[Mc91]

I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to have gotten worse at the beginning of this year, although it varies, some people with certain AI-related skills are doing well.

In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.

Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).

[NetOpWibby]

This is what I come to HN for. The perspective of OGs mean you can see patterns where the rest of us are too zoomed in to notice (or even know).

[hn_throwaway_99]

Well, as another "OG", I'll give you a contrary opinion.

Yes, absolutely, business cycles come and go. But I think there is a really large shift in the overall "technology mindset", and this is something that does feel very new.

I would say that from at least the 70s (just using that because it's my birth decade) up until the mid 2010s or so, pretty much everyone viewed technology as the main driver for societal progress. Sure, there were definitely scary parts of technology (leaded gas, nuclear weapons), but people still felt overall that improvements in technology would lead to improvements in people's lives.

I'm not so sure that optimism exists anymore, nor do I necessarily think it should. I see so much of the tech industry not focused on how to improve people's lives with technology, but on things like how can we addict people to dopamine spikes, or how can we insert ourselves as an intermediary that vacuums up all the profit due to many technologies' natural tendency toward monopoly. I see technology as the primary cause of what I consider the slowly increasing societal disintegration that is happening across many countries.

Even with technology like AI which I think has a huge potential to aid humanity, my greater fear is that it will just lead to much greater concentration of wealth and power and the expense of everyone else.

For sure, part of my pessimism probably comes from the timeline of my career, which started during the extreme optimism of the 90s, when we all thought that the Internet was going to democratize societies even more and that it was going to "bring us all together". When you feel like the opposite happened, it can be tough to come to terms with that.

[olelele]

I am a bit younger and not a computer tech person per se but I agree completely.

[red-iron-pine]

post-WW2 optimism that is now dying off with the last of the Greatest Generation and their kids, the Boomers.

by the 1970s the post-WW2 boom was over and the 80s were full of doom and gloom -- and then tech exploded and there was all this new growth. but now capitalism did what it does and we're back to the 80s again, this time with China instead of Japan.

[hn_throwaway_99]

As someone who remembers the 80s quite well, I think it's a giant mistake to just say this is some kind of cyclical, "Oh, it's like the 80s again" moment.

While I don't want to delve too much into politics, I think the situation at the moment in the US is without precedent at least since the Civil War. And the tech situation is far, far different. I know a lot of people seem to think that folks who point out societal concerns with tech are "Luddites", and love to give (IMO very poor) analogies like "it's just like buggy whip manufacturers!", but I think we're at a point where tech, either now or very shortly in the future, will start to kill off more jobs than it creates (and, if you think about it, in some sense that is actually the point of many technologies), and modern society is far from figuring out how to function if most people can't make a living by selling their labor.

Again, I totally agree that on one hand there are standard business cycle forces at play, but there are other longer term forces that have been building steam for decades, and I think it's a mistake to confuse these two things.