A friend of mine, bright, driven, and relatively new to programming, asked me a heavy question the other day. “Did I make a mistake? Did I choose the right career?” The question hung in the air. It wasn’t born from a bad day or a frustrating bug. It came from a much deeper place of anxiety, one that I suspect many in our industry are feeling right now. They saw recent waves of layoffs, they read the headlines about Artificial Intelligence, and they felt the ground shifting under their feet. The ...