Tech Was Never Stable. Find Your Place to Stand.

I started my career on a help desk at Missouri State University, resetting passwords and swapping out dead monitors. This was the early 2000s, and the thing everyone told you on the way in was that nothing you learned would stay useful for long. The rule of thumb we passed around was that your knowledge had a shelf life of about eighteen months — after that, new versions, new tools, new languages, and the thing you were an expert in last year was a footnote. You were never done learning, because the ground never stopped moving.

That was twenty years ago. So when this year's survey asked people to describe the state of the industry in a sentence and the runaway answer was chaotic — change, uncertain, unstable, in flux, drinking from a firehose — my honest first reaction was: yes, and? It has always been like this. We just have a newer word for it.

The same industry, read two opposite ways

What's genuinely interesting in that finding isn't the chaos. It's what people feel about it. When the researchers scored the sentiment behind all those "chaotic" answers, it split almost perfectly down the middle — about 37% positive, 37% negative. The same churn that reads as thrilling to one person reads as terrifying to the next. Optimists called the industry "transforming" and "full of opportunity." Pessimists called it "dystopia." Same facts. Opposite forecasts.

If that sounds familiar, it should — it's the whole story of this series, blown up to industry scale. We started ten pieces ago with a split between the people amplified by AI and the people shaken by it, and I argued the difference was less about the technology than about where each person was standing. This is that same split, and the same claim holds: the chaos is not the variable. Your position relative to it is.

Nothing here was ever stable

So let me say the reassuring, unglamorous thing plainly. Tech has never been stable, and it isn't uniquely unstable now. The eighteen-month shelf life I learned in 2003 has just compressed — call it six months today — but the condition is identical. IBM has estimated that a professional skill now has a half-life of about five years, and a technical skill closer to two and a half. Perpetual relearning isn't a symptom of the AI era. It's the job, and it always was.

Which means the people panicking that they'll never keep up are measuring themselves against the wrong thing. The stuff that expires was never where the value lived. What's durable — and what's actually gotten more valuable as the half-life shrinks — is the part underneath: systems thinking, judgment, the discipline to stay calm and think clearly when everyone around you is sprinting. Those don't have a two-year half-life. They compound.

AI makes the churn easier to stand in

Here's the part that surprised me, and it's the opposite of the doom. AI has actually made the pace of change easier to survive, not harder.

Twenty years ago, when a new language or database or platform showed up, keeping up meant hundreds of hours of study to learn its particular grammar. I did that, every year, for a long time. Now, when something new arrives, I don't have to learn its implementation the way I used to. I bring the thoughtfulness and the experience — I decide what outcome I want and I judge whether the output is any good — and the tool handles the part that used to cost me those hundreds of hours. The churny, memorize-the-new-syntax work, the exact thing that used to age people out of this field, is precisely what AI absorbs. What it leaves in your hands is judgment, which doesn't expire.

Find your place to stand

There's a line attributed to Archimedes: give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I shall move the world. People remember the lever. The load-bearing word is place to stand. A lever does nothing without a fixed point to brace against; your leverage comes entirely from your position relative to the thing you're moving. In a churning industry, your leverage is not how fast you can chase every change. It's where you plant your feet.

And the best place to plant them is the one thing that never goes out of date. One respondent said the industry "has lost its center of gravity — replacing curiosity about customers with an obsession over AI, automation, and efficiency." That line is the whole series in a sentence. Back in the piece on ambivalence, I said the goal was never to use AI — the goal is to help a customer, to get a real job done for a real human. That's your center of gravity. AI, automation, velocity — those are levers. The customer is the fixed point you brace them against. Teams that keep the customer at the center don't get thrown by the churn, because they always know which way is up. (It's worth remembering that speed itself has a limit here: PostHog has written well about how product velocity can outrun customers' ability to absorb it — you can't out-ship the humans you're building for.)

The fear I'll admit to

I'll end on the thing I don't usually say out loud, because I suspect a lot of you carry a version of it.

I've gotten nervous about the pace as I've gotten older. I've known since my twenties that this day would come — that there'd be a point where I couldn't absorb new information the way I could when I'd stay up all night reading and wake up fluent in something new. That's not insecurity; it's biology. The research is fairly clear that fluid intelligence — the raw ability to take in and manipulate new information — declines with age, while crystallized intelligence, the accumulated judgment and knowledge, is largely retained and can keep growing. For a career built on constant relearning, that's a quietly terrifying trajectory.

Here's where I've landed, and it's why I'm genuinely hopeful rather than bracing for the end. The deeper I go with AI, the easier the work gets, not harder — because what I'm really doing now is seeing gaps and building systems to fill them, which is crystallized-intelligence work. I don't have to out-absorb a twenty-five-year-old anymore. I have to bring judgment and let the tool carry the fluid-intelligence load. Which means the very technology everyone's afraid will make them obsolete may be the thing that keeps experienced people relevant longer — that lets a career run past the point where the relentless relearning used to end it. The part of you that ages is the part AI is best at replacing. The part that doesn't age is the part it can't touch.

That's how I stay oriented in the chaos, and it's the note I want to leave you on after ten of these. Focus on people. Solve problems that are actually worth solving. Keep taking ownership of your own work and your own place. The ground will not stop moving — it never has. But you don't need stable ground. You need a place to stand.