Staying Market Volatility Resilient as a Dev in the age of AI

If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time, you can feel it. There’s a shift. It’s in the Slack channels, the quiet DMs between former colleagues, and it’s definitely in the headlines. The ground feels a little less solid than it did five years ago.

For a long time, we operated under a specific social contract: Learn to code, get a job, you’re set. That was probably the title of a few of my “break into tech” TikToks back in the day. If you were a mid-to-senior developer in particular, you felt untouchable. Recruiters were kicking down your door. You didn’t need a strategy, just a heartbeat and a LinkedIn profile.

That. Era. Is. Over. 

Between interest rate corrections, the normalization of layoffs as a quarterly operational lever, outsourcing, reorgs, and the rapid proliferation of generative and agentic AI, the landscape has changed. Dramatically. But even with those facts, understand clearly, panic is not a strategy.

The goal here isn’t to teach you how to never get laid off. That’s outside of your control. Companies merge, budgets get cut, and priorities get realigned. You can’t control the weather. What you can control is the shelter you build.

I coined the phrase “market volatility resilient” on a recent @Torc Discord chat because we need to shift the goalpost from just job security to market resilience (the ability to get rehired quickly, at a premium, regardless of market conditions). So here’s my playbook on how to position yourself so that if the music stops, you’ve already got a chair waiting for you.

The Mindset Shift – Stop Being Just an Employee

Most developers, even the seniors, still think like employees. They think their value is tied to the JIRA tickets they close or the cleanliness of their pull requests.

To build resilience, you need to start thinking of yourself as a business of one (as the poet stated “I’m not a business man I’m a BUSINESS man”). Your current employer is just your biggest and current client. Your skills are your product. Your network is your distribution channel.

If you would just view your career through this lens, market volatility and “what’s going to happen with AI” stops looking like a threat to your survival and starts looking like a shift in client demand. It forces you to ask different questions. Instead of asking, "How do I keep my boss happy?" you start asking, "Is my product (skills) still finding product-market fit?" and "Is my distribution channel (network) active?"

This mindset shift is the foundation. Everything else we discuss rests on this premise. If you fail to reframe your thinking around this entire process, the steps will be disconnected and ineffective in that void.

Always Be Connecting (ABC)

Let’s talk about networking. I know, I know. You’re a developer. You prefer IDEs to mixers. But the reality is if you wait until you are laid off to start networking, you’re at least six months too late.

You have to dig the well before you’re thirsty. This is the Always Be Connecting (ABC) framework.

1. Beyond Transactional Networking

Most people network transactionally. They reach out when they need a referral. Fun fact, that smells like desperation every time. What you’re going for is completely different: it’s about relational equity.

You need to cultivate a network of "weak ties." Sociologist Mark Granovetter discovered decades ago that most jobs aren’t found through close friends (strong ties), but through acquaintances (weak ties). Your best friend often knows about the same openings you do. That product manager you worked with three years ago? They’re in a totally different ecosystem, hearing about opportunities you may be blind to.

Action: Set a recurring calendar reminder for every Friday morning. Spend 15 minutes sending three messages to people you haven’t spoken to in six months. LinkedIn or even (gasp!) your phone is a great place to source these connections. No asks. No "looking for work." Just:

• "Saw your company shipped that new feature, looks slick."

• "Hey it’s been awhile, I see you’re in a new role!"

• "Saw this article on (blah blah blah) and thought of our convo at the conference."

When you eventually do need to make a move, you aren't a stranger asking for a favor; you're an active connection continuing a conversation.

2. Don't Neglect Your Current Building

If you’re a Senior Fullstack Dev, do the jr frontend devs even know you? Do the PMs know you understand the business logic down to the resulting dollar, or do they just think of you as the person who fixes the API?

Cross-departmental reputation is your insurance policy. When layoffs happen, people who don't know you often decide them in spreadsheets. But when rehiring happens, or when a former colleague moves to a new company and needs a Tech Lead, they remember the dev who explained why the database migration was necessary in plain English, not the one who just grumbled about tech debt. Pay your insurance premiums by exposing your genius to more people you work with

3. Stop Shipping Invisible Code

You don't need to be an influencer nor do you need to do TikTok dances. But these days, "proof of life" online goes a long way.

