HACKER Q&A
📣 ALostEngineer

How to prepare for potential layoffs in this AI era?


I'm four years into my SWE career here in the US and struggling with how to prepare for potential layoffs. Outside of emergency fund, etc.., how do I prepare to find a job again with all the horror stories of nobody hiring?

Beyond grinding LeetCode, what should I focus on to stay competitive?

I have a BS in Software Engineering from a state school but nothing higher. Any suggestions on areas to focus on?

  👤 AlanClifford Accepted Answer ✓
AI will reshape software engineering, but it won’t eliminate it. The boring stuff, such as coding, routine QA, and documentation, is bounded and pattern-heavy, so AI will eat that first.

The real bottleneck has never been typing. It’s figuring out who the stakeholders are, what they need, and why. That’s messy, political, and brutally hard to automate. For most products, the critical work is defining the problem, not writing the solution.

That kind of work requires soft skills, requirements engineering, deep domain knowledge, and prompt engineering. It’s also much harder to outsource, because deep language and cultural awareness are critical.

If you want to future-proof your career, focus on being really good at understanding and defining the problem to be solved.

👤 paulcole
Spend less than you earn. Live well below your means. Do this for years and everything gets easier.

You can also just try to earn a shitload of money and not worry about it.

Personally I’ve found the live cheaply option to be much easier.

👤 scarface_74
@AlanClifford got on my soap box before I had a chance to. But even if you ignore AI (don’t do that), the larger issue is that software development, especially generic enterprise development has been headed toward commoditization for years.

If all you have to sell is “I codez real gud” and “I pull well defined tickets off of a Jira board”, you’re screwed. No being able to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard while riding a unicycle on a tightrope won’t differentiate you.

👤 chistev
"There is no better way to achieve job security than by making yourself an indispensable employee."

- Lou Bloom, Nightcrawler.

👤 samyar
I'm already working on my own side hustles. future proofing yourself currently is bound to making sure that you have deep knowledge and can solve things that i can't.

The amount of generated code is getting more and more. But also, on the other hand the amount of production ready code is less than before. because people need to make sure it works which in my experience with vibe coding, it never works if you don't review the code apply strict constraints and a good modular folder structure.

Only startups and solo developers skip that part.