How to surv(ai)ve

My advice for surviving layoffs.

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My advice for surviving layoffs.

This is a more serious and intense Platform Weekly than I have written in a long time. Yesterday, I had dinner with a friend who shared that they had been laid off. The day before, I'd had lunch with two former colleagues, both had been laid off. On Monday, I had a beer with another friend whose entire department had also been laid off.

At the same time, I receive emails, Slack and LinkedIn messages every single day from people across our industry looking for jobs, or fearing for their own.

I am not a life coach, or a therapist, so I will speak only about our universe and what I’ve learned from our 270k-strong community and the dozens of workshops, roundtables, and 100s of leaders that I’ve talked to in the last 6 months.

The fundamental point is simple (relatively). You need to be AI-first.

As an organization, as a team, a department, but most of all as an individual.

You might hate AI, you might resent AI, you might think it’s slop or a fad, or disagree fundamentally whether it’s the future or not, but at the end of the day - to your boss, and their boss, and so on up the chain - it is the most important thing in the world.

What are three things you can do to massively improve your position?

Know your story: Platform engineering is a foundational stone of successful AI. The organizations that win this aren't the ones with the best model; they're the ones with the best platform. Models are becoming a commodity. The platform that harnesses them is the differentiator. I live that. I breathe that. I’ve got the data to back it. That is my story. Why might my platform engineering team need to be kept? Because you need us if you want your AI initiatives to succeed. Why should I stay on board? Because you need me to build the Agentic Developer Platform that determines whether your boss's boss’s AI goals succeed. 

Play the game: Sure, your boss probably has no idea what they're talking about. You probably can't build an agent over the weekend to migrate all your crap off Cobol as they proposed. Or rewrite that legacy monolith into Rust - as background execution at that scale requires platform infrastructure your teams don't have yet. But your response to these “visionary” ideas can’t just be to scoff and retreat back to tweaking some Terraform modules. The game right now is crazy, ambitious, and often very successful, and sometimes not, experimentation with AI.

Should you spin up an agent to rewrite that monolith into Rust? Probably not. But you can “No, but…” your boss on the path of other AI experimentation. You tell your boss, “That idea we shouldn’t do, but we can try and use AI to map dependencies, generate test coverage, and identify which parts of the monolith are realistic candidates for extraction or rewrite. We can then build agents to validate those changes (and iterate), catch regressions, and enforce some quality, and we can do it in a way that proves out the platform architecture we need to do this safely at scale." There are a lot of times we need to say, “no”. But you also need to say “No, but…” and show you are playing the same game. The "Probably not" becomes a platform-maturity argument rather than a practicality one, and the counter-proposal now explicitly connects the experimentation to building the platform architecture… so you're not just redirecting your boss's idea, you're using it to tell your story.

Upskill, upskill, upskill: You need to be learning how to operate in this new world. That means understanding how AI changes platform engineering, the fundamentals of evolving to Agentic Developer Platforms, and the core tenets of building and utilizing agents across the SDLC. You need to be AI-native. There are currently three AI-focused courses on the Platform Engineering University, with many more on the way, focused on exactly this. Intro to AI in Platform Engineering, which will give you the story, AI in Platform Engineering, which will help you play the game, and Agentic AI in Platform Engineering, which will ensure you have the skills to operate at the very top of this new frontier. You will be able to tell your boss, “No, that idea is stupid. But I have a great one you’ll love,” and then actually do it.

At the end of the day, layoffs can be completely random. There are no 3 tricks that guarantee you’ll keep a job. 

But if you fully understand and are focused on these 3 things, there is a very good chance you will do more than just survive in this new frontier; you’ll thrive.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• Meet Unify: Governed AI that knows your delivery. Check out our new community format, Platform Engineering Demo, where Community members and partners show off their tools. 

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel!