Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

For most of my career, the plan was simple: get good. Be better at the craft than I was last year, and let that be my security. It worked for a long time, right up until I watched “good” get cheaper. The tools raised the floor for everyone. Competent stopped being rare, because competent became something you could increasingly generate on demand.

That was unsettling at first, and then it pointed me somewhere better. If being good is no longer scarce, the thing worth aiming for is being hard to copy. Not just skilled — skilled in a combination that can’t be swapped out for a tool or a fresh hire.

Anyone can prompt the model now. Far fewer people can pair deep technical skill with real judgment, with taste, with a genuine understanding of a particular domain and the people in it. Each of those on its own is common. Stacked together, in one person, they get rare fast — and rare is what stays valuable when the ordinary stuff gets automated.

So I stopped only trying to climb the single ladder of “better engineer” and started building an intersection instead. The specific mix of things I know and care about, that few other people combine, in the corner where my particular judgment can’t be commoditized.

The goal shifted from good to rare. Because in a world where the floor keeps rising, the safe place to stand isn’t higher on the same crowded ladder. It’s at a corner very few people occupy.

– Serguey Asael Shinder