Future Proof Your Career as an Engineer in Gen AI World

Hello, everyone. Can you guys all hear me? Great. Thank you for the kind introduction. I understood a little bit Polish because I'm from Slovenia, so it's a little bit similar, but not really. But I understood a little bit in the beginning, so that was a good introduction. Yeah. Hi, everyone. I was already in InfoShare Katowice. I had a great time there. And yeah. Great to be here again in Gdańsk. So, yeah. Today we're gonna talk about how to future-proof your career as an engineer in Gen AI world. But before we go straight into the specific details of what we're gonna talk about, let me share a little bit about myself first. So I have over 11 years of experience both as engineer and also engineering leader. I grew from engineer all the way to CTO. I started as an engineer, then progressed as a senior software engineer, team lead, engineering manager, head of engineering, VP of engineering, and then CTO. Currently, I'm working as a fractional CTO and also advisor, consultant, and also a coach and mentor. I also write an engineering leadership newsletter And also I teach a course, it's called Senior Engineer to Lead: Grow and Thrive in the Role, where I helped over 200 students to become great leaders. And my overall goal is to help as many people as possible to become great, great leaders. All right. Now, let's go straight to what we are talking about today. So I'll be sharing a couple of patterns and trends that I'm seeing across the the industry. And the first one is some companies go for less people, similar productivity, and other companies go for more people, more productivity. So they either go first route or the second route. And I believe companies who are selling any kind of IT products— sorry, any kind of AI products, any kind of AI services They're automatically incentivized to go for the first route. And obviously the reason is the selling point. Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google, they're all doing AI products. And they're incentivized to automatically sell, okay, we want to sell more productivity with less people. So they are doing similar things with their layoffs and so on. Some other companies, they go with the other route, which is they keep their people and they ensure they are a lot more productive over time. So who will move faster, I believe ultimately, that's my opinion, who will move faster in the current world is going to be more successful. So that is the first thing. The second thing I see happening is there's a lot more startups starting right now than it has been, for example, in 2023. And I don't see this stopping anytime soon. I think it's just going to increase. The amount of startups starting 2026 and so on is just going to get more and more. I see almost daily a new AI tool, AI product, and so on. So yeah, ultimately, the amount of engineering roles that are going to be available depends on how many new startups are going to be started versus either the companies going the first route or the second route, as we talked about before. Now let's go to the, to the third trend that I'm seeing. Um, I'm seeing a lot of especially junior engineers these days, uh, they have good kind of a grasp of AI technologies and tools that are available, but I see they're lacking a lot of engineering good practices and kind of like they lack a deep understanding of engineering and how things work. And that is kind of like a good opportunity for everyone listening and also, you know, everyone starting in the industry. I think that people who will have more deeper understanding of engineering topics will have a lot better time in our industry. It's going to be a lot harder for people who have like a just shallow understanding of engineering to be successful in engineering roles. Because ultimately, you know, you can build with AI, you can build certain MVPs, you can build certain products, but you get to a point where you need to understand what's happening. You need to really understand what's going on in that particular function, in that particular file, and what's going on. And you need to really dissect it and understand it in order to to improve it and optimize it. And that's where a lot of engineers, I think, are going to lack in the future. And yeah, talking about everything becoming more robotic, more automized, everything becoming, how do I say, easier, tools are getting better. You know, ultimately, what is going to be more and more important for everyone is human-related skills. And this is, trust me, this is going to be more and more crucial for everyone. For example, like 3, 4 years ago, you could get a role as engineer just knowing a particular framework or being decent in a programming language. But right now, a lot of this stuff, you can, you can, you can, it's already expected that you know pretty well. But what really differentiates people between between each other is people skills, being able to communicate well, being a great person to work with, leadership skills, being pragmatic, overall problem-solving abilities, being resourceful. Those kind of things are not going to be replaceable. These are not replaceable. This is something that AI is going to take a long, long, long time in order to be at least decent at it. And yeah, as I mentioned, when things are becoming more and more robotic around us, people will crave for human touch. And this is a great quote that Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned, is that in the future, he believes that there are going to be businesses that will actually charge money for people to take a walk, and people will be willing to pay a lot of money for that experience. So don't forget about that. Now, we talked about these trends and what's happening in our industry, and also what particular skills are going to be more and more valuable. Here is kind of like a good overview of what I think is going to give you the most value for your time spent. And we will go over all of these skills in detail in the upcoming slides, but Yeah, the first section is human-related skills. Focus on getting better in human-related skills like leadership, teamwork, good communication, being a great person to work with, empathy, overall emotional intelligence. Those things are not going to be replaceable anytime soon. And of course, the other side, you want to utilize tools as much as possible, as good as possible. You want to be pragmatic. You want to be resourceful. You want to understand the business and the industry. You want to understand the product. Ultimately, it's hard to build great products as an engineer if