this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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its bad, but this also happened in the late 90s with the dotcom bust. people thought similar things because so many high salary tech jobs were laid off. it wasn't just the bubble bursting, it was capital "discovering" outsourcing could cover their technical needs at a fraction of the cost.
that was the dominant vibe when i was in school, and it soured a lot of interest in tech as a secure/stable profession at the time.
this is the nature of capital and in my opinion, the only real maneuver to mitigate it (besides insurrection) is to not put all your skill/knowledge/development points just into tech. pair it with something you have an interest in (medicine/public health, education, etc) and get a formal credential in that field. then you're not just a tech person, you're a [the other thing] with advanced technical skills who can communicate with the jargon, see the broader context, and propose solutions.
narrow, singular specialization is a risky gamble. some people absolutely make it work and bank, but i think they're the exception over time with these cyclical contractions.
I’ve considered doing exactly that, so good to hear it’s not a bad idea. Feel insane wanting to switch things up when I have a job in this kind of job market, but I also cant imagine doing this until I retire.
i sort of accidentally did it after being burnt out from ~6 years in IT, mostly helpdesking/repair/network integration/sysadmin. i lost my shit and did scut work on farms for some years, then went to school for ag, yadda yadda yadda. the tech skills never really go away, because in my new line it would always get around that i could fix tech shit, recommend solutions, and muddle my way through learning new/confusing technologies being adopted. it gave me a foot in the door everywhere, because every org has tech debt. especially non profits, but they can rarely afford a full-time IT person who only does that. everybody doing weird shit needs multidiscipline flex players, not specialists.
the last two times i have felt "stuck" by an employer being unreasonable, within 6 months of starting a job search i get an offer from a place i want to work and they treat me like a warlock who has blended two oppositional schools of magic.
as a mostly monolingual anglo dumbass, i imagine its how truly multilingual codeswitchers feel in a dysfunctional border region or some colonial diaspora.zone.