If a hiring manager Googles you, what do they find? A LinkedIn with a job title from 2019? Or do they find a trail of breadcrumbs that shows you are active, engaged, growing, building, opinionated about current tech matters in an informed way? You can

• Comment on industry blogs.

• Post a summary of a conference talk you watched.

• Engage in GitHub discussions. (or even Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn Groups/Slacks/Discords)

This is the passive networking that works while you sleep. The flipside is if you continue to build in silence, you’re likely to lose in silence as well.

Always Be Building (ABB)

The second pillar of resilience is Always Be Building (ABB). Pretty sure I stole this one from my friend, Danny Thompson.

There is a trap that senior developers fall into, let’s call it the architect’s armchair. You spend so much time in meetings, designing systems, and reviewing code that you simply stop writing code. Your muscles atrophy.

In a volatile market, companies are less willing to pay for pure theory. They want builders. They want people who can architect the solution and prototype the MVP. As I mentioned to a recent mentee “they just want to know you can build the darn thing”. 

1. Learning vs. Building

Tutorial hell is real, even for seniors. Watching a YouTube video on Agentic AI is not the same as building an agent.

• Learning: "I watched a video on the new Spring Boot 3 features."

• Building: "I migrated a legacy microservice to Spring Boot 3, documented the breaking changes, and measured startup time improvement."

The market pays for the latter.

2. Portfolio for Seniors ?

While most senior devs would totally scoff at the idea of a portfolio, these are times where extra validation is no longer extra. The “3 to 5 projects of increasing complexity” may not be the right mantra, but it’s certainly worthwhile to have some project good enough to be a product working in the wings.

For instance, If your background is Java/JVM, you could build something that demonstrates resilience and scale.

• A custom load balancer.

• A simplified version of a Kafka topic.

• A RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline that integrates with a legacy SQL database.

If time is a constraint, open source issues are in the millions and allow meaningful contributions that don’t require you to steer the entire ship. These projects show you’re more than a coder, you’re an engineer who understands systems on an enterprise scale. 

3. Sharpening the Saw

Yes, Steven Covey’s 7th habit is still relevant and you can use ABB to diversify your risk. If your day job is 100% maintaining a legacy monolith, spend your nights on the cutting edge. What “they” won’t let you use at work is no excuse for stagnation in your growth with most every AI model and tool offering a free tier and fun fact, there are continual advancements in languages libraries, and frameworks that have nothing to do with AI at all - some of which are open source!

Sharpening your saw creates a hedge. If the market for legacy maintenance drops, your skills in modern cloud-native architecture are fresh. If the AI bubble bursts (not likely to fully happen), your foundational knowledge of data structures and algorithms keeps you employed.

Discernment – Hype vs. Harvest

Are you chasing digital pet rocks or diamonds in the rough? Determining this is often the hardest part. To be resilient, you gotta bet on the right horses, often. You have limited time to learn. Do you spend it learning Web3? The Metaverse? Generative AI? Rust?

One career-supportive skill is learning to differentiate between industry adoptions (Enterprise AI enablement is in this category) and passing trends (blockchain which according to Gartner never moves past POC 90% of the time).

1. The "Boring Problem" Test

How do you tell the difference? Apply the boring problem test

Does the technology solve a boring, universal business problem better than the existing solution?

• The Internet solved the boring problem of "sending documents."

• Cloud Computing solved the boring problem of "buying servers."

• Mobile solved the boring problem of "accessing data away from a desk."

2. A Tale of Two Techs: Blockchain vs. Agentic AI

Let’s look at this diplomatically, without throwing shade, but looking at the data.

Blockchain is a fascinating technology. It created immense wealth and solved very specific problems regarding trustless verification. However, for the average Fortune 500 company (insurance, retail, healthcare), it required a complete paradigm shift. It required rewriting the way they thought about data ownership. Because the friction was high and the "boring problem" solution wasn't always clearer than a centralized database, adoption remained niche.

Agentic AI, on the other hand, is currently passing the Boring Problem Test with flying colors. It doesn't ask companies to rewrite their entire philosophy. It asks: "Do you have employees who spend 4 hours a day copying data from a PDF to Excel?"