you don't understand the business and what's happening with the product in the industry as well. And engineers are going to be also more and more involved in the actual discovery process. So make sure to really focus and spend some time on really trying to understand the business. And yeah, as you mentioned in one of the trends and one of the patterns that are happening, having deep understanding of a relevant topic and really— so you can dive deep into that topic and you can talk about it and you can help others with it. That's going to be very important. But also, you know, you can do great work, but if you forget the other side, which is doing good work is not enough. You need to make sure that others also understand how great of the work you're doing. So a lot of people forget about this, and I know because I manage so many engineers, and if I wouldn't be involved in what they're doing so much, then a lot of the effort and a lot of the hard work that they were doing actually would go to waste because nobody would even notice it. And they would lose internal credibility because of it. So it's really important that you share what you're doing with everyone. We will go into details how to do that in one of the upcoming slides. So yeah, let's— we will go step by step in each of the skills that I believe is going to get you one of the biggest return of your investment of the time. So first, I would really love if everyone focuses on becoming a better leader. Being a good leader is a mindset. It's not a title. It's not something that you get with years of experience. It's not something that you need to be a manager, you need to be a director, and so on. Everyone can be a leader. And me, as a manager, I always want people in my team to be leaders. I want to create leaders. And the reason is that leaders are going to create more leaders. So you want to make a shift just from focusing on your own individual contribution to how you can help others, how you can provide value to the team, how you can provide value to the organization, how you can provide value to the business. That is going to be crucial. Not just zoom out a little bit from your own your contribution to how can you help as many people as possible. Ultimately, you want to go from doing structured work to unstructured work. So that's where the real value is, doing unstructured work, being able to get an ambiguous problem and dissect it and create structured work from it. So yeah, I would highly, highly recommend to focus on that. Let's go to the next one. Teamwork. Very, very important in these days. It's going to be more and more important because any kind of software we are building, it's built with teams. And I like to say that great teams build great software. And, you know, you can have the best technical-minded individuals in the team that are experts in all the latest technologies. But if If they will not work well together, it unfortunately won't mean much. Yeah, by the way, I'm sharing— these are my top tips for each and every section. At the end, I'll be sharing a full list of resources that you can store and will help you to do a deeper dive on all of these particular things. Yeah, the next thing, you want to be a great team player, right? You not only focus on empathy, but you focus on helping others, team goals. And a great way to do this is, you know, there's a lot of problems inside a team, inside a company, inside a business that some people may be like pushing it under the rug. But I really value people that are really taking care of the problem that's happening inside the organization. Solving a problem that nobody wants to is a great way to stand out and show yourself as a team player. And then also, you know, if you combine leadership and teamwork together, you inspire teamwork in others. That's where the ultimate value is. If you can inspire great teamwork in 5, in 10 people, in 15 people, 20 people, that's going to be extremely, extremely valuable. So what you want to do is You want to give feedback when the feedback is needed. Even if, for example, you're not managing any people, it's totally fine to start giving feedback. And, yeah, you want to be ultimately, you want to be a great, great role model for others. Let's go to the next one. Being able to communicate better. This is going to be more and more important. As we mentioned, you know, we as engineers, we are doing Most of our work is actually communication, both written and verbal communication. With code, we are communicating. With creating PRs, we are communicating. With Slack messages, with meetings, and so on. And one of the key skills that is really, really important, and I see a lot of engineers struggling with it, is learning to read the room. What this means is, you know, we as engineers, we like to go straight into programming languages, frameworks, okay? We need to do this like this. We need to use this design pattern. But ultimately, business doesn't really care about frameworks or doesn't really care about programming language. They care about the timelines, the progress. They care about the trade-offs that you're making. They care about how much is this particular feature going to improve our growth of the users, of the NPS score. You want to talk in a way that resonates especially non-technical people. So you always want to read the room. And yeah, focus on both verbal and non-verbal communication. Obviously, written communication is very, very key in our industry. And if you get better in writing, you are going to be so much more productive on a daily basis. With writing, my top tip is to be concise as much as possible, be very clear. If you're writing a message, try to really understand what resonates with that particular person. What do they actually need? And you want to present that message in a way that is going to be easily understandable by them. So, you know, do bullet points, straight to the point. Don't try to write essays because nobody really reads essays. Let's go to the next one. Be a great person to work with. This is crucial. Obviously, this may sound a bit obvious, but it's crucial. You know, if you're a great person to work with, you're going to get many opportunities. It's simple, simple as it sounds. It's really like that. And ultimately, what you want to think about when we're talking about this is Be someone that you would love to work with. You know, help others. Make sure that you support others. Make sure that you proactively help if they need help and so on. And also, you know, a great thing, especially if you're starting a new project or you're coming to a new company, you want to