I was the Neanderthal. Now I'm peddling power tools to them.

The trial by fire that taught me to see the next shift coming — and why I'd still be a Neanderthal myself.

Ryan Doubrava

— 4 min read
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The deep end

I want to tell you about the time I was so far out of my depth I was drowning.

Back in 2012 I was a wide-eyed young dev at a big defense contractor, still brimming with joy, still grappling with the gap between "professional" software development and how close the real thing ran to Dilbert. That didn't last. A few years in, I jumped to a small startup in the same industry that was mid-transition, moving all of its development, test, and production onto the cloud. Every buzzword of the era, all at once: cloud, containerization, CI/CD, DevOps, agile. Corporate waterfall to fast and furious. It was wild and refreshing.

Man, was I in over my head.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but more than once I had job applications out, actively trying to get the hell out of there before anyone figured me out. I'm not even sure what to call it. Imposter syndrome? Except I WAS inadvertently, actually, an imposter. I had unknowingly thrown myself straight into the deep end, and these were shark-infested waters where only the greatest of admirals dare venture. I was kicking for my life just to pop my head above water and suck in some air before getting pulled back under. I'd never felt such dread. I had real trouble sleeping, convinced I'd be let go any day. I hadn't earned that seat on merit, and I knew it.

Hiring was ramping fast, and in the churn of new faces my objectively unbelievably low Jira metrics had so far gone unnoticed. But it was only a matter of time. The money got tight, the way it does at startups, and the roster started thinning one standup at a time. Eventually it was my turn. Two days later I was hired back at my prior employer. Back in calm waters and close to shore. Back in charted territory where I belonged.

Trial by fire

It wasn't until later, much later, that I realized that year and a half was my trial by fire.

I'd had every intention of taking the next available life raft back to safety. Hell, I'd been actively seeking one. I was ultimately lucky one never arrived. No help was coming. Life's hard. Life doesn't play fair. Not everyone's going to make it. By all accounts I didn't make it. Not by my own doing, at least.

The fear did leave me one useful thing. I was so convinced my complete and utter incompetence was about to be discovered that, for the first time in my life, I ran our household budget and cut it deep enough that losing my paycheck wouldn't sink us — a survival hedge for the day of reckoning. That panic-budget became the seed of the financial-independence plan I still run today.

And all that forcefully induced struggle, all that furious kicking? It had quietly turned me into a navy SEAL at sea while most of my peers were still in the children's pool with floaties on. Safe and sound. Not a care in the world. I'm grateful to have been dragged through the fire. I wouldn't be who I am today without it.

Ten years of the same job

Then I spent the next decade doing the exact thing I'd just survived. Over and over.

Different companies, different programs, and underneath the org charts it was always the same tasking: help us move OUR software onto [insert latest buzzwords here]. Cloud. Containerization. DevOps. CI/CD. Same job, different software, over and over and over. The good news is it keeps getting easier each time you've done it. There's even a perk: you can see the same potholes coming from a mile out. You point them out, you raise alarms for months, and everyone still plows right into them, genuinely surprised, every time. Sometimes it feels like pointing at the pothole is what steers them into it. It never gets old.

Fast forward to about eighteen months ago, and the same thing started happening again. New words on the marquee: AI, ML, agents. Same shape. Same adoption curve. These buzzwords are probably good for the next ten years or so — unless the machines have taken over by then.

Peddling power tools

Which brings me to now, and the part where the joke turns on me.

These days I'm the one helping teams adopt the new stack, and some days it feels like I'm over here peddling power tools to Neanderthals. Every shop has them. Devs who haven't discovered an IDE yet, getting AI pushed on them from above. Devs relentlessly pasting proprietary code into chat-jippity and merging whatever it barfs out without thinking twice — like the meme with the cat jamming away at the keyboard, except everything it types is "Claude plz fix." Yup. We're definitely going places.

But here's the thing: I'd still be one of those Neanderthals myself, to be honest. Not quite grasping the full capabilities of this new-fangled power tool that's just been shoved into my hands. No training manual included. A decade ago that was me with cloud and containers shoved into my hands, and I just didn't know it yet. The only difference today is that I do.

I published the receipts last month: what an agent stack shipped for me on nights and weekends. And still, most days I'm not sure I understand a modicum of what these agents truly are. Honestly, I'm not even sure they ARE a tool to begin with. For all I know, I'M the tool. I'm the bottleneck. Every time the agents don't quite get something right, it feels like a skill issue. Missed-the-dodge-roll-in-Dark-Souls, demolished-by-the-boss skill issue.

And every day the skill gap feels like it's growing.

If you know one engineering leader figuring out where agentic tools fit in their org, forward this to them. They'll either see themselves in it — or see who they're about to become.

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