Every company has that problem.

Agentic AI that can execute tasks, use tools, and make decisions is integrating into existing workflows. It fits into the API calls we already have. It reads the documents we already wrote. It summarizes, aggregates and even solves mathematical problems that are on current dockets, not theoretical ones.

The Play: Bet on the technologies that are infrastructure-level shifts. Agentic AI is looking like infrastructure. It’s the new database, the new electricity. Positioning yourself as a developer who knows how to orchestrate AI agents to solve business problems is a high-resilience move.

3. Don't Abandon the Classics

Discernment also means knowing what doesn't change.

While everyone is chasing the new shiny object, the systems that run the world still run on the JVM, .NET, and C++ (NASA’s is known for strict rules on their abundant C code).

You can build resilience by being the person who can bridge the gap. The most valuable developer in 2026 isn't the one who only knows AI prompting (remember the almost career of prompt engineering), nor the one who only knows Java 21. It’s the developer who can say: "I can use a Java-based LangChain wrapper to safely integrate this new AI model into our existing secure banking infrastructure."

That’s the sweet spot. That is where the money resides.

The Unc Strategy for Career Moats

In medieval times, the moat was what kept the castle safe when the invaders came. In your career, your moat is what protects your salary when the market contracts. What’s your moat? Have you even thought about it? If not, now’s the perfect time.

1. Soft Skills are Actually Hard

Something about the phrase “soft skills” is a tad deceptive. Some techies write them off as if they’re optional or easy. They are not.

In a world where AI can generate code, the value of generating code goes down. The value of determining what code to generate goes up.

• Communication: Can you explain technical trade-offs to a non-technical VP?

• Business Acumen: Do you understand how your code makes money?

• Empathy: Can you mentor the juniors so the team doesn't burn out?

• Anti-Slop: Do you follow some version of spec-driven development to avoid replacing slow clean code with a fast mess?

These are the skills that get you rehired. It’s not hard for recruiters to find a Senior Engineer who knows the syntax. It’s harder to find those who can lead the room. Be the latter and make sure that part of you is known.

2. The T-Shaped Developer (with a twist)

You know the concept: Deep expertise in one area, broad knowledge in others. To increase your resilience, you’ll need to widen that horizontal bar. That means more study, personal study.

I was in a recent group chat where someone offered “why are we doing all this off the clock work, other industries don’t do all this”. While I didn’t answer in the moment, I will share with you: this gameplan I’m offering is not about what is fair. It’s about what works. If you can execute a strategy that is both effective and satisfies your personal barometer for fairness, I invite you to do that instead. 

An example of expanding that T shape could look like this:

• Deep: Your core stack (e.g., Java/Spring, Python/Django).

• Broad: Cloud (AWS/Azure), DevOps (Docker/K8s), Data Engineering basics, and now, AI Orchestration.

You don't need to be an expert in all of them. But you must know enough to be dangerous. You need to know enough so that if your company pivots from on-prem to cloud, you aren't left behind. If they pivot to AI-driven features, you can raise your hand and say, "I can handle the backend for that." Even at the junior level, I’m encouraging more self-described front end devs to make sure they have *some* backend skills. Or as I put it on Twitter spaces, “can you make the app or not”. That’s the test.

Calm in the Storm

Market volatility is the tax we pay for working in the highest-leverage industry in the world. One that from its inception, has been defined by change (iteration), abstractions, and tradeoffs. With the high rewards come high variance.

If you’re feeling anxious right now, that is normal. I’m not describing a plan to remove anxiety. This is a plan where your feelings won’t matter one way nor the other. You’re covered.

Straightforward:

1. Treat your career as a business, not a job.

2. Always Be Connecting: Build relationships before you need them.

3. Always Be Building: Keep your hands dirty and your portfolio diverse.

4. Practice Discernment: Bet on infrastructure, not just hype.

When you execute this playbook, layoffs stop being a career-ending event and start being a mere inconvenience. I have experienced this, personally. You walk into the market not with a begging bowl, but with a toolbox that you know is in demand.

Stay building. Stay connecting. You got this.