The Commencement Address Nobody Asked Me To Deliver

You've made it! You've arrived. Past quarantines, past all the horrible flavors of lockdowns – to be here, degree in hand, with your toes just over the edge into adulthood. You deserve high praise and a hearty celebration for even making it out of the shit show that encompassed your high school and college years.

And now, as you smile into your phone at arms length in celebration, with your knees reflexively bowed for the photo, you may still believe the old tale that if you just grind hard enough – if you memorize every freaking sorting algorithm and nail that behavioral about “that time you showed leadership” (which was really just texting Tommy to finally finish his part for the group project) —you'll be tapped to ascend to the promised land of that cushy software developer gig on the colorful campus with free food and dry-cleaning and unlimited everything.

But here’s the deal: you've arrived at the exact moment the bartender called last call.


It wasn't long ago when a Computer Science degree felt like a golden ticket. With the degree in your back pocket, landing that big tech job was proof of your intellectual superiority and mastery of the grind. This uber-geek, Big Bang Theory mythology has been a proven path for the past decade – especially during the pandemic years when hiring managers acted like it was Black Friday and engineers were flat-screen TVs. Money was free, venture capital flowed, and companies hired entire engineering teams “just in case” they needed them later. The pandemic had changed humanity, or at least consumer behavior, and our almost-self-driving-car-future had finally, and fully, arrived. Return those work pants, delete your commute: it's pajamas 24/7 from here until we land on Mars.

But we didn’t notice the hangover brewing. 2022 hit like a freight train carrying fat tax bills and return-to-office, while tossing many well-planned careers overboard.

The Fed cranked up interest rates because inflation wasn't so transitory after all. Suddenly that free money wasn’t free anymore, it had compound interest and uncomfortable questions attached. Companies that had been burning cash to fuel growth suddenly had to explain why they needed seven different engineers working on the rollover state for the same login button.

The tax code flipped up it's collar and decided to sneak into the party: R&D spending that used to be a tax write-off became a multi-year commitment, turning every developer hire from a quarterly expense into a five-year mortgage on uncertainty.

And while the pandemic showed that decades of Agile practice made for a seamless transition to remote work, the spreadsheet class quickly realized that if Sarah can write flawless typescript from her apartment in Portland, why can’t Miguel do the same thing from Santiago for a fraction of the cost? Those pandemic Zoom standups that proved we could work from anywhere accidentally proved we could be replaced from anywhere, too.


Not to mention the deep hum in the background. You can hear it, even if you don’t pay attention. And no, that's not your hangover, or the sound of layoffs (those sound like a sawtooth wave with some clipping, at least to me).

No, it’s a deep resonant drone – maybe a sine wave with gently oscillating tremolo – awakening the culture we've stored in our societal bedrock, fracking piece by piece to the surface. This is the arrival of AI, transforming into an incredibly valuable, super useful, general purpose tool, and a damn good coder, to boot. I'm sure AI helped you rip through your homework, finish your essays, tell off your ex before you blocked them, and then sent out a hundred internship applications. Am I wrong? Ah, right. Two hundred internship applications, then.

AI is a fantastic technology – an amphetamine for productivity junkies – but like some horror movie where your new roommate is eating your leftovers and then starts stealing your friends, AI is now offering to actually do that entry-level job you've coveted. That job that used to go to a person with a CS degree in their back pocket.

If, at this moment, you're questioning your decision to get that degree—no doubt the leaders at this imaginary institution are now questioning who the hell invited me to speak at your commencement—I'm here to offer some potentially comforting predictions about the chaos that envelops us. I must admit, I come to you not from the future but from the past (so past performance does not guarantee future results, etcetera.), as a Gen-Xer who survived and rode the first bubble. Not tulips, ya damn punks, I mean Web One Point Oh, the original internet revolution.

My first point is mere observation, but has potential as a salve: none of the chaos I mentioned had anything to do with you. Call it bad timing, call it a twist of fate, call it bullshit. As Buddha or Belichick said, "It is what it is."

The second is a truth you should learn sooner rather than later:

Chutes and Ladders.

The old game had rules we could memorize: climb the corporate ladder, avoid the chutes, collect your rewards at the top. But the board got flipped sometime around 2022, and now we're staring at a piece of cardboard wondering what game we're supposed to be playing.

Universities and the industry are scrambling to figure out what computer science education should even look like when AI can write code. The ladder didn't get knocked down—it got optimized out of existence. And now all the career advice turns whisper quiet, but I'll say it in full voice: the death of the old path might be the best thing that happens to you.

When the guaranteed path disappears, you stop asking "How do I get the job?" and start asking "What job should exist?" The same forces that destroyed the junior developer market also democratized every tool you need to build whatever you want. GitHub Copilot generates boilerplate faster than we can type it. ChatGPT debugs logic errors. Claude Code is fun and super promising.

Now that money costs money again, we're forced into a deeper question: What value do we add that can't be automated, offshored, or optimized away? Remote work proved that code is code regardless of zip code.

The friend who pivoted from chasing FAANG to building inventory monitoring software didn't step down—she stepped sideways into work that can't be deprecated in five years. The guy laid off from the social media optimization team now builds tools and integrations for small businesses that can't afford enterprise software. All tech isn't just Big Tech. Software is everywhere. The spiral career path isn't replacing the ladder. It's revealing that the ladder was always a mirage.

This isn't about becoming an entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley sense—raising millions to disrupt english muffins or whatever-the-fuck. It's about recognizing that when the guardrails disappear, you can build roads that go places the old highways never reached. And these roads don't run in straight lines. They spiral.

Maybe this economic hangover is exactly the intervention we all needed, because that golden ticket was always printed with disappearing ink, anyway. But this is what I am here to celebrate at your commencement: the spiral is better than the ladder ever was.

You gain altitude with every loop—more skill, more clarity, more conviction about who you are and what actually matters. Your career isn't chutes and ladders. It's an upward spiral. And if you take a look back behind you, and your years and your accomplishments and your friends from this glorious, difficult and invaluable time here at school, you'll notice you're already climbing.