Episode 513: Forgotten employee and what skills actually matter in the AI world

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How long until I am ethically obligated to let my company know I’m doing no work? There was a big re-org at the company I recently joined. It’s a huge financial company, so there’s a lot of bureaucracy. Somehow in this mess I was kicked off the first team I joined so that I was pending re-assignment. It’s been a month and I haven’t been re-assigned. Instead of being in between jobs not working, I am currently in between teams, but still getting paid! This feels unintentional on the part of the company as no one has followed up with me. I’ve been happily using the time to catch up on hobbies, but I’m starting to get concerned about what will happen when the other shoe drops. At what point do I start to venture into irreversible reputational harm? For some added context, teams at this company are about 6 people and the manager handles several teams, so I’ve never talked to my manager since I joined. I got the message about the re-org from a screenshot of an email that my scrum master shared in my last stand-up.

2. AI changes how software is build. Actual coding is mostly done by LLMs now (I hate it, but it is what it is). What do you think should I focus on learning now to not become obsolete in 1-2 years? I am a senior dev with 13yoe, and loved coding, but now I find it hard what my role will be in the next years (still have 30+ before retirement). I do not want to go to the EM track, at least not in the near future. So is it more architecture knowledge, security, AI internals, …? What do you think?