Someone who I used to work with asked me to write a take on what’s going on in the tech industry right now. Lots of folks are worried, some are losing jobs, stocks are down - the sky is falling!
I don’t really have any magic answers, but I have a few thoughts. One is that these things do happen - it’s just been a while since the last one happened. Tech, like other businesses, is cyclical - we invest in a lot of new ideas, some work out, many don’t, there’s a period of reckoning and then recovery, and the cycle starts again.
This will happen here. There are new things coming. Remember - big new things always have doubters, always have problems at first. The right question is “what if”, not “why not”. The right place to ask that question right now is AI. There’s a lot of skepticism (some of it justified), but it’s possible to see lots of good progress (like the image generators, or LLMs) that are capable of unlocking huge value for end users.
And that’s really the point of all of this - we (as an industry) solve problems for people, using tech/software, at scale. A lot of the things that are very far down right now (social media, crypto) are things that haven’t done a great job of solving real problems for people or have extracted value or created externalities in excess of the problems they do solve - of course they are going to run out of steam eventually.
But the companies (and engineers) who stay focused on adding real value, solving real problems, will always do well eventually. And downturns can be very healthy, even if painful - most big companies are founded in downturns because it instills them with a better sense of discipline and value creation. When there is too much easy money flowing, you wind up having to compete with “dumb” companies - if someone is doing your exact thing but giving users a free $1 to use it, there’s no way to compete with them, even though they will eventually run out of money and fail.
The new wave of tech that’s coming will be disruptive, exciting, scary, challenging, and full of false starts as well as triumphs. But it’s coming. Do what we do: keep your tools sharp, learn the new stuff, look for hard problems to solve…do the engineering!