I started in a role that no longer exists anywhere. The title referred to a class of machine, a specific vendor's estate, and a set of daily rituals that were entirely reasonable at the time and are now completely gone. Nobody made an announcement. The work simply thinned out over about four years, absorbed partly by better tooling and partly by the fact that the underlying thing we were tending stopped being how anyone built systems. I did not lose that job. The job dissolved underneath me while I was still doing it well.
What I remember most clearly is how invisible it was from the inside. There was no quarter where the workload dropped. There was always plenty to do, right up until the point where what I was doing had become a niche, and then a legacy concern, and then a line item in somebody's decommissioning plan. Competence is a poor early warning system, because a shrinking domain still rewards the people who are good at it, sometimes more generously than a growing one does, right until it stops.
I see the same shape forming around a lot of current roles, including several on my own teams. Not disappearing, exactly. Being compressed. The parts of the work that are procedural, repeatable and well documented are the parts that leave first, and those are also the parts that are easiest to build a career identity around, because they are the parts you can demonstrate you are good at. What stays is harder to name on a CV: knowing which failure matters, knowing who to involve, knowing when the obvious fix will make things worse.
So I have stopped thinking about my career as a title I hold and started thinking about it as a set of problems I am useful against. Titles are a snapshot of how one organisation currently divides up work, and that division is redrawn every few years by forces nobody in the building controls. Problems last much longer. Systems fail, people need access, data has to be trusted, something has to be recovered by morning. Those have outlived every tool I have ever learned.
The people I have watched come through these shifts intact were never the ones who were most expert in the thing that was ending. They were the ones who were curious about what was replacing it, early, while it was still optional.
– Serguey Shinder
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