On change
The times they are a-changin'—but maybe not how you think. Plus a reader survey.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is change. Change comes in all forms, whether you’re ready for it or not, and whether it’s the kind you wanted or now begrudgingly need to adapt to.
First, there’s been a lot of change with Technically. We’ve assembled a pretty killer group of writers covering topics in new depth, from Will going in depth on data centers to Christy explaining why AI uses so many em dashes. In fact, Sachin’s post about vibe coding and the maker movement was the first post from Technically to ever make it to the front page of Hacker News, 6 years after I started this thing. It’s weird to transition from only-writer to editor and sometimes-writer, but this is good change.
The change in the labor markets is not necessarily good change. Last week Block laid off 40% of their 10,000 employees, despite the fact that “our business is strong” and “gross profit continues to grow.” Jack said it’s because of AI…but is that really true? Or did Block just overhire in 2020 – like everyone else did – and the time has come to pay the piper? For those of us using AI day to day, it’s hard to say we’re getting a 40% efficiency gain (as if that would even translate to an entire organization).
Quibbles about disingenuous headcount reduction aside, everyone seems to believe that more of these mass layoffs are coming. The story goes that AI is going to make entire swaths of workers obsolete, rendering them useless corporate husks who will need to resort to “get ready with me as an unemployed father of 3” reels to pay the bills. Grim indeed.
But even this change isn’t so clear. Like happened with previous waves of technological disruption, entirely new fields are opening up thanks to AI. Notion just opened up a new role for a “Model Behavior Engineer” whose job is to own the quality bar for Notion AI products. It’s a wacky combination of technical skill, good taste, running evals, and all-in-all doing a suite of things that completely didn’t exist a few years ago. Plus, contrary to popular narratives, job postings for software engineers – whose work is allegedly “a solved problem” by AI – are up 11% this year.
In fact, we’re seeing this in a quickly changing Technically subscriber base. Over the past few months we’ve been getting a ton of signups from industrial companies, from pipe manufacturers to railroads. New people are interested in software and AI, and how they can use it at work to make their jobs easier.
Bobby said it best in 1964: The Times They Are A-Changin. I believe that if we’re open minded, are willing to change quickly, and hustle a little bit, we’ll all be fine.
Which brings me to you. To make sure we're covering the right things for the right people, from time we run reader surveys. In last year’s survey, we realized that no one (not even us) knew what evals were.
Lend us 2 minutes for a 6-question survey, to share where we can help you become more technical this year: