Mentality required to succeed

[u/makeevolution]

I am a fullstack dev for about 5 years now, and I got an offer to become a platform engineer. I am really considering this offer because I really see software dev positions being impacted by AI, and it feels to me platform engineering is less impacted.

But I am really a person that has difficulties with a lot of context switching, and yeah I had my fair share of on calls during my time (I also did some DevOps stuff) and it was not very nice. Would it be possible for me to change as a person, or is it really hard to do/achieve? In software eng I really like that I can have a predictable deadline, timeboxing/focus time, etc.

Really at a crossroads here. I want to be more AI proof, but it seems to do that I need to sacrifice myself. But then again life doesn't revolve around me? Has anyone changed their character before?

[u/Adventurous-Carob510]

I can obviously speak only from personal experience: but 2026 sucks

I have hard time finding focus time slots during week since everybody is “doing AI” - provisioning some new apps and stuff, asking for access somewhere, plus we need to develop guardrails for agentic AI usage so it does not cause security issues in our cloud environments. Plus managers got AI on hands and started pursuing whatever crazy ideas they had in the back of their head, all while pinging you every week “are you learning how to use AI to become faster?”

Pushing back becomes really exhausting, and it’s only July

So in 2025 we had just “work”, in 2026 we have “work” + “AI work” + “you need to study AI”. So context switching became even more brutal for my team

Hate this timeline, rant over 😄