but within the next decade, the employment landscape is going to look radically different. And I do not think we are ready. This is not doomerism. This is observation. The capabilities are improving faster than anyone predicted. The economic incentives are obvious. The companies building this technology are not doing it for fun. They are doing it because automation at scale is the most valuable thing in human history.
Imposter syndrome is real. Plenty of people, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, genuinely struggle with feeling like they do not belong despite evidence to the contrary. That is a real thing that affects real people and deserves real support. But somewhere along the way, the discourse around imposter syndrome went completely off the rails. It became a content genre. A personality trait. A thing people perform on LinkedIn for engagement. And I think it is doing more harm than good at this point.
Between 2022 and 2024, the tech industry laid off somewhere around half a million people. Not contractors. Not underperformers. Engineers, designers, product managers, entire teams deleted in a single afternoon. People who had been told they were essential, who had stock options vesting, who had relocated their families for these jobs. Gone. Often via email. Sometimes while locked out of their laptops mid-sentence. The industry has moved on. Hiring is picking up. The job market is recovering. But something broke during those years that is not coming back, and I think we are only starting to understand what it was.
I deleted my LinkedIn account. Not deactivated, not taking a break. Deleted. And honestly, it felt like finally unsubscribing from a newsletter I should have binned years ago. LinkedIn has become an echo chamber of the worst kind. It’s not even a useful echo chamber where you might accidentally learn something. It’s a place where people post the same recycled motivational platitudes, agree with each other in the comments, and pat themselves on the back for being brave enough to share their hot take that nobody should work weekends (revolutionary stuff, truly).
I am a front-end developer. That is my main thing. JavaScript, TypeScript, component frameworks, state management, the DOM and all its quirks. I have spent years in this world and it is where I am most comfortable. If you need someone to build a reactive UI or argue about whether signals are better than virtual DOM diffing, I am your guy. I am also a PHP developer. Have been for a long time. Back-end work, WordPress, Laravel, the lot. That is another core part of my toolkit that has served me well for years.