♠️ Five Years as an IC - A Blink and a Lifetime in Tech

After reading Software Guidebook to Senior Developer and reflecting on my five-year journey as an individual contributor, I’ve started to notice a shift — not just in the industry, but in how I perceive IC roles themselves.

Five years in tech is strange. On one hand, it's a relatively short amount of time — especially when compared to seasoned veterans who've seen entire tech stacks rise and fall. On the other hand, five years feels like a lifetime when you consider how quickly this industry evolves. The pace of change is relentless.

Being five years behind on a framework doesn’t just feel like you’ve missed a couple of updates; it can feel like you’re dragging along a decade’s worth of tech debt. Not only that, but it felt like I had just got into tech and I’m already reading that its about to be automated, or so I’ve been told... its quite close.

That being said, I have some internal thoughts and opinions of what I think might be the future of software developers.

Current devs who have honed their skills in the industry will find themselves creating side-projects with less effort, thus, bringing their passion project to life faster than ever. And I think this is an extremely exciting time.

Junior devs will find themselves an intermediate pair programming buddy with a fairly efficient rubber duck and gone of the days of Googling and reading Stack overflow solutions. With the increasingly difficult market for junior devs, they might just say screw it and just vibe code their own company and actually come out ahead.

The rise and use of AI is definitely a double edge sword though, if we become way too reliant, our critical thinking skills will most likely diminish alongside our ability to think deeper about code being written.

Maybe we don’t need to think deeper, the many years of social media usage has greatly thinned our patience and attention span. It’ll be much easier to tell AI to “think deeper” for us 😆

That said, it’s an exciting time, AI tools are now more accessible to developers, empowering solo devs to follow their passions, create innovative solutions for niche problems, and make a positive impact on society.