It's hard to be good at your tech job right now

I’m writing this post because I want to say out loud what a lot of people are feeling: Working in tech during the AI transition is tough as hell.

There are pressures from all sides. Here are just a few of them:

• Layoffs across the industry, especially reductions in management and support roles, as executives rush to replace human productivity with AI.
• Mandates to learn and adopt new tools and processes incredibly quickly.
• Shifting job requirements - like asking non-technical designers to become fluent with code-based workflows, or turning software engineering into an LLM-prompt-and-review lifecycle.
• Obligations to accelerate work, do more with less, and increase your output.
• A constantly changing market, where new breakthroughs and best-practice innovations launch nearly every week.
• An influencer-led hype cycle pushing AI as The Way, along with a subtle or overt denigration of traditional ways of working.
• A blurring of roles where non-experts can cosplay as experts because they created something with AI that looks credible on the surface.
• A structural reset in how people build things, what they build, and the time and effort it takes to complete each step of the process.
• Threats that entire job categories will be entirely wiped out by AI advancements.

All of this adds up to a feeling of persistent intensity, and a sense of falling behind even when you’re working at max capacity. You have to rapidly adapt how you operate and how you think, with more productivity, and less management support.

Also: your job might no longer offer what attracted you to this line of work in the first place. If you loved to write code carefully by hand – instead of asking a chatbot to write the code for you – you’re probably not super stoked about this movement.

And that’s not to mention the increasing public apprehension and negative impacts of AI on communities, which cast a looming shadow over the work whenever you have a rare moment to stop and think about it.

To top it off, the fragility of the job market leaves employees feeling more powerless to push back or share concerns openly.

Perhaps the most stressful side effect of all is the erosion of trust and confidence that arises from generative AI. It’s becoming difficult to tell if something is real or fake, well-reasoned based on actual facts, or just utter nonsense masquerading as truth. The worst case scenario is all of those at once. A truthy-looking document that’s half-accurate and half-bullshit is a dangerous document, because you have to look extra closely to spot the bullshit, and you might be accidentally lulled into believing it was all intentional.

Lately I’ve noticed my kids asking, “is this AI?” much more often, because they’re increasingly skeptical of the information being presented to them, in any medium. I find this skepticism permeating my work brain too. Did my coworker really think this through? Or did Claude Sonnet just half-ass a proposal based on some Granola notes?

My kids are old enough to remember the world before AI existed, and maybe they’ll reflect on it like a before/after divide – similar to my memory of getting lost before we had always-on mapping devices in our pockets. It was scary, but we were unburdened by the shackles of constant ambient connectivity.

We were lost, but we were free to get lost.

The AI before-times will become similarly quaint. "Hey, remember when all information was authored by people?"

I know this sounds pessimistic, which could be confusing coming from a tech person who currently works at an AI-oriented company. That’s exactly the problem: we’re all experiencing these internal contradictions every day. Rejecting AI makes you obsolete, but embracing it comes with a long list of troubling compromises. You end up more focused on surviving than thriving.

As I’ve stated previously, I think the technology can be incredible when applied wisely, and I'm excited about the vast new creative potential it unlocks. Previously unsolveable problems are now solveable, and that kind of sea change is always worth pursuing with curiosity.

But tech doesn't take much time for doing things wisely. The industry is structured to chase one gold rush after another, and it's usually willing to go scorched Earth to win at all costs, without much consideration for what breaks along the way.

Right now, any advocacy for human-centered AI feels drowned out by the hype trends of the day, and there are no major players in the space presenting a counterculture argument for how the tech could be executed artfully. Apple used to be the humanist punk company that would chart a unique course, but they seem neutered by their own scale. Governments have little incentive or sufficient expertise to regulate anything. No one is holding the bag aside from frontier AI labs, which are caught between advancing the technology thoughtfully vs. building unfathomably valuable growth engines around it.

Given the circumstances, it seems that the only way out is through. We have to figure out the best paths forward, and that process will be extremely messy. We cannot just stay silent and passively accept poor outcomes and boneheaded decision-making. This has happened before: we pushed for web standards and accessibility, we pushed for health and safety in tech, we figured out the mobile revolution. Of course those things remain deeply flawed, and they probably always will. But we made them better by speaking up and doing the work.

Folks working in tech have a responsibility to build thoughtfully and pump the brakes on destructive ideas. I've been saying this for years, way before AI, and it's still true today. It's tougher than ever – but that's the job.

This is my second post in a series on how design is changing with AI. Part 1 is here. Stay tuned for part 3.