> I don't know what to do.
Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.
This here.
Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.
The 90s and 00s had this wave of "object oriented programming changes everything". Hey we're doing this thing that's been done successfully 100s of times before, but now it's OO. Writing some code in involving an airplane? Just purchase this omni-airplane object that does everything for airplanes (an actual thing I was told in college).
That's weird OO isn't the be all end all? Code gen, get this Ruby on rails running. Look at me building this website in two seconds. Code gen everywhere.
Huh, that's going to a funny place... TDD. If you aren't TDDing then you're such a bad engineer that you should be locked in prison (real conversation I observed). Oh wait, not TDD, BDD. That fixes it.
Lean, no Agile, no agile like with a small a ... but it was first, no scrum, no xml wait that was last decade, json, and finally SAFe.
Hey, have you seen this chat bot thingy?
Every iteration brings good stuff if you're paying attention. But it also brings a lot of hype and anxiety. Experiment and learn.
The one thing that's remained constant for me is that nearly everyone would rather die than to think carefully about the consequences of their dreams coming true. And as long as that remains true they'll continue to pay for someone else to ride the hype dragon on their behalf.
> Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.
The thing is... everything you mentioned had only brought the need to retrain.
This new hotness AI? It's bringing actual layoffs, and not just of the boom bust cycle kind, but permanent, industrial-revolution kind that lasts for decades.
It is?
Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs. Maybe that's bringing actual layoffs in the name of AI?