I showed up, where's my cookie?
Most engineers treat their job like a vending machine. I insert forty hours of JavaScript. You dispense a salary. We don’t make eye contact.
That model is dead. AI killed it.
If you are still operating on the "I do the task, you pay my salary" logic, you're sleepwalking off a cliff. Look up! The real contract, the only one that saves you from becoming obsolete corporate furniture, is this: We make you better. You make us better.
AI and "Work-life balance"
Why is the old model dead?
Because two things happened at once: Covid and AI. Covid brought WFH and AI brought vibe coding. Now both these little cuties are out to destroy your career.
An engineer today can build a functional feature without understanding half of what’s happening under the hood. They just ask the model. It vomits out the code. Done. They feel like geniuses. They are not. They are glorified spell-checkers.
I know because I was one. Coasted for a while. Closed tickets, attended standups, kept my head down. Then I got fired. Not for screwing up but for being forgettable. The kind of engineer you can replace with a slightly better prompt.
The moment they step into unfamiliar territory, when the AI hallucinates or requires actual judgment, these "engineers" stall. They can’t reason through the unknown because they never learned to. They outsourced their critical thinking to a server farm in California. This isn’t just an "AI problem." We're doing this to ourselves. We stopped training people like apprentices. If AI handles the known problems, humans are left with the messy, chaotic, "what the fuck do we do now" problems. You can’t ChatGPT your way out of ambiguity. That capability isn’t taught via a certification. It is earned by actually working in messy situations.
The way great engineers, artists, and craftsmen used to do it: Apprenticeship. You lived with your mentor. You learned by osmosis. You built, failed, got yelled at, refined, and built again. They provided food and shelter. You provided sweat and a promise not to remain an idiot. That was the original professional contract. We just forgot it because we were too busy optimizing for "work-life balance" before we even had a life to balance.
How to stop AI from replacing you
In a company that isn't a soul-sucking void, the real contract that saves you from becoming a replaceable code-monkey is this:
We make you better
We invest in you. We give you mentorship that actually hurts. We give you exposure to problems you aren't ready for. We give you real feedback, not the "shit sandwich" HR suggests we give our juniors. We let you break things. The engineers learned by sitting next to the wizards, hearing them curse at cryptic logs (or lack thereof, which is the tale of every early startup I've worked at), and watching how they debugged. You cannot learn by osmosis if you are sitting alone in your bedroom with your Slack status set to "Away."
You make us better
This doesn't mean just closing Jira tickets. It means increasing the company’s capability. If AI handles the known problems, your job is to specialize in the unknown. The messy stuff. The stuff ChatGPT can't solve because it doesn't know our business context.
What about the money?
Money is important. I'm not asking you to ignore it. Working for money is a really good motivation. But it's not the reward you should be chasing. Growth is the actual reward. (I know, I know. That sounds like something a CEO says to justify not paying overtime.) Money is just the balancing mechanism. It’s the side effect. If you get better, the money follows (Follow the teachings of Baba Ranchoddas.).
Take a random sample of 10 engineers who had to choose between two jobs. Almost always, they choose the one that pays more. All the other factors be damned!
If you chase the money without the growth, you’re just expensive dead weight. And dead weight gets cut.
The only two questions that matter
Every 1:1 you have with your manager should boil down to two questions:
- How did you make the company better? (Did you move the needle, or did you just attend meetings?)
- Are you getting better? (Are you smarter than you were last month, or just older?)
If the answer to either is unclear, you're about to break the contract.
AI is a sword hanging over your head. It gets sharper with every new model that comes out. If you aren't getting better, you are getting cheaper to replace.
Why Lala Companies kill potential
This only works if leadership isn't full of shit. If "we make you better" turns into empty words, no mentorship, no feedback, just piling on work until you snap, then the whole thing collapses. Then it becomes manipulation: "You’re not improving, so you’re out." That’s not a contract; that’s a scam.
Most Indian startups are "Lala companies" (look it up, if you don't know what it means). If you find yourself in a chaotic "Lala" setup, you must compensate for the lack of structure by radical self-agency. Use the "We make you better" clause as a demand, not a gift.
You are responsible for your own apprenticeship. Demand exposure, not praise. If they won’t teach you, teach yourself on their time. If they won't give you context, demand context. Never stop getting better, even if your company stops caring.
That said, if the leadership actively blocks your growth for too long? Get out. Don't mistake a company's incompetence for your lack of potential.
The severance package is waiting
AI is eroding the value of shallow knowledge. The only defense is depth. Depth comes from high-agency learning. Raise your hand when you're stuck. Bother your seniors. Treat your work as an apprenticeship, not a task list.
We make you better. You make us better. That’s the trade. Take the deal, or get ready for your severance package.