And how can you mitigate the downside?
There is a lot of talk on the internet about AI/ML happening around the internet currently with a wide variety of sentiment. I saw a post on Reddit yesterday morning, which caught my attention. It’s a post written by a junior Data Scientist/ML Engineer. He had some fear around skills, pay, pay cuts, and in general job security. I gave him a response and I was quite surprised to see how much traction my post had gotten.
I’d like to take a few minutes here to unpack the advise that I gave him.
Background
I’ve been in industry for almost 15 years now. I’ve seen many cycles in the stock market and in the job market. In 2009, when I was graduating from my undergraduate program it was hard to find work with a BS in Applied Mathematics, I had already lined up a graduate program to go. I didn’t find many opportunities at that time, I think partly cause I didn’t have a lot of industry experience at that time. I had worked mostly in retail and had my own lawn mowing business when I was in high school. I take great pride in my work and I always aim to push myself to do better. Having seen some down turns in the stock and job markets, I have been fortunate to largely be isolated from layoffs etc.
That is until mid Jan ’24, I was served my first layoff ever in my life. I was working as a subcontractor/AWS ProServe Partner and eventually all the low side work was completed and delivered. I was awaiting to onboard for a new project and I was on overhead at the company. I had issues with my clearance that had no time horizon on when they would be resolved and was out of my control. Ultimately, this string of events lead the company I was employed by to let me go without severance.
This actually fucked with my head a lot. I have always done great work for my clients and I always aim to take care of people and do the right thing. And now I was being faced with unemployment for the first time in my life at 36 years old, while expecting my first child in June ’24. I struggled to let go of the this event, I knew logically that it was just “business” and wasn’t personal. It felt very personal to me, because it had happened to me. I felt very insecure and I wasn’t sure what my next steps should be. I proceeded to do the only thing I knew how to do, I started to text some of my friends in my network and ask if they needed a SWE – Software Engineer or Data Scientist with experience in Cybersecurity. I had a stroke of luck, when I had remembered that I just had turned down a job offer in Dec ’23 just before the start of the new year.
I called up my recruiter let’s call him Benny and said, “Hey, Benny! I know it’s been a few weeks since we last spoke. I wanted to check in to see if the Cryptologist role was still available.” He responded, “I don’t know, I’ll have to call the account manager and see if it is.” Within about 30 minutes of placing the call to Benny, the account manager called and told me it was available. He proceeded to ask me, “When can you start?” without pause I stated, “I can start tomorrow, if you want me to…” I let the ring of the silence feel the space and he respond, “Okay, I’ll call the client and see when they can get you started.” It was a wild set of events in had been fired and hired in the same day, which is extremely fortunate for myself and my family.
My thoughts on automation in industry
I’ve been automating leveraging coding and systems since 2004 and there may come a time when I am automated out of a job. I don’t think so, why do I not think so? I attribute my confidence in my ability to learn new skills. One of my favorite books called “Make it Stick” is a Masterclass on skill acquisition and learning in general and has had a profound impact on my career and both my personal and professional development. I started learning everything I could about skill acquisition after reading Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, this book completely changed my life. I had struggled with “finding my passion”, I was passionate about Video Games, but there wasn’t a clear path for how I could make a career out of that in 2005, so when I was in college I decided to pursue Applied Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. I wasn’t a nature at Mathematics, but I would use what Michio Kaku would describe later as “Butt power”. I would sit there working on problems and refining my skills through deliberate practice.
I’ve never found myself the best at anything I have done a lot of times it is about the reference point or what you’re comparing it to. Am I the best Mathematician? Absolutely not. Am I the best Data Scientist? Nope. This goes on for ever category or label that you might place on me. And I am okay with this… some might wonder why? A big reason this doesn’t both me goes back to some teaching from even when I was a child. My favorite book as a child was “The Little Engine That Could.” I bought this book later in life after moving to Hawaii for a job, I was excited and scared about the change. I had to step past my fear, but I didn’t know how. I had started by focusing hard on learning and building the skills in my career that I need. I was a Network Engineer that didn’t know what a “ping” was and it scared me cause I didn’t know what I didn’t know. The only way forward was for me to learn. Learning became my reason for being.
I was learning about networking and system administration for my job much of it on the job, while spending countless hours after work to do the same. Eventually, I was able to break past my imposter syndrome and actually feel like I had my feet under me. I started getting some certs such as Net+ and Sec+, eventually I started getting pay raises too. It was 2013 and I had left Missouri to move to Hawaii. Many of my friends thought I was crazy, many were excited for me. I wasn’t sure what to expect in this new beginning I just wanted to seize the opportunity. I credit a lot of my success to some of the ideas that Cal Newport wrote in his book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, whether or not you agree with the entire book the theme of acquiring hard skills and mastering them was very appealing to me. I mentally decided that this must be true and I wanted to become an experiment of one and see if I could do it.
I started in my first full-time tech job as a Database Analyst, DBA for short, working in the Casino Industry. I had went hard and everything that I could about SQL, writing performant queries, all things joins, data warehousing, ETL, and eventually got into system integrations. This opened up a world of new opportunities for me, because I had only really ever used my programming skills to work on a MySpace page and to do Scientific Computing. I had been exposed to things such as Neural Networks in my undergrad, but compute wasn’t that widely available at the time. I later left this job to take the Network Engineer/Sys Admin role in Hawaii and eventually I left that job for a new position on the East Coast. I set a goal for myself that I wanted to really go hard and acquire an entirely new skill set every couple of years. I wanted to couple programming and cybersecurity with my math and data science skills.
I chose to pick up a new skill or set of skills like this so that I could broaden horizons. There is a saying “A jack of all trades is a master of none…” after reading Cal Newport’s book I didn’t want to become a master of nothing. Looking into the deeper into the origins of this quote on the internet, I found out that there is more to the saying. It goes like so, “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but always is better than a mastery of one.” I had decided in 2013 that I wanted to become a master at skill acquisition, so that I could grow in my career and build autonomy and job security. And this is my core belief as to why I don’t think I will be automated out of a job. Obviously, you can’t go super deep when you’re intersecting three or more categories to create a Peter Thiel would call “A Category of One” in his book “Zero to One”. I have a ton of career success, since adopting a “Growth Mindset”, before doing so I had a lot of anxiety around the promotion process in my places of work. I never did well with receiving feedback, especially when it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
One of the best things that I did was start to look at these moments for feedback as an opportunity for growth and learning about how others perceive me. Eventually, I started to find my own groove and I kept choosing myself. I kept reading, investing in my self education, and I will do so for the rest of my life. Can I guarantee that I won’t get laid off? Absolutely not. Do I know which skills are going to be automated away first? Nope. All that I know is that I am going to keep growing both personally and professionally. Is that a good enough insurance policy? I don’t know.
Summary
In summary, I think skill acquisition is necessarily for both personal and professional growth in 2024 and beyond. I don’t know what skills will be needed 5 to 10 years from now, I see some trends. Cloud Computing is becoming more and more prevalent in both the public and private sector. Everyone is generating more data. Live Service video games are a hot mess with all the micro transactions. AI/ML hype is here… will it stay? How will it impact our future? I don’t know, let’s find out together. If you liked this content, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with a friend, please leave me a comment on which trends you’re interested about in tech currently.