If you were laid off recently, especially if you are taking it personally, I recommend reading The End of Loyalty. It covers the shift over the 20th century from companies providing lifelong employment (retirement watch, pension, etc) to mass layoffs at the drop of a hint.
Take home message is that the future promises not only little job security, but less *career* security. Have to be prepared to retrain/retool, and possibly even change careers multiple times during your working years.
@kyle even where one might have job security I wonder if it is worth staying put and trying to last to retirement or better to make a move every so often?
Thanks for the recommendation I'll check it out.
@thrrgilag I suppose it depends on whether you are happy enough with the work you are doing, your advancement (if you want that), and the employer. The key is to keep an eye on where your industry is heading and prepare to make a change if it is going away, or changing in a way you don't want to follow.
I moved from sysadmin to security because I saw the industry moving more to software dev managing proprietary infrastructure, instead of the sysadmin work I enjoyed.
@kyle I believe this is an absolutely true statement. it won’t come in the form of large language models and AI. it will come in the form of low code/no code tools that move the task of translating business requirements into syntax from software developers to business people.
@toddsundsted @kyle In my view, software engineering isn't writing code, it's translating business requirements into something a computer can understand. It's just that we currently use code to achieve that. Maybe our natural path forward will eventually make us "robot psychologists", as in Asimov's Foundation
The biggest piece of advice I'd give to colleagues who are devs, is to figure out what you will do when software dev work moves from many opportunities writing code at a large number of companies to fewer jobs managing automated systems that write code.
Sysadmin/neteng careers made that transition w/ cloud over the past decade, the remaining major cost for tech-heavy orgs are devs, which is why the industry focus is on reducing that head count with automation. Tech is not there yet, but coming.