How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
blog.phuaxueyong.com
How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
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Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#2With 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.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#3"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.ht...
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#4Most 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 . This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#5It'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.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#6It'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…
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.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#7Spend 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.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#8"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 respect…
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.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#9Most 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 . This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of . 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
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#10Most 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 . This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of .
I don’t really think this is a problem. AI is a tool, you still learn while using it. If you actually read, debug and maintain the produced code, which I consider a must for complex production systems, it’s not really that different compared to reading documentation and using Stack Overflow (i.e., coding the way it was done 10 years ago). It’s just much more efficient and it makes problems easier to miss. Standard practices of AI assisted development are slowly forming and I expect them to improve over time.