focus on asking great questions instead of giving strong opinionated statements. Especially, for example, in code reviews, we like to— okay, we see something that is not the way it should be. We give a strong opinionated statement that, hey, this is not the way it should be, right? You should go the other route. But you want to understand exactly what is the mind, what is the thought process behind it. And also it's going to come across a lot better. And ultimately, it's all about how can we be better together? And how can we grow together as a team, as the organization? And how can we all get better? That is the crucial mindset. Being reliable, being proactive, those are one of the key things for me as a manager. I really want people that are reliable, people that are going to not try to be heroes, not try to do an extraordinary amount of work in short amount of time. I don't like that. But what I really like is consistency and long-term good work. So that is what my advice is to focus on. How can you be consistent as much as possible? And then obviously being proactive is a key skill, and I value a lot in engineers. So if you can focus on you spotting problems before they even happening, that's going to be key. That's something that is irreplaceable. That's crucial. For me as a manager, those kind of engineers are getting promoted first. Now let's talk about empathy and overall emotional intelligence. That is the last thing that we are talking about, human-related skills. So you want to write code in a way that others with zero context would be able to easily understand it. Obviously, this is easier to say than actually do. But ultimately, I think people that can do that have a high level of empathy. Yeah, you not only utilize that with writing code, but if you have a good level of empathy, you focus on building the right things. Not only building things right, but you focus on actually finding out what should be the most impactful thing to build. And as I mentioned, this is going to be more crucial as time goes on. This is where I think the industry is heading. Engineers getting closer to the product. Getting closer to the business, and spending time to really understand this part is going to be very important. And also, high level of empathy automatically makes you a better teammate, a better person to work with. And, you know, it's because you turn any kind of disagreements— because we as engineers, we often, you know, we have opinions about frameworks, about programming languages, C# versus Java, PHP versus JavaScript, and so on. You know, you ultimately turn any kind of disagreements into interesting conversations. And all of the sides that are connected with finding out what is the best approach to do this, you are the one who is making sure that everyone is together on this problem. Not trying to win the argument, but you are actually trying to make sure that everyone is together on solving this problem. I've seen so many teams, so many individuals trying to win the arguments at all costs. But it doesn't work like that. That's not what we want. This is also a great example of a picture where empathic writing really helps a lot. Yeah, a person really understood how cluttered these days emails are. So he really went straight to the point, and he got a pretty good— response. Now let's talk about problem-solving skills. Let's first talk about pragmatism. It's going to take a lot of time since, you know, there's so many contexts, so many things that we need to keep in mind if we are trying to solve a particular problem, right? And you need experience. You need various different experience of solving different problems in order to find what is the most pragmatic solution. What is the simplest solution in this particular case? What is the simplest code to write? So my advice here is to solve more problems. With solving more problems, you will develop breadth of knowledge of different challenges. And that can be any kind of problems. For example, it can be just, you know, planning time, solving various different problems for for your family, for your friends, colleagues, etc. Always look at every problem in a way that it's going to help you to be better in the future. A lot of times we are all procrastinating. Just do it attitude helps a lot with that as well. Now let's talk about being resourceful. Yeah, as I mentioned, obviously ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, All of these tools can give you certain things that are going to help you with solving problems. But ultimately, you want to have various different sources where you are actually getting information. Obviously, we all know ChatGPT, Gemini Cloud, they're not going to give you 100% true information. You need to have the knowledge and you have the insights to understand if that information is good or not. But ultimately, you want to become good at finding essential information quickly. Not just relying on your memory, but you rely on making sure that you can find whatever you need. So, yeah, you need to become good at scanning the documentation, the codebase, your notes, search for answers on various platforms and different tools, et cetera. Don't neglect the importance of networking and having experts inside your network. Because, you know, if you have a problem with backend development, with Kubernetes, with scaling the applications, you might know a guy that is going to help you with this particular part. You may need someone in design. You may need someone in frontend development. If you have a group of people around you that you can ask these questions. This is going to be very, very crucial. Now let's talk about utilizing AI tools. Obviously, you don't need to learn and understand all of these tools that are on the slides. But it's good to know what tools are available out there. Because anytime you will be solving a particular problem, you might know that, hey, this tool might help you with this. And, yeah, especially for me personally, I use Cursor for everyday coding. And also Perplexity is really great for me for researching, for writing any kind of— if I'm researching for a new article, I will use Perplexity Deep Search. And it's really great because it will give me all the sources. And I can check all the sources. And then I can check in details if I'm interested into a particular topic. So, yeah, it's definitely good to know what is available, but ultimately, you can't learn everything. You want to pick a tool that is going to be best for solving that particular problem. All right. Let's get next to being better at product and business. As I mentioned, this is going