Recently I was laid off from a short stint at Nike, here in Beaverton, OR, after about four months of work - February to June. It sucked - we were building new things I was excited about and I was working with a great team I had started to feel really close to. It felt just long enough that I started to relax a bit, thinking “Alright…I might actually chill here for a bit.” I had started to entertain beginning another heavy lifting program - they have some nice facilities there for fitness, as you can imagine.

Rumors and speculation for cause abounded for the layoffs - which not only impacted most of the contractors at Global Tech org, but also a fair amount of FTEs, in product.

• It was political retribution for some C-level exec blocking another C-level exec on some work/initiatives.
• Nike stock had been doing really poorly and quarterly earnings were disappointing
• Belt tightening for the tech industry all around had already been happening for a few years, to prepare for incoming recession/over-hiring during the pandemic.

And of course there is the ever-present massive AI tech bubble and over-optimism of business leadership around the latest and greatest tools to automate software development and get rid of those pesky highly paid software engineers.

The latest layoff at Nike hit hard. My previous job loss had been the previous summer at Capital One (a year ago now). I was actually fired for “non-compliance” with company directives - which means I can effectively never work there again. The company directive being: all employees must report into the nearest corporate office. Living in Portland, OR, the nearest office is…San Francisco, CA. I had been working remotely for two years with approval from my team, director, and VP - and then was told the authorization never made it to HR. Sneaky stuff. Of course these are underhanded ways tech companies can lay off workers without actually calling it a “lay off”. I had a stellar performance review record over five years in a very competitive/toxic review environment (a tale for another time), but a recent doctored review by a former manager (yet another tale for another time) set me up for HR’s crosshairs. After crawling out from under that shitstorm (with help from my director and new manager), the RTO requirement soon followed, nailing the head of the coffin shut that was my former career at Capital One. I did try to fly out to SFO on my own dime for a month every other week, to try and meet the RTO requirement (at the time 3 days a week), but not only was that route costly for both my pocketbook and time, ironically SFO office was very empty and even trying to set up meetings with teams based out of SFO were unsuccessful because they were not in the office.

I had worked really hard to build a career I was proud of at Capital One, so the ending really stung. I took the summer off to work on my band’s first full length album, spent September traveling in Europe for three weeks (a bucket list item), and then in October dusted off my resume and online presence and hit the job search.

Granted the end of the calendar year is a pretty terrible time but I was still surprised how terrible the job search went. It would be 3 months before I got my contract offer from Nike. And that’s relatively short compared to many in my field - the average job search seemed to take 6 months or a year plus before they landed something. Not only were the interviews infrequent, but I dropped out of two loops due to how awful the experience was - something I’ve never done before. I took a very short term contract with a company that I ended up finding out was very badly run. The other opportunities I had to interview were definitely not that inspiring.

So yes - the last two years of my tech career have been particularly terrible. And it’s been two months since my layoff at Nike. I couldn’t even look at a technical article for weeks without feeling sick to my stomach. But I feeling like I’m coming around.

The tech industry is still a mess, as is the economy as a whole. The AI bubble is in full effect. Recently I read a blog post by Colton Voege that much more eloquently summarizes the current state of the tech economy and what it’s like to be a software engineer in these times. Please do yourself a favor and check it out:

https://colton.dev/blog/curing-your-ai-10x-engineer-imposter-syndrome/

Some of my favorite passages:

AIs still struggle to absorb the context of a larger codebase…Agents occasionally do something neat like fix the tests they broke. Often they just waste time and tokens, going back and forth with themselves not seeming to gain any deeper knowledge each time they fail

People don’t understand the boundary upon which this struggle begins - it’s a lot earlier than you’d think.

0x productivity means ten times the outcomes, not ten times the lines of code. This means what you used to ship in a quarter you now ship in a week and a half. These numbers should make even the truest AI believer pause. The amount of product ideation, story point negotiation, bugfixing, code review, waiting for deployments, testing, and QA in that go into what was traditionally 3 months of work is now getting done in 7 work days?

