I just had what you might probably describe as the opposite experience. I was sat at a very important all hands meeting by our senior tech leader with about 100 people or so .who was mandating an AI goal for every employee on workday, he basically says that “if we all do not learn to adapt to AI, we will all get left behind” , and he had presented how to utilise spec driven development. He opened up the room for Q&A at the end of the meeting. A lot of them had technical questions about the agentic framework itself but I had a philosophical one. I I felt uncomfortable asking him the question in the open, so I sent him a private note .
The note read something like as follows : I don’t exactly agree with the framing that we will all get left behind if we all don’t learn to adapt to AI. More accurately, I see it this way. While the company definitely stands to gain from all the hyper increase in productivity by the use of said AI tools, I stand to pay a personal price and that personal price is this - I’m may very slowly stop exercising my critical thinking muscles because I am accustomed passing that to AI for everything and this will render me less employable, it is this personal price that I feel reluctant to pay. There has always been a delicate balance between an employer and employee. We learn new technologies on the job and we’re more employable for transferring that to other companies. This equation is now unbalanced. The company trapped more value, but there is skill erosion on my side . For instance, our team actually has to perform a Cassandra DB migration this year . Usually, I’d have to take a small textbook and read about the internals of CassandraDB, and maybe learn a guide on how to write Cassandra queries. What do I put in my resume now? That I vibe coded Cassandra migration? How employable is that? And I’m not sure if others felt the same way. But I definitely felt like the odd one out here for asking that question because everyone else in the meeting was on board with AI adoption.
The leader did respond to me and he said that learning agentic AI actually will make me more employable. So there is a fundamental disagreement as to what constitutes skill. I think he just spoke past me. Oh well at least I tried.
The note read something like as follows : I don’t exactly agree with the framing that we will all get left behind if we all don’t learn to adapt to AI. More accurately, I see it this way. While the company definitely stands to gain from all the hyper increase in productivity by the use of said AI tools, I stand to pay a personal price and that personal price is this - I’m may very slowly stop exercising my critical thinking muscles because I am accustomed passing that to AI for everything and this will render me less employable, it is this personal price that I feel reluctant to pay. There has always been a delicate balance between an employer and employee. We learn new technologies on the job and we’re more employable for transferring that to other companies. This equation is now unbalanced. The company trapped more value, but there is skill erosion on my side . For instance, our team actually has to perform a Cassandra DB migration this year . Usually, I’d have to take a small textbook and read about the internals of CassandraDB, and maybe learn a guide on how to write Cassandra queries. What do I put in my resume now? That I vibe coded Cassandra migration? How employable is that? And I’m not sure if others felt the same way. But I definitely felt like the odd one out here for asking that question because everyone else in the meeting was on board with AI adoption.
The leader did respond to me and he said that learning agentic AI actually will make me more employable. So there is a fundamental disagreement as to what constitutes skill. I think he just spoke past me. Oh well at least I tried.