8 ms·

How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026

40 points by xueyongg 6mo ago

cronin101 6mo ago
With the exception of 3 (How to survive in the world of AI: use AI!), these have all been par for the course all along if you wish to succeed at senior+ level. With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context. It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.
holyra 6mo ago
"If you resist AI, it helps to ask why" I am not intrinsically opposed AI. I am opposed to its environmental and social impacts. I constantly see spamming AI bots that send zillions of useless or poor-quality PRs to OSS. I see PRs that add features, but are really huge, making maintenance even harder in the future without the help of AI. AI creates bloatware everywhere. I see AI trained on stolen data without respecting licenses. I see data centers popping up at a scale never seen, consuming more and more energy. more and more resources (They basically consumed all RAM/SSD of 2026). "It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies." [0] I am tired of people that have no concerns about climate change or the impact of their collective actions on other humans. I hope that one day everyone will be judged for their role in this system. [0] https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.html https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.ht...
- hparadiz 6mo ago
  I promise you I spent more energy air conditioning my house this month than the collective energy of all my prompts over the past year to date while refinaries are being blown up in multiple countries right now. It's a silly argument. The hardware coming out now is 10x faster while using the same amount of energy as a regular desktop while I'm gaming. I legit can't take this "please think of the environment" argument seriously. The math ain't mathing.
  - surgical_fire 6mo ago
    Neither are yours. Any talk of new AI datacenters is peppered with its humongous energy needs. A cursory internet search can point to that: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-... > Global electricity generation to supply data centres is projected to grow from 460 TWh in 2024 to over 1 000 TWh in 2030 Just to be clear, 540TWh is the yearly energy consumption of developed industrialized countries. It would sit in between Germany and Canada as of today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... I offered data. You offered vibes. "Math ain't mathing". The nerve of these pricks.
    - hparadiz 6mo ago
      I'm quoting directly measured usage and you are making shit up from Wikipedia.
      - surgical_fire 6mo ago
        The first link I posted is from IEA directly. The Wikipedia link I posted is not "me making shit up". That page is sourced from https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/ https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/ You, on the other hand, provided no sources. You claim to be quoting directly measured usage. But, unlike me, you provided no sources. It is clear who is the one making shit up here.
bovermyer 6mo ago
Most of that article is just good career advice in general, so I'll just comment on the part about AI. One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
- subhobroto 6mo ago
  > One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem. Very much the opposite. LLMs do a fantastic job of increasing accessibility of knowledge. They have wide exposure to content and is incredibly good at spotting patterns and suggesting both well established norms from the current domain and serendipitous cross domain concepts. I feel the concern you share is LLMs expose new frontiers to people who otherwise might not even have imagined that frontier exists and then those people do a lazy or superficial job of it because they lack any internal motivation to do a deep dive on it
  - bovermyer 6mo ago
    We must be from _wildly_ different backgrounds.
    - subhobroto 6mo ago
      It's possible we are from very similar backgrounds but bring wildly different perspectives. I'm always suspicious of statements of the form "X will prevent people from Y". The amount of progress humans have made over 2000 years, especially the last 100, is just phenomenal. If anything, there's very little evidence that any X prevents people from Y. X certainly might not require people to Y anymore but I don't question what a motivated person can do just like I don't question what an unmotivated person can refuse to do. It would help if you expanded on "it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>", but could one interpretation of it be "AI will prevent people from building an understanding of good software design patterns" because AI allows people to just vibe code and pay no attention to design patterns at all?
gyulai 6mo ago
It's not like "spend more time away from the screen" is a real choice that is actually offered to "codemonkey ICs", like myself, in most workplaces, and I haven't seen AI change a damn thing about that. If anything, it has become worse. With AI raising the expectations about how much code I need to ship per unit of time (and all the responsibility for that code actually working still resting with me), I am more glued to the screen than ever.
- redeux 6mo ago
  Then spend less time on screens when you're not working. The post says "Go to meetups and events. Offer help. Offer introductions. Learn to be a connector." These are all outside of work activities. Also, these don't have to be tech events. They can be anything, just unplug, get out there, and meet people.
  - gyulai 6mo ago
    Telling someone they need to learn to be an extrovert to get ahead in a field that people tend to gravitate towards because they are introverts is psychologically quite unsound advice, because personality is quite fixed. I've beaten myself up over my not-get-ahead-able personality enough when I was at college, and have, paradoxically, gotten ahead quite a bit better than the people I knew back then, who did have those model extrovert personalities. The second reason why I take issue with that line is, as I've said, the fact that few employers allow employees time "on the clock" to do anything at all that's away from screens, and saying "do it in your spare time, then" is adding insult to injury. I have a rich social life, hobbies, and am raising a family. What I'm observing is that this is not helping my career one bit, and that's perfectly fine. Not everything in life needs to be in service of one's career. But this is also the reason, why I do not have time, off the clock, to attend meetups and events. The third thing I would notice is that it helps your career (again, speaking from a "code monkey" perspective here), less than you'd think. What is going to come out of the chance encounters at meetups and events? Maybe someone wants to hire you. Maybe someone wants to work with you more informally. If you sell your time in 40-hour-per-week blocks, none of this is a business opportunity you can capitalize on. If you're on a job, you've already sold your 40-hour-block, and have nothing left to transact with. If you're off a job, you need a new one, and you need it now, so you need to be more transactionally-minded than just investing time into chance encounters. Now, there is a separate consideration that may enter into career planning, namely that one might try to evade the 40-hour-per-week payrolled-employee trap, and try to prioritize maximizing hourly rate over yearly compensation and do freelancing. But this sort of consideration, in my mind, is not properly the domain of career advice. Career advice is: "Here is some mistakes you should avoid. Avoiding them is always an option, no matter what your circumstances are, and by avoiding them, you will always have better outcomes." This is not that: It is simply not the case, that everyone can and should be a freelancer.
redeux 6mo ago
Spend more time away from the screen and meet real people - Coincidentally, this is a use case that I'm about to task OpenClaw with. I'm going to make a personal social events coordinator of sorts where I give it my interests, tell it where it can find local events related to those interests, then let it suggest them as they come up and add them to my calendar. Then I can just show up and do the fun stuff and automate the boring part of finding things to do.
jeremie_strand 6mo ago
[dead]

