When network engineering gets hard (and it always does), most engineers retreat into one of two worlds

Naive Optimism: The world where you tell yourself “AI won’t affect my role,” where every automation trend is overhyped and where the future feels safe because the past felt familiar. This mindset avoids the uncomfortable truth and clings to blind confidence.

Hopeless Realism: The world where every advancement in AI feels like a threat, where every new automation tool signals your eventual replacement, where you face the facts but lose hope in your ability to adapt. Engineers in this group freeze, panic, or quietly disengage.

But the people who thrive in this new era are the ones who grow stronger as AI reshapes the industry. They don’t live in either extreme. They operate at the collision of those two worlds.

They blend Naive Optimism and Hopeless Realism into something far more powerful: practical, resilient, reality-based confidence.

This mindset has a name: The Stockdale Paradox.

And it’s exactly the mindset engineers need right now.

Just like Admiral Stockdale, who survived because he held two truths at once, engineers must do the same:

The Engineer’s Stockdale Paradox

1. An unwavering belief that you will remain relevant because you can learn, adapt, and reinvent yourself.
2. A clear-eyed acceptance that AI is changing the field; the tasks, the expectations, the skills, the pace.

The first keeps you hopeful, curious, and open to transformation. The second keeps you honest, focused, and prepared for what’s coming.

You need both to survive a career shaped by AI and to grow because of it.

If you can look directly at the uncomfortable realities of the modern networking world; automation taking over ticket work, AI diagnosing issues, LLMs assisting configs and still believe you can carve out a future in this new landscape.

You become unbeatable.

The engineers who thrive in the AI era aren’t the ones who deny what’s happening. And they aren’t the ones who collapse under fear.

They’re the ones who hold the paradox:

See the truth clearly. Believe in yourself anyway.