THIS. Creating software as part of a larger team/organization is not just hopping into your favorite coding IDE, fast forward X hours, and boom you’re done. Planning as a team, starting, stopping, pivoting based upon discovery and research, pivoting and planning depending on how your product or service fits into the larger scheme of what the org or company is working on, making sure your interfaces are crafted appropriately, onboarding users, testing, etc. etc…none of this gets solved with github copilot. Companies still take humans and teams to run - no amount of greed or shareholder investor lust will change this, as much as they would like for this to change.

The human processes involved in actual corporate software engineering have not changed significantly. Product managers might use ChatGPT to do “research” but they aren’t suddenly pumping out ten times as many well vetted, well justified, well estimated stories as they did before. They can not do 10 user interviews all at once. The same goes for Designers and QA testers. Hiring 10x the number of PMs to keep up isn’t feasible. Each hire has diminishing returns as network effects and bureaucracy take hold.

Much of your prime coding time is actually reading and thinking, often while waiting for compiling, a page refresh, or for tests to run.

I think sometimes people lose the scale of just how big a 10x improvement is. 10x is the difference between your mini-van and a record setting supersonic land jet. Imagine trying to drive your 10 minute commute down your city streets in a car that goes 600mph. Will you get to the other side of town in one tenth the time? No, because even a single 60 second stoplight will eat up your entire time budget. F1 cars slow down to mini-van speeds in basic turns. It turns out that most of any activity is not spent going at top speed.

See my above comment on creating complex software at scale for an organization of any decent size.

When I have had engineers who were 10x as valuable as others it was primarily due to their ability to prevent unnecessary work. Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible. Getting another engineer to not build that unnecessary microservice. Making developer experience investments that save everyone just a bit of time on every task. Documenting your work so that every future engineer can jump in faster. These things can add up over time to one engineer saving 10x the time company wide than what they took to build it.

YES. 10x engineering is not 10x code delivered…it’s soft skills and strategy gained from years of hard work and experience.

I think the AI-posters are a mix of the following, in order of least to most malevolent:

Good-natured folks who are mismeasuring themselves and others People heavily invested, personally or financially, in the success of AI (AI startup founders, investors, etc.) Bosses outright trying to make their engineers feel precarious so they don’t quit, look for other jobs, or ask for raises

Accurate.

If you are running an AI startup and every other AI startup is telling investors they are seeing 10x more productivity thanks to AI, the incentives are plain and simple: you should say the same publicly and privately. If your company is built on the back of AI, you are incentivized to sell AI as a miracle solution in every part of life. If you are an engineer and your boss asks you: Hey, you’re getting 10x the productivity thanks to AI, just like all the other engineers, right? You are strongly incentivized to say yes. And when every other engineer also says yes for the same reason, that CEO isn’t lying, they are just relaying what they heard.

It’s okay to sacrifice some productivity to make work enjoyable. More than okay, it’s essential in our field. If you force yourself to work in a way you hate, you’re just going to burn out. Only so much of coding is writing code, the rest is solving problems, doing system design, reasoning about abstractions, and interfacing with other humans. You are better at all those things when you feel good. It’s okay to feel pride in your work and appreciate the craft. Over the long term your codebase will benefit from it.

So, what are next steps for me? Well, I think it’s really time for me to get my ass in gear and build my own thing. It’s always been a calling of mine, for various reasons. And corporate America has turned out very sour. I’ve registered an LLC (Flite LLC, of course) and am starting it as a software consultancy. I’m open to taking on a lot of different kinds of projects and work to start, but I expect the focus and nature of what I do will change quite quickly as I get my hands dirty, my feet wet, and start seeing how I can add some value to people’s lives. I expect a lot of workshopping and conversations with other founders and people in my community in the near future. Which is always the fun, motivating part for me. And:

• open source contributions hopefully
• kick the TechPDX community stuff back up
• fun little ideas and projects with friends (you should see my project idea list)
• much more

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