The Kids Will be Ok: How To Skip the Jobs AI Doom Spiral and Actually Prepare for the Age of AI: A Tech Career Manifesto

I think this is a debate our children will ultimately have to conclude (hence my illustration here), but we are the ones who have to start the conversation.

What does our world look like in a future with work? Let’s set aside all the grindset advice for a minute. Let’s set aside the “just ship something to github” advice, which is a variant of turtles-all-the-way-down thinking. Because you see if everyone ships to github with their vibe-coded app, we’re in the same pickle we’re currently in with resumes—we’re drowning in a sea of perfect AI resumes and nobody can find signal.

I want to get past that part of the conversation and have a more interesting discussion around how AI is shaping jobs, frankly acknowledge some widely circulated claims about the future of the job market this week, and get to something actionable and useful for actual careers in the here and now, in 2025. This is what we owe future generations: the start of an answer on AI.

Right now, most advice on jobs today is answering “what does it take to show you do work,” not “what are the actual job skills changing that matter for us in 2025, and how can we map that back against what the smartest minds in tech are thinking about AI? How can we develop a more comprehensive take on jobs in 2025?”

I think the latter question is much more useful.

This post does that. I first get into the context—the debate between Dario and Gergely over jobs and the future of jobs in the age of AI (they’re not debating directly but they are absolutely using social media to make very different cases aimed at each other). You might call Dario the pessimist and Gergely the optimist here, but it’s more nuanced than that.

After laying out the debate, I get into why this matters: how we make sense of conflicting visions of the future profoundly affects our ability to proactively prepare for jobs. What are the skills that matter, why? I dive into both technical skills, and how jobs are changing, and also take a little detour into emotional skill territory (which I think is severely under-discussed in tech). Last but not least, I focus the camera and we talk a bit about how this is all crystallizing in current hiring practices in mid-2025.

I hope you enjoy this one! It’s a complex piece and quite lengthy, but it’s tightly organized and absolutely worth a Saturday read. Enjoy!