Hello everyone, I haven’t written a blog post in a while. Before we get to it. Here’s some irony. WordPress sent me this email after I logged in for the first time in a while and starting writing this post:
LeadDev NYC 2026 – AI Much?
As an Engineering Manager working for an online Psychiatrist Practice I was fortunate enough to attend my first LeadDev conference in NYC this past September.
I very much enjoyed the conference. It was great to come together with other Engineering leaders and āswap notesā on the challenges we are facing across the tech industry. One of the most common themeās of the conference was of course, AI. Since it is a seismic paradigm shift in the industry right now, it is hardly surprising. I attended talks covering many different aspects change across multiple areas of the SDLC because of AI. Posing interesting questions such as “Do we even need pull request anymore? What purpose did they serve beyond reviewing code? There is so much to consider when we think about how friction in the old way of working accidentally did something really important that was not by design, such as training developers and providing a means to gain systems context. I was thankful to see some talks tackle this point head on and discussed ways that we can intentionally add friction back in, to ensure we still have a system for training new engineers in this new age. I also attended workshops considering how we can improve our “shared context” tool kit across the engineering org to avoid all solving the same problems with AI separately. There is indeed a great amount of work to do here and my team is hitting this head on.
As an Engineering Manager of a team of 6 engineers, there was another important consideration on my mind. How are the engineers doing? You know, the humans, that write code, or did. Things are moving so fast right now and I do think it is taking its toll.
Look at this article citing a recent letter from Microsoft employees, signed by “Concerned Microsoft Workers”. Here’s a quote from the article:
The letter is blunt about what AI adoption looks like on the ground. Workers say they are pushed to use AI tools in almost every part of their jobs, often with little or no training and no reason given beyond speed
This is of course happening across the industry, across the globe even. I feel very fortunate to work for sensible leaders at Talkiatry that recognize that change is happening, that there is a paradigm shift and we need to meet it, but don’t force things onto it’s work force blindly, but rather empower us to create the shift together. It’s none the less a change that is being somewhat forced upon us by the industry itself, by society itself. If things are fundamentally changing, no one can afford to be left behind.
Just another abstraction?
Automation has happened before, some like to argue that this moment is simply another layer of abstraction. For example, the argument goes, we once has to manually program for memory management and now we don’t even have to think about memory when we write code, and so now we don’t even need to know how the code is written to program. Once we didn’t have to think about memory management, we didn’t program less, we programmed more at a hire level of abstraction.
Generally speaking, in the past new abstractions have brought new types of employment.
I am not convinced that future engineers will be able to have the same system level of context once they’ve never had any experience writing code, and perhaps capitalism is eating it’s future breakfast, lunch and dinner. I think it remains to be seen whether our current systems will function effectively once a new generation of engineers have never written a line of code, and if we don’t need engineers at all in the future, things will be so different that it’s tough for me to speculate
So, I do think this change may be more nerve racking, since I don’t think its proven that simply up-skilling to the new technology will ensure future employment and I don’t think efficiency gains today necessarily implies a working consumer capitalist society in the future (if the labor force stops buying things etc)
So if this is a new paradigm, a new shift from what has happened before on a societal scale. It’s rather daunting. We absolutely all need to authentically meet this moment and not pretend it’s not happening, but does that give anyone anxiety anyway?
So are we all just experiencing a sense of instability on a grander scale right now? I think so.
All structures are unstable
I like this quote from Eckhart Tolle’s a New Earth, when he came across a construction sign:”:
āIt read: ‘Danger. All structures are unstable.’ I said to my friend, ‘That’s a profound sutra [sacred scripture].’ And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death.ā
Me and my nervous system
It’s something I often think about a lot nowadays. If the outside world is forever changing, is it possible to feel a sense of stability from your inner being rather than looking for it solely from the structures around you?
I completed Kundalini Yoga Teach training back circa 2018 and for the past 3 or 4 years now I’ve kept up a daily Kundalini Yoga Sadhana (no I don’t get up at 3am). It helps me A LOT with my day. I feel less drawn to addictive behaviors and feel more centered and comfortable and able to cope with the challenges of the day. My daily sadhana includes Sodarshan Chakra Kriya, a meditative and breath-based practice. I don’t think Kundalini Yoga is for every body, but it requires no belief system, just an openness to try things are see how you feel.
I also see a Somatic Therapist once a week. Somatic Therapy is a body-centered form of psychotherapy that explores how past trauma, stress, and difficult emotions are stored and expressed physically in the body. I wont get into it here but has been truly transformative work for me, I wouldn’t be the same, partner, father, leader I am today without the continued work I do in therapy
Make change in the world from a grounded center
So I do think it is really important NOT fully expect stability from the outside world. Of course that doesn’t imply we should acquiesce, comply without regard.
No, I want to do my best to make things as sane for as many people as I possibly can every single day but I think that’s only possible when you come from a place of finding strength outside of the “unstable structures”.
Burnout Prevention: Being Human in the Age of AI (and Fairground)
There was one other classification of workshop at the leadDev conference that I failed to mention so far. No, don’t worry it still included AI. I was fortunate enough to also attend Fairground‘s workshop on managing burnout and stress within the Tech industry and especially in the age of AI. Mel and Roshen led the workshop, they led exercises to help calm individual nervous systems based on somatic practices, and then and only then did they invite the room to TOGETHER share the challenges they were facing with AI adoption and burnout. I cannot tell you how overjoyed I felt to have stumbled into this workshop and it felt so balancing against all the hard work I was doing elsewhere on AI adoption. I felt like all of my universes were suddenly coming together in the most perfect way. – I believe that Mel and Roshen are perfectly positioned to fully understand the demands of corporate engineering life and are on a mission to give people the exact tool kit that I wish everyone had already. I am very fortunate to have found them and they will be leading a workshop for my team in the coming months.
The future
When it come’s to imagining a future where AI is doing, let’s say, a lot of the things that human’s are doing today (understatement?), we can argue over whether or not new abstractions will yield new types of employment. Some argue that if there is mass unemployment, we should meet the challenge by introducing something like a UBI and that certainly resonates with me, some how funded by AI efficiency system gains. Let’s put aside for a moment whether it would be feasible, whether a capitalist sysem could create it…
One of the most hilarious arguments I’ve seen against UBI is that human’s receive their purpose, their sense of being from their 9 to 5s and without those jobs they would be lost souls with no purpose.
Work doesn’t end the moment you no longer need to work for a living wage. Purpose is most certain when it comes from the unencumbered authentic depths of ones being.
As the abstractions accelerate faster and faster on the planet, pulling us further away from our beingness. I believe that any free time we may afford ourselves as a society in the future will be much well spent rediscovering that being-ness if we only had the tools and direction to do so.
If I am ever privileged enough to assist others with that journey I would be so fortunate.
Robert.
