During rich years plenty of people came to the industry. Plenty of them are smart and capable, so competition will lower salaries and push some people from their levels.
And god save us if this AI thing will actually take off. It's dumb but it's progressing.
I don't see how it does anything but progress. I obviously have no idea how long it will take before it can replace a software engineer but after playing around with ChatGPT and seeing the code it can create, it's definitely progressing faster than I thought it would.
For example, when things start recovering, I'm curious how quickly companies will rush to increase comp back to recent levels, bring back cut benefits (or reduce their costs that have increasingly been passed on to the employee), change WFH policies, etc.
My gut says they will only do it when labor has leverage again, which means these companies will try to put their thumb on the scale as hard as they can to make up lost ground and then some.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/23...
Clean books, squeezed operations, cash reserves, and providing critical internet infrastructure you’re likely & able to discount at scale right now as well as foreseeable future.
Most non-tech businesses get by with, and prefer, the platform world that spoon feeds them.
It’s either a good time to be Google, or a self-funded startup. Not much in between.
Unlike the crash in '08 and '01, the economy now has a hard dependency on tech. There is no "going back" to the world of the past. Smartphones aren't going to be "un-invented". People aren't going to give up online shopping. Businesses aren't going to give up targeted advertising and start buying ads on AM Radio or something. If you look at the big picture, and barring any wild developments like general intelligence AI, the demand for skilled tech workers is only going to increase.
I don't think tech workers are invincible but I think tech is now a requirement for economic growth, which poses a problem: Business leaders and investors have been really ticked off by the tech labor shortage. They tried to fix it with H1B, they tried with all these "learn to code" programs. They tried boot camps. They keep trying, and failing, because being a software engineer requires a degree of intelligence and critical thinking and there will always be a limited supply of that kind of labor.
My pet theory is that some portion of the layoffs are being engineered to undermine the remote work revolution, scare people into accepting lower wages, and get back to "how things were". But the economic need for tech is so large and the supply of labor is so limited I don't see much changing.