| I have thought about this as an employee. I think which point of view you have matters. The problem is that the best interest for the company and for the individual employee do not align in most cases. If someone wants to move fast and innovate, an employee or a large company like Google, it needs to invest time to do things differently. Given a finite amount of resources, you can spend them part on "speed" of execution, to keep up with in AI race, or "acceleration", to innovate and move faster in the future. If you are a company CEO or senior leader and you think we are in a paradigm shift that threatens the very core products of your company, you cut what you think won't bring future revenue or better revenue growth; then, to maintain speed, you focus fewer resources on mature products that have less space to growth or fewer risks to be challenged in the short term; then, and use all resources that you freed up to accelerate. (Whenever a leader is visionary and good or not impacts the quality of these decisions; this is not an endorsement or rebuttal of Google's leaders) The problem as an employee is that you are only in one of those buckets. Depending on where you are in these buckets and in your personal point in life, the consequences can be very different. It colors how you view the choices of those leaders in these surveys. - cut + early career = can be challenging and demoralizing, but in my past experience these moments were those that pushed me into a higher trajectory. - speed + early career = can be very comfortable to be here, but you're learning less variety than if you see more companies/roles. In the long run, it could make you less successful. - innovate + early career = be blessed, you're very well paid and you learn state of the art that will hopefully be very marketable. If the bets of the industry do not play out and sentiment/hype on AI cools down, be prepared for a drop in earning down the line and save; - cut + mid career = depending on your early career choices and marketable skills and personal inclination for risks, this can be quite challenging or push you out of your comfort zone, into another (hopefully upward) trajectory. - speed + mid career = very comfortable position, but the most risky on long term trajectory. (1)
If the AI paradigm shift materializes, your skills could likely become outdated/largely reduced value and you are at risk of being automated away. (2) - innovate + mid career = nice place to be, very highly paid and very hard to replace. I can't comment on late career, I am not there yet. I'd expect it really depends on your priority and inclinations. My judgement is also likely influenced by the fact that I started as a generalist and contractor/small-business-owner; if you move from education right into FAANG, you'll likely have a more organized but less innovative personal drive/risk tolerance. (1) I think I am here, and that's why I decided in late last year to move to (60%) part time and invest a significant portion of time, beyond what I can do at work (learn to do things differently, and learn about other industries, how they solve similar/adjacent problems and what is unique about them), on my own improvement/innovation at a significant personal cost (40% less income). (2) IMHO the risk as an employee in "speed+mid career" in one of the companies in the AI race can be much higher than in other companies, automating SWE/eng roles requires a lot more mature tech infrastructure (e.g. good testing of very large systems is tricky to get right, but it enables closed-loop automated AI improvements) than many non-tech companies have. |