Responding To “What The Heck Is Going On In The Tech Industry Right Now?” Readers
Mostly Oana, in the form of rambling
This comment above in my last article has been bothering me for days…the most mature, productive catharsis I could think of was writing a subsequent article that was 100% rambling. You think THAT was rambling? It was actually one of the more researched and focused things I have written. Oana, you should see my other articles.
Prepare yourselves, readers, for an article that is 0% research and 100% my own personal thoughts on the economy, the tech industry, and negative comments like Oana’s.
We Are, And Always Have Been, Tied To The Market
It seems pretty obvious to write that anyone who works at a company they do not own, for a paycheck, is tied to market forces that are beyond their control. Even the often optimistic channel “Fireship” describes programmers as pawns.
But like pawns, Fireship continues, programmers are important to the game because they can become queens. To do this, they must be able to survive the aggressive maneuvers of predatory pieces that are seemingly more powerful. Eventually, by the time they reach the 6th or 7th row, they become a true game-changer.
Okay, Fireship said the first part. I made the rest of it up.
The comment above is the longest and most complex one I have received. In the second half, which I have truncated, Bob says he has continuously adapted and never boxed himself in, to the point that he has dug literal ditches for cables, climbed telephone poles, worked as a network admin, and worked security.
The Finance Rabbit Hole
I am going to go on a pretty long tangent here, but believe me when I say I am going somewhere with it. Eventually. At some point.
For the most part, I have been a fan of Graham Stephan for some time. He has received a quite of backlash for sponsoring FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that was most likely committing massive fraud, which in hindsight made actual financial advisers look good for turning down lucrative promotional deals with cryptocurrency and NFT companies that looked suspicious. This led to lots of comments on how Graham Stephan and influencers are unreliable resources, but even Jim Cramer, someone who used to manage a hedge fund, has made enormous mistakes.
I grew increasingly concerned about the market as a whole, and the thought that it is a complex, tremendously important system that even extremely smart people do not understand. I watched a video about the Dot Com Bubble. I bought a bunch of books I might never read that seemed to be from credible sources, like Malkiel and Eisenmann. Maybe understanding the market is a lot more important than understanding tech. But how much time would it take to truly understand the market?
Anyway, back to Bob…
Inflation was the first domino. Nobody is mentioning interest rates is this particular comment section, but I think that’s because it’s part of the reaction. As Bob writes above, interest rates increased in an attempt to curb inflation.
Multiple Income Streams
Thanks for your comment, Jed May. When I wrote about multiple income streams, it was in response to a few comments I have seen on LinkedIn — people kind of brush off concerns, and say the key is multiple passive income streams.
So actually, I am critical of the claim that in uncertain times, the key is to have multiple passive income streams. I think it is advice that is too generic to be helpful for most people. Is investing a good strategy? Yes, if you have money to invest. I found a video I liked quite a lot about tech layoffs, which I will link below, but the tl;dr is someone arguing that companies do not care about us.
Which is helpful. Sort of. She personally moved to content creation as a steady stream of income. First of all, this is not passive income. Second, content creation monetization is difficult for the majority of people. Data point of just me, but my Medium earnings dropped from $100 to less than $40 in a month. Not only is this a huge drop, it also reminds me that even $100 a month is not enough money to do very much.
I am not a fan of hustle culture. If we can’t work reasonable hours, have hobbies, and have families, then this is not worth it.
“What Is It You Were Trying To Say?”
I have not been accused of clickbait. Yet. I am sure the accusation will come eventually, and I am just delaying the inevitable.
“What The Heck Is Going On In The Tech Industry?” was used as a title because I thought it would receive more clicks than “This Is What Is Going On In The Tech Industry.” I would argue that NOT everyone knew tech companies were cutting staff when the article was written. We also did not all know that it was because they were losing money. Some people thought it was just Twitter and Meta.
If you already knew this, then you probably did not learn anything from my article. It was: Layoffs are happening in the tech industry, in contrast to these archived articles about how well the tech industry was doing just a few months ago. Relax. It will be okay.
Furries The Gathering
When I read this comment, I actually thought that maybe “Furries The Gathering” was a real app that raised millions of dollars, so to find out what I was missing I googled that name in quotes.
Thanks for putting that on my search history, Walter…
CNBC
When I called CNBC the best news source, I was half-joking. It is simply one of the only news sources I like that ALSO does not have a paywall.
I think the media attention Twitter is getting is pretty interesting. I tried writing about Elon Musk on this blog, but no one really paid attention.
Will Twitter fail, or will it flourish? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Every news outlet I can find, other than Fox (which argues the exact opposite), claims that Elon Musk is driving Twitter into the ground. I think everyone outside the company is operating on incomplete information.
On the other side, this Fox News Opinion Piece argues that Elon Musk is saving the company, tactfully trimming the fat and streamlining it to the point that it will succeed.
Overpaid Tech Workers
I saw a really similar comment to this. I wish I remembered where it was, but it said something like: Look at a map. Look at California. Wow, there’s a LOT of country east of that. Get a tech job in one of the companies somewhere else, and maybe you won’t get free kombucha every day but you will still find steady work.
I could find YouTube videos from just a few months ago about the prestige FAANG holds. Every time I open LinkedIn, I find a sponsored post promising new grads $300K salaries if they take their $5000 course.
Final Comment
Thanks for this, Éric Vallée.
That tech layoffs video I linked earlier shares a hypothetical scenario. You get a job at a FAANG company, so you buy a house that costs $2 million. For the Bay Area, this is not a crazy sum of money.
Or…maybe it is. Maybe it always was. Maybe these kinds of problems were self-inflicted.
It seems like a bleak way to end on that note, so I guess I will just say that I don’t know what will happen next.
No one does.
