> Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating.
I very much agree.
A lot of tech job growth during the late 2010 and pandemic period were frankly BS for a ROI perspective. Late 2010s was really the first time in tech that I started to feel like most of the stuff that needed to be built was built, and increasingly I was working on BS projects offering less and less value every year.
Consider:
- In the 80s developers were needed to write fundamental business software for word processing and spreadsheets
- In the 90s computers became mainstream and there was a huge demand for consumer software
- In the 00s the internet took off and we needed people build the web
- In the 10s the smart phone revolutionised computing and we needed people to build apps and rebuild websites to be mobile-first
But towards the late 10s entrepreneurs and investors seemingly ran out of no-brainer tech investments so increasingly started trying mental stuff still promising tech-like returns – block-chain, metaverse, Web 3.0, [insert traditional industry here] but a tech company.
I'm not saying there's nothing to build or maintain anymore, but I also no longer see where people think the exponential need for new software and software developers could come from, and I suspect this would have become obvious earlier if it wasn't for ZIRP.
But it's not a lack of productive things to build. We also have other trends hurting demand for new SWEs today. Consider how today completely non-technical people can start and scale an ecommerce company without any developers. Things that would have taken armies of developers just 10-15 years ago, can now be largely done in an afternoon on platforms like Shopify. It's actual hard to believe that just 15 years ago selling things online used to be very hard if you weren't technical.
Similarly starting in the early 2010s even being a developer got significantly easier because increasingly there was packages for everything. Things I might have spent weeks building before could now be built in days or less. And another thing that changed was sites like stackoverflow and blogs which help you solve problems and learn new skills. I remember trying to learn how to do things before 2010s was hard, and before the 00s it very hard.
And of course now we also have AI coding tools which don't just hurt the overall demand for developers, but effectively expands the supply of developers to anyone with an internet connection and computer.
So to summerise:
- There's much fewer good investments to be made in new software today.
- Where there are investments to be made you need far less developers.
- When you need developers there's far more people who can do the job.
Even if tech companies are doing well and the number of tech jobs is increasingly, the above means the average person trying to find a job in tech today will find it much, much harder than they have in the past. People working in tech today genuinely should consider a career change if they're primarily in tech for the money.