Wayfinding in Public: What I Tell My Team About AI and Job Security -- Krystal Smith-Moore

A few weeks back 11,000 people lost their jobs in a single day. Meta. Intuit. The headlines called it an AI-driven restructuring. My team saw it too. And like most engineering teams right now, they came to work the next day with questions I don’t have complete answers to.

That’s the part nobody talks about. The manager sitting across from their team, holding uncertainty so the room doesn’t collapse under the weight of it.

Here is what I actually say.

I ask them how they felt about AI a year ago.

Not as a gotcha. As a real question. Because a year ago most of us were handed a new tool we didn’t fully understand and were told to figure it out. Nobody had a manual. Nobody had a proven playbook. We were all just trying things.

That hasn’t changed. We are still wayfinding. The difference is the stakes feel higher now because we can see what happens when companies decide the wayfinding is over and the headcount reduction begins.

But here is the thing about wayfinding. It is not the same as being lost. It means you are moving, adjusting, learning in real time. That is not a weakness. That is how every meaningful shift in technology has ever worked.

So while we are all figuring this out, what do we actually do?

My answer to my team is three things.

Skill up. Not because it guarantees your job. I will get to that. But because the learning muscle is the one thing that has always mattered in this industry. If you are actively learning how to use this tool, really learning it and not just prompting it for shortcuts, you are building something that compounds over time.

Apply it to real work. Not the cool demo. Not the impressive side project you post about. Apply it to the actual codebase you work in every day. For my team that means a codebase that is nearly 20 years old. Messy, complex, full of decisions made by people who are long gone. That is where the real learning happens. That is where you find out what AI can actually do versus what it looks like it can do. And right now we are all working through the balance of learning, applying, and shipping without letting code quality become the casualty.

Share everything. What you built. What you learned. Where it broke. Where you failed and why you know you can do better next time. This is the part most people skip because it feels vulnerable. But sharing the failure is what opens the door for the engineer on your team or in your network who is still too scared to admit they don’t know what they’re doing yet. Your honesty gives them permission to start.

Now for the honest part.

None of this guarantees anything. I say that out loud to my team because I think they deserve to hear it from me directly instead of reading it in a headline. The decisions being made right now at companies across the industry are not purely about skill. They are about business models, investor pressure, and leadership choices that most engineers have no control over.

What you can control is whether you are still flexing the learning muscle when the dust settles. Engineers who keep learning have always been the ones who land on their feet. Not because the industry is fair, but because adaptability is the one skill that never goes out of style.

What I know for sure.

We are not at the end of this shift. We are somewhere in the middle of it, maybe closer to the beginning than we think. The tools are going to keep changing. The anxiety is not going to disappear. And the leaders who pretend they have all the answers are going to be a lot less useful than the ones who are willing to wayfind in public alongside their teams.

That is the job right now. Not certainty. Honesty. Not a roadmap. A learning culture that keeps moving even when the path is not fully clear.

We are all figuring this out. The ones who say so out loud are the ones worth following.