Ask HN: How to prepare for potential layoffs in this AI era?
3 ALostEngineer 5 8/20/2025, 1:32:21 AM
I'm four years into my SWE career here in the US and struggling with how to prepare for potential layoffs. Outside of emergency fund, etc.., how do I prepare to find a job again with all the horror stories of nobody hiring?
Beyond grinding LeetCode, what should I focus on to stay competitive?
I have a BS in Software Engineering from a state school but nothing higher. Any suggestions on areas to focus on?
The real bottleneck has never been typing. It’s figuring out who the stakeholders are, what they need, and why. That’s messy, political, and brutally hard to automate. For most products, the critical work is defining the problem, not writing the solution.
That kind of work requires soft skills, requirements engineering, deep domain knowledge, and prompt engineering. It’s also much harder to outsource, because deep language and cultural awareness are critical.
If you want to future-proof your career, focus on being really good at understanding and defining the problem to be solved.
The fewer employees you have, the less politics will get in the way. Then the quicker the business can execute.. especially as the cost of producing product continues to approach 0.
Most roles can be automated, I've been thinking of a real B2B platform enabler which optimizes for AI to negotiate the best deals with other AIs. But over time, I think even this will become trivial for GPT-6, 7, etc.
You can also just try to earn a shitload of money and not worry about it.
Personally I’ve found the live cheaply option to be much easier.
We do both of them however that doesn't help with staying hire-able in the industry.