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Occupational Hazards That Will Future-Proof Your Engineering Approach

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Occupational Hazards That Will Future-Proof Your Engineering Approach

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Before we get into this week’s topic, I’d like to hear from you. If you have a question about your job or an upcoming decision you want advice on, you can ask us here. I will be reading your answers and choosing questions to answer regularly. We are now back to our regular schedule.

Software engineers have the shortest tenure of any white-collar job. The average software engineer stays at a company for about two years, about half as long as workers in many other information technology jobs. Layoffs in the past few years have highlighted this instability, but it was already there.

This is not a story about a broken job market. Rather, it’s about how to turn that instability to your advantage, which is what I’ve spent the last ten years doing on purpose.

Playing It Safe Was A Very Risky Option

I switched careers to software in my 30s. I had a steady job at a community college, with a union and a pension. It was about as safe as a job gets, and I learned to plan on the side.

Then I did something almost everyone in my life considered reckless: I quit, left a secure job and became a junior engineer at the age of 31. My mother was skeptical. I took a very risky job, for two reasons: It was a job I really wanted, and I could see the possibilities.

My first development job was in a grocery store. Good people and company I liked. But I kept meeting engineers earning twice my salary for the same job. In the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by the best engineering talent in the world, I realized that my skills were faltering.

So I left a small startup. I learned more in nine months than I had in two years, and my income doubled.

Over the years I have learned to manage risk in the workplace as something I must manage deliberately. It falls into two categories.

Take Risks With Your Career

The first type of risk involves the job itself: Bet yourself by fighting for better roles and opportunities.

Working for money alone is not a mistake, especially early on. But the benefits diminish after the first few hops, and the pressure to chase a bigger paycheck every year will wear you down.

There’s another job hazard with rewards involved: Seeking positions to work alongside the strongest engineers.

You may have difficulty continuing. You may be fired. But the skills you acquire working around people better than you are what build long-lasting stability. You build marketable technology, you see how different organizations work, and every project becomes another tool you carry to the next opportunity. Working alongside talented developers is a proven way to grow your expertise.

If that sounds too much, try volunteering for a project that you don’t know how to do. The danger is that you fail in front of people. The reward is a new skill and a reboot line that opens the next door.

Compare that to the “safe” method.

You stay with one company, thinking that loyalty will be rewarded. Usually not. And when you finally leave, by choice or not, you may find the skills you’ve built are worth less on the open market. You could be an in-house expert on an old technology stack while employers hire cutting-edge technology. Suddenly you are competing with people who have the same experience as you.

You may be taking a risk that you didn’t realize.

Risk Your Time

The second form is risking your time, which means betting on trends.

Some trends are non-negotiable. If you’re a software developer, then cloud services, ReactJS, and AI are common enough that ignoring them is detrimental to your career. A backend developer who refuses to learn cloud architecture is committing to obsolescence.

Real gambling is about micro-trends: niche tools you stumble upon and find quietly interesting, not knowing if they’ll ever become important.

About two and a half years ago, I learned about regenerative augmented generation (RAG). Almost no one in my circle was talking about the vector database, the central piece of RAG. Today RAG is close to normal, and for once, I had an early detection opportunity.

Most of these bets do not pay. But when someone becomes a big trend, you are already at a low level. Right now I’m betting the same with voice AI. It’s unusual. It may not be. But when it comes to the next thing, I’m already there, building the foundation.

Short Term Risk, Long Term Stability

Counter-intuitively, skipping a job and betting on trends gave me something I was after all along: stability. I’ve never had a hard time finding a job, because every risky move accumulates skills that the market really wanted.

If you feel stable and comfortable right now, enjoy it. But ask yourself if you are still learning. Because if you don’t, the comfortable and the dangerous choices may come together.

The goal is not to avoid the open market forever. It’s to make sure that when you get to it, you’re not at its mercy.

Written by Brian Jenney

PS Don’t forget to submit questions about your career or future decision you’re looking for advice on here!

—Brian

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