40 points by xueyongg 6mo ago

With the exception of 3 (How to survive in the world of AI: use AI!), these have all been par for the course all along if you wish to succeed at senior+ level. With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context. It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.

holyra 6mo ago

"If you resist AI, it helps to ask why" I am not intrinsically opposed AI. I am opposed to its environmental and social impacts. I constantly see spamming AI bots that send zillions of useless or poor-quality PRs to OSS. I see PRs that add features, but are really huge, making maintenance even harder in the future without the help of AI. AI creates bloatware everywhere. I see AI trained on stolen data without respecting licenses. I see data centers popping up at a scale never seen, consuming more and more energy. more and more resources (They basically consumed all RAM/SSD of 2026). "It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies." [0] I am tired of people that have no concerns about climate change or the impact of their collective actions on other humans. I hope that one day everyone will be judged for their role in this system. [0] https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.html https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.ht...

hparadiz 6mo ago
I promise you I spent more energy air conditioning my house this month than the collective energy of all my prompts over the past year to date while refinaries are being blown up in multiple countries right now. It's a silly argument. The hardware coming out now is 10x faster while using the same amount of energy as a regular desktop while I'm gaming. I legit can't take this "please think of the environment" argument seriously. The math ain't mathing.
- surgical_fire 6mo ago
  Neither are yours. Any talk of new AI datacenters is peppered with its humongous energy needs. A cursory internet search can point to that: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-... > Global electricity generation to supply data centres is projected to grow from 460 TWh in 2024 to over 1 000 TWh in 2030 Just to be clear, 540TWh is the yearly energy consumption of developed industrialized countries. It would sit in between Germany and Canada as of today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... I offered data. You offered vibes. "Math ain't mathing". The nerve of these pricks.
  - hparadiz 6mo ago
    I'm quoting directly measured usage and you are making shit up from Wikipedia.
    - surgical_fire 6mo ago
      The first link I posted is from IEA directly. The Wikipedia link I posted is not "me making shit up". That page is sourced from https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/ https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/ You, on the other hand, provided no sources. You claim to be quoting directly measured usage. But, unlike me, you provided no sources. It is clear who is the one making shit up here.

