Staying Market Volatility Resilient as a Dev in the AI Era

If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time, you can feel it. There’s a shift. It’s in the Slack channels, the quiet DMs between former colleagues, and it’s definitely in the headlines. The ground feels a little less solid than it did five years ago. For a long time, we operated under a specific social contract: Learn to code, get a job, you’re set. That was probably the title of a few of my “break into tech” TikToks back in the day. If you were a mid-to-senior developer in particular, you felt untouchable. Recruiters were kicking down your door. You didn’t need a strategy, just a heartbeat and a LinkedIn profile. That. Era. Is. Over. Between interest rate corrections, the normalization of layoffs as a quarterly operational lever, outsourcing, reorgs, and the rapid proliferation of generative and agentic AI, the landscape has changed. Dramatically. But even with those facts, understand clearly, panic is not a strategy. The goal here isn’t to teach you how to never get laid o