to be more and more crucial in our industry. And you want, in order to get better at it, I have 3 different tips for you. The first one is you want to ask as many questions as possible to your product manager, to other business stakeholders, to other people inside your company, other departments, marketing, sales, finance. You want to understand what's actually the goal of the business, right? Where are we going as a business? Where are we going as a product? What is the next best thing in order to focus as a business? If you do that, you will be making so much better micro decisions because we as engineers, we are making so many micro decisions on a daily basis. So definitely do that if you haven't already. And then the next thing is try to build and monetize a product. These days, you know, AI products are very popular. But if you are trying to get users, if you're trying to do marketing, if you're trying to do sales, you will see and you will understand how hard it is to do that. Visibility these days is really hard. And getting attention is harder these days as well because people are— how to say— the attention span is getting lower. So getting visibility is really extremely hard. So try it. If you haven't already, try to build a side project, a product, and try to market it. Try to monetize it. Try to get users. Try to get paying users. When I started to monetize, when I started with the paid subscription of my newsletter, I then saw how hard marketing is, how hard sales is, how hard visibility is, how hard is spreading awareness about various different topics, about your newsletter, and so on. It's a totally different beast than engineering. And also, if possible, I would also suggest to do some freelance work. This has ultimately been my secret to be able to do good work in my full-time roles. And the reason is that if you want to do good freelance work, you need to be able to understand the requirements. And not go straight into the build mode. You want to propose solutions. And you only do that if you understand the problem, especially if you do freelance projects for non-technical people. You need to understand their pain points. And 99% of the times, the actual problem is going to be different than the solution that they actually hired you for. So you need to actually say and find out, okay, maybe this is not the right way to go. This is a better way to go. No, yeah. Having both depth and breadth is very important. As we talked about, I see the trend going in a way where people will have more shallow understanding of various different engineering practices. You need to develop that good, deep understanding of different practices. But at the same time, you want to develop breadth as well in as many fields as possible. As we talked about the business, the product, quality assurance. If you're a frontend developer, you know, you need to develop decent understanding of backend development, AI tools, and so on. The more you know, the easier it's going to be for you to solve various different problems because you can connect various different contexts together to be able to solve that particular problem. And yeah, we talked a lot about doing great work, but as I mentioned before, All of these things that we have talked about, human-related skills and problem-solving, those are going to help you to do great work. But ultimately, great work is not enough. You need to make sure everyone around you understands how great of the work you're doing. That is when you're actually impactful in your career, in your job, as a person. So yeah, this is my top top 4 suggestions for you to make sure that you are communicating your work and impact the right way. So I highly recommend, if you don't have it already, I know a lot of you guys are engineers, and you need to keep a brag list of wins that you have achieved. And the reason is your manager only sees part of the actual things that you are doing on a daily basis. If you keep a list of all the wins, that you have achieved, they will much easier understand what actual impact are you having on the business. And if you're not communicating impact the right way, your great work and effort, unfortunately, is not going to matter. So very, very, very, very crucial. The next thing and the next tip from my side is to share progress, not just results. So the reason is, you know, if you share just results, people will not really understand what actually went into that particular part to be able to do this great work. And also, you know, ultimately, if you know about something, if you develop deep expertise in a certain field, make sure to share it with others. Make sure to share that knowledge internally inside your company. With your team, with the engineering organization, with everyone. That is how you show yourself not only as an expert in that field, but you are there to help and support as many people as possible. And also, internal credibility is the one for sharing knowledge internally. But ultimately, you also want to build external credibility as well. And you do that by writing online, like having a blog, having a— writing articles, having a newsletter. Newsletters are really popular these days. If you're not doing this already, I would highly, highly recommend to do it. My overall credibility has skyrocketed after I started writing online. I was able to get buy-in from stakeholders a lot easier and also buy-in from my team as well because they knew and they understood and they read my articles. So yeah, if you haven't already, that is one So this is one of my top tips: start writing online. To help you with all of this, I have prepared a list of 30 resources that you can do a deeper dive in all of these things that we talked about. I shared just my top tips, but here you can find, by scanning this QR code, you can find the list of 30 resources, and there are a mix of books and articles. Articles are mostly paid articles for my newsletter, Engineering Leadership. But make sure to first— yeah, first scan the QR code. And the second, make sure to reach out to me via email and share your email with me, and I will give you a complimentary 1-month paid subscription so you can read all of the articles. All of these things are going to help you a lot. You can see in leadership, teamwork, good communication, being a great person to work with, Empathy and overall intelligence. We also have a lot of problem-solving articles and books as well. So for you to do a deeper dive and get better and level up as engineers. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for joining this talk, and I wish you a great rest of the day.