Career

The views in this post are my own personal reflections on the industry as a whole, written in my own time. They are not about any specific employer, team, or colleague, past or present. Almost every confident take on the future of software engineering assumes a particular kind of person at the centre of it. A senior. Someone who can read a generated diff and feel which line is wrong before they can articulate why. Someone with taste, judgement, and a working theory of the system in their head. Someone who can curate, review, and steer fleets of agents. ...

This is another “thinking out loud” post, in the same spirit as the agent-first architecture piece. I do not know how any of this is going to land. I am writing it partly because the question has been rattling around in my head for months, and partly because I suspect a lot of people in and around software are quietly wondering the same thing without quite wanting to say it out loud. ...

The job search has long been a one-way mirror - companies deploy AI to filter applications while candidates manually juggle spreadsheets, tailor cover letters, and hope their resume gets past the automated screener. Career-Ops flips that script entirely. Built on Claude Code, it’s an open-source system that gives job seekers their own AI advantage: intelligent evaluation of opportunities, automated customized applications, and systematic candidate strategy. The Problem It Solves The traditional job search is a grind of low-signal noise. You find 30 job postings. You read them. You customize a resume. You write a cover letter. You track applications in a spreadsheet. You wait. You compare offers using gut feel and spotty spreadsheet columns. The process burns time and attention - exactly when you need both to think clearly about your career. ...

For forty years, the engineering career ladder has looked like this: Junior → Mid-level → Senior → Staff/Principal → Architect It’s a smooth progression. You write more code, then you write less code but influence the shape of it, then you write almost no code and mostly make decisions about how things are built. This ladder is becoming obsolete. Not in five years. Now. The problem is not the ladder itself. The problem is that AI has already done something the ladder never anticipated: it’s collapsed the middle rungs by automating the step where you learn to execute well. ...

Assume AI is “everywhere” - what still needs actual humans? When AI eats routine tasks, jobs don’t disappear - they mutate. Anything that leans heavily on judgement, emotion, trust, embodied skill, or accountability stays human-shaped. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report and the OECD’s work on AI and the labour market both point in the same direction: the categories below are the ones that compound in value as automation accelerates. ...