Confessions of a Millennial in Tech

Verna has lived through cloud migration, digital transformation, mobile, SaaS and product-led growth. AI, she says, “feels 10x bigger. And 10x faster.” Her core feeling is being behind, specifically the sense of possibly already operating on an outdated mental model. Growth, marketing, product management and sales, crafts she spent a decade building intuition in, are losing leverage as AI flattens the gap between someone who spent years earning judgment and someone who can produce a plausible version of the same work in minutes.

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• The specific feeling under the AI shift: “am I already operating on an outdated mental model” behind, sharper than casual “I should test that tool” behind.
• A social dynamic underneath it: everyone performs having a system or workflow that changed their life, which discourages people from asking basic questions even though most are equally unsure.
• Watching a 22-year-old produce “a suspiciously solid version” of decade-earned expertise in 14 minutes removes the normal mourning period for a skill losing its value. There’s no time to process it before moving to the next shift.
• Seniority’s old signals are weakening without disappearing entirely. She welcomes part of that flattening (“a lot of old hierarchies deserved to die”) while still calling the transition disorienting.
• Productivity gains get absorbed immediately. Being 10x faster with AI produces the expectation of 10x more output.
• The economic question, raised directly: what happens to compensation and the premium on knowledge work when output rises while the cost of producing it falls.
• Her guess: value moves away from execution and toward taste, judgment, prioritization and orchestration, deciding what’s worth building rather than how to build it. She notes those skills are much harder to teach or pattern-match.
• The open question she closes on: whether her generation is the last to build careers around software as a medium, as AI increasingly builds, configures and operates software itself.