Gen Z is anxious about AI's impact on careers, but leaders aren't talking about it candidly. Traditional career paths like staff engineer to CTO may not exist anymore. We need data on how AI adoption affects different groups, and honest conversations about sustainability and who gets left behind.
There's so much anxiety. I don't think I've seen this level of anxiety, especially among Gen Z, in a really long time. There's so much fear of what does this technology mean for my future and my career. And the truth is no one is having those candid conversations. So, you know, what happens to our brain when we don't know and we're filling the blank with, uh, sometimes worst-case scenarios? Because our brain wants protect us and keep us safe. So when I don't know what AI is going to mean for my career, do I get paid more if I learn AI? No one is telling me these things. They're just saying, go do it and use more of it. Does that mean it's no longer valuable to continue as a coder or software developer? What does that mean for those more technical roles? And in the past, it was like a pretty linear path, right? I, you know, it's like you have competency framework laid out and I can, you know, eventually be a, you know, staff engineer, whatever, a principal, and then you just keep progressing, and then you get to a CTO. That's like the path. I honestly am not sure what the path to a CTO anymore today. Anyone who says they know is probably not being super honest because there's so many unknowns, right? What kind of skills are required? And is it supervising, you know, agentic AI in your workplace along with humans? Does leadership skills still matter? And which part matters more? Like, all of that really is different. Are we going to see different roles getting combined, right? There's a famous pharmaceutical company that combined HR and IT together. It is now under one umbrella. Do we know anything from that experiment? How is it going? Does that actually work? Because if we're getting squeezed at the top, if we're seeing even fewer opportunities at the C-level, what does that mean for the leadership pipeline? And so people are really most worried about what does this mean for my career? And so I think that's number one. And basically, you know, if I'm not hearing my leader telling me this won't impact my job and I still have a future here, then I'm going to do things to protect myself. And that could include not using the tool you are forcing me to use. The other is environmental impact. This is huge and this is philosophical ideology, if you will, but it's also very real, right? And there's so much misinformation out there. Part of my learning recently for myself is upskilling myself on AI infrastructure. So, so how do we actually get more out of the same compute? How do we get more out of the same chips? Because we're constrained. There's a lot that is happening behind the scenes from various AI companies trying to minimize environmental impact. And I think it just takes more curiosity from all of us to better understand before we jump in and say, oh, I'm going to only use the model from this company because they're doing more. We may not know everything. So anyways, I think there's a lot going on in sustainability side of AI that I'm paying more attention to, and it's definitely moving really quickly. And then I think the third that is a little bit more strange is like related to next generation? Do my kids still have a future? I've heard parents say, I don't want to use AI because, because I don't want to advocate for a future where my kids don't have jobs or they don't have good jobs. And again, like, these are soundbites that I have gathered. And my encouragement to all of you is to gather your own and actually talk to people because there's a lot of stats out there like women don't use AI as much as men. And then even Reese Witherspoon is advocating for a woman to use AI to not get left behind. And there's all kind of backlash. And like, again, gather your own data because in the organizations I work with, when I looked at the disparity by gender, I actually don't see one. And perhaps, right, there's some bias in this data sample, right? But the organizations that hire me obviously are very heavily invested in AI. And I also speak very loudly on, you know, well-being, inclusion. So they're not going to pick me if they don't care about those things. So perhaps there's a relationship there. But nonetheless, you have to know, are the female employees in your organization actually using AI less? Are they pushing back more? Or is there something that is out there? And maybe it's not just gender, maybe something else, maybe it's generation. But you have to understand your own data so that you can create a strategy that targets the groups that maybe need different help than the general population.
