I kinda reassessed who is benefiting and the actual importance of a lot of the work you do. Even though it's all framed as 'mission driven' and 'Changing the world' a lot of it really is only important so some mega corp can make a couple extra points on their stock.
I've talked to a bunch of people in the industry that had similar realizations. I've heard things like 'it's not something I can do today, but in x years . . .'
I believe there were a lot of people who reassessed an have a different view and that is and will continue to change the trajectory of many tech careers over the coming decade.
For instance, writing jobs pay terribly overall, with the quantity of them going down a lot due to the decline of traditional media and the advent of AI. Unless you've got a FAANG income nest egg or a trust fund to rely on, I wouldn't recommend anyone get into this kind of work as their main career, regardless of how fulfilling it might be.
Ultimately I suspect many people will be forced to try and stick out this recession/downturn just because tech is their best bet of a decent living.
My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018. Her reason more or less amounted to looking at me and determining "it's a cushy job that pays very well." For a while, I tried pointing her to various sources to start learning a bit about software development and programming; there's no barrier to installing PyCharm CE and Github, after all. But there was zero interest and zero natural curiosity. She just did some certificate coursework, passed, then started looking for a job, and nothing beyond that.
In a lot of ways, software developer has been brought down to earth as a more "normal" career. You don't really hear about lawyers working on passion law projects at night or mechanical engineers designing skyscrapers as a hobby; the path for that is just go to school -> get internship -> get fulltime job -> do your 9-5.
The thing is, my partner isn't alone. She represents the vast, vast majority of new software developers in the past 15 years. The industry has grown, the pay has exploded, people who worked retail could parlay a 6-week bootcamp into a six-figure salary. Obviously people would hop in even if they didn't know what a compiler was.
But in a post-ZIRP world companies are seriously reevaluating the value of the average software developer. In 2010, a software dev was far more likely to have at least some personal interest in software, or even just computers in general. Now, you have software developers who never touched an actual, non-phone/tablet computer before entering their university courses. They're not stupid--they can pass a leetcode interview just fine--they just don't care about technology beyond using it as a means to pay rent.
Even if we return to near-ZIRP, there's going to be less demand for massive software dev teams. Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% to cut.
So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.
What do you mean this revelation was recently demonstrated by Elon? The NATO Software Engineering Conference 1968 paper talks about the problems of having too many programmers of low skill. The 1969 paper talks about the same thing. Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man Month in 1975, covering this topic extensively. This has been talked about extensively for over half a century with regards to software, it wasn't just discovered by Elon in the last year.
You mean because he fired a lot of people and the website is still up?
Revenue has been falling precipitously. I'm not sure anything has been demonstrated yet.
If I remember correctly, he reduced the content moderation team, which led to an increase in hate speech, misinformation and CSAM. That's why big advertisers left and revenues crashed.
He then told those big advertisers to piss off and refocused his advertising business on smaller customers, which is why he doesn't need so many ad sales people any more.
Perhaps he should hire some developers and data scientists to better automate content moderation.
Advertisers leaving is a combination of instability caused by Musk's impulsive decision-making, uninformed bandwagoning based on the perception projected by aforementioned MSM and parrots (AKA peer pressure), and the state of the economy combined with the above forcing them to reevaluate their investments. Advertisement revenue has been dropping everywhere as it turns out.
You may ot even be wrong about "peer pressure", but that's how so much of the rest of the world works. Part of the downturn isnt based on economic logic but peer pressure: "BigCo is sizing down so we should too!". The aforementioned brand perception is the exact same way, but based on the consumers over the company. The Stock market as a whole is literally based on speculation.
As long as stuff is run by peoople, people will influence other people to make decisions based more on gut feelings than raw facts.
Most of the business models in tech are unsustainable. The ad-revenue driven explosion of the Internet over the past ~15 years has long since reached saturation. The data mines are all tapped out, and what have we learned? Mostly, nothing. Following a person's habits can help you target ads and drive them towards (mostly) unnecessary consumption. Then what?
Without ZIRP we're going to run out of the easy credit fueling such consumption. The economic hamster wheel is going to have to slow down. Then the realization that the SnR on the data being collected is practically 0 will set in. An immense amount of investment dollars was thrown at companies that charge nothing to the end user but collect and sell data to third parties. Yet that data is almost completely worthless.
I personally think fee-for-service is eventually going to make a (bigger) comeback, though another round or two of ZIRP might stave it off for awhile. As it does return, it is going to put even more pressure on companies to run lean teams.
This happened after the dot-com burst in 2000. At that time there were a lot of people in Tech who would have otherwise gone into marketing, accounting or whatever.
A lot of these moved out of tech into other fields. Or they moved into less technical roles like project manager or management.
1. I don't like the implication that junior = non-passionate. I'd even argue the opposite. Those new and hungry are most likely to be exploited and take whatever over the grizzled vet who's long had reality slap them in the face. There will always be non-passionate people but well: that falling passion seems to correlate quite well with the falling passion of companies to even pretend they want to better the world. Tit for tat.
2. The downturn is very much not correlated with passion. I've seen some 9-5'ers survive several rounds of layoffs and I've seen some of the hardest working engineers with almost a decade of experience slashed to the surprise of everyone. You look further in industry and you see some vets of even 15,20+ years cut. This isn't some calculated move to "drain the swamp". As usual, corporate is throwing darts on the board instead of seeing what each engineer brings to the table. If you're unlucky enough to be working on the wrong product at the wrong time (which at this point is just anything non-AI. Nothing is safe), it doesn't matter how talented you are.
The games industry is very much full of underpaid, underappreciated passion and is being hit just as hard as the rest of tech, so passion clearly isn't the answer to job security.
Early? If you've been in tech (or any job, really) for 35 to 40 years you're going to be in your 60s (or close) which is a normal time to retire.
Now people who have run faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill with their inflated tech salaries, they are going to be in trouble.
This is especially true if you consider salaries world wide vs just the United States.
With so many people looking for work at the moment, I think a lot of these same companies have kind of a big head about themselves. Interviewing always sucks, but having to jump through a bunch of hoops, be ignored, or ghosted by some dopey SaaS company is really discouraging for a lot of people.
I myself decided to take a sabbatical so as not to deal with all this right now.
I of course can't speak for everyone, but I imagine there will be more startups/small companies forming over the next few years from people that were otherwise satisfied at BigCo. Tech has definitely felt like it devolved to being a cog in the wheel of raw profits over a field of innovation meant to make lives easier. You can't really get that back without sizing down.
If you can hold on to a job in a downturn, it’s a good opportunity to invest when the market is lower (which interestingly is not exactly the case now) so that you can benefit from it later.
But I guess the best time to quit is when you’re ready. Regardless of where in the cycle it is.
Also, this isn't a "downturn"...the companies are mostly doing better than ever. This is a permanent restructuring in resource allocation. Companies are going to shrink headcount even as their businesses flourish.