bovermyer 6mo ago

Most of that article is just good career advice in general, so I'll just comment on the part about AI. One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.

subhobroto 6mo ago
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem. Very much the opposite. LLMs do a fantastic job of increasing accessibility of knowledge. They have wide exposure to content and is incredibly good at spotting patterns and suggesting both well established norms from the current domain and serendipitous cross domain concepts. I feel the concern you share is LLMs expose new frontiers to people who otherwise might not even have imagined that frontier exists and then those people do a lazy or superficial job of it because they lack any internal motivation to do a deep dive on it
- bovermyer 6mo ago
  We must be from _wildly_ different backgrounds.
  - subhobroto 6mo ago
    It's possible we are from very similar backgrounds but bring wildly different perspectives. I'm always suspicious of statements of the form "X will prevent people from Y". The amount of progress humans have made over 2000 years, especially the last 100, is just phenomenal. If anything, there's very little evidence that any X prevents people from Y. X certainly might not require people to Y anymore but I don't question what a motivated person can do just like I don't question what an unmotivated person can refuse to do. It would help if you expanded on "it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>", but could one interpretation of it be "AI will prevent people from building an understanding of good software design patterns" because AI allows people to just vibe code and pay no attention to design patterns at all?

gyulai 6mo ago

It's not like "spend more time away from the screen" is a real choice that is actually offered to "codemonkey ICs", like myself, in most workplaces, and I haven't seen AI change a damn thing about that. If anything, it has become worse. With AI raising the expectations about how much code I need to ship per unit of time (and all the responsibility for that code actually working still resting with me), I am more glued to the screen than ever.

redeux 6mo ago
Then spend less time on screens when you're not working. The post says "Go to meetups and events. Offer help. Offer introductions. Learn to be a connector." These are all outside of work activities. Also, these don't have to be tech events. They can be anything, just unplug, get out there, and meet people.
- gyulai 6mo ago
  Telling someone they need to learn to be an extrovert to get ahead in a field that people tend to gravitate towards because they are introverts is psychologically quite unsound advice, because personality is quite fixed. I've beaten myself up over my not-get-ahead-able personality enough when I was at college, and have, paradoxically, gotten ahead quite a bit better than the people I knew back then, who did have those model extrovert personalities. The second reason why I take issue with that line is, as I've said, the fact that few employers allow employees time "on the clock" to do anything at all that's away from screens, and saying "do it in your spare time, then" is adding insult to injury. I have a rich social life, hobbies, and am raising a family. What I'm observing is that this is not helping my career one bit, and that's perfectly fine. Not everything in life needs to be in service of one's career. But this is also the reason, why I do not have time, off the clock, to attend meetups and events. The third thing I would notice is that it helps your career (again, speaking from a "code monkey" perspective here), less than you'd think. What is going to come out of the chance encounters at meetups and events? Maybe someone wants to hire you. Maybe someone wants to work with you more informally. If you sell your time in 40-hour-per-week blocks, none of this is a business opportunity you can capitalize on. If you're on a job, you've already sold your 40-hour-block, and have nothing left to transact with. If you're off a job, you need a new one, and you need it now, so you need to be more transactionally-minded than just investing time into chance encounters. Now, there is a separate consideration that may enter into career planning, namely that one might try to evade the 40-hour-per-week payrolled-employee trap, and try to prioritize maximizing hourly rate over yearly compensation and do freelancing. But this sort of consideration, in my mind, is not properly the domain of career advice. Career advice is: "Here is some mistakes you should avoid. Avoiding them is always an option, no matter what your circumstances are, and by avoiding them, you will always have better outcomes." This is not that: It is simply not the case, that everyone can and should be a freelancer.

redeux 6mo ago

Spend more time away from the screen and meet real people - Coincidentally, this is a use case that I'm about to task OpenClaw with. I'm going to make a personal social events coordinator of sorts where I give it my interests, tell it where it can find local events related to those interests, then let it suggest them as they come up and add them to my calendar. Then I can just show up and do the fun stuff and automate the boring part of finding things to do.

jeremie_strand 6mo ago

[dead]