technology

everybody believes every sector bounces back until a specific one doesn't and stays gone for 20+ years.

even then, someone can get elected and cake up by promising to get it back.

i was in the exhausted, abandoned Appalachian coal fields in the 2010s and there were plenty of small business tyrants in ghost towns eager to believe coal was just about to come back when obama ruined everything.

its not to say many, if not most, totally knew shit was over and never coming back. but the true believers tended to be in charge of shit, threw their weight around more, and acted like naysayers were gonna undermine the comeback with their lack of faith.

You should ask those people in what sense is the market going to come back up and what the timeline is.

Is it going to go back up in the sense that the oversupply of CS graduates will be solved? Probably.

Is it going to go back up in the sense that CS graduates will be given 6 figure salaries and VIP treatment? 0% chance.

It may be cope.

I do think tech is more likely to "bounce back" than a lot of other industries. Like some people here are comparing it to extractive industries that never came back but I think demand for tech innovation is probably going to remain a lot more consistent (baring societal collapse) than demand for coal or timber or whatever.

I do think it will continue to be a less prestigious and well compensated field, as more people learn tech skills employers will have less need to lavish talent with high pay and job perks.

I fundamentally believe we can’t engineer software anymore. Like how we can’t manufacture anything anymore. So I don’t think there will be more tech growth in western nations. A good number of my high tech friends work for companies based in other nations. Open source software for my field is mostly Chinese contribution. I’m in the late stages of the interview process for an Indian company. I live in Silicon Valley.

im honestly even skeptical the AI bubble popping will make AI go away. I think we're more likely to see a 2000s situation where the bottom falls out, the actually dominant companies remain, and we find ourselves dealing with the one or two companies appointed to carry it forward. Consolidation, not outright destruction.

which depresses the unholy fuck out of me

the way power and capital are all in on it conceptually - it just does too many things that serve them - they want the skilled labor elimination, they want the information control, they want the thing to mature enough to be an entertainment replacement.

i frankly half expect, a decade from now, seeing AI companies buying out entertainment companies and industries and just shuttering them so that people have to use their product. e.x.: buying up instrument creators so you have to either be wealthy or capitulate and use a LLM to do that labor for you.

the future is bleak, and the way they want that technology to develop, and the sheer amount of money and "were forcing this down your throats" that's happening in several places and in several sectors of the economy - i absolutely despise i have to talk to an AI chatbot to apply to certain jobs now, but that's psychologically conditioning the workforce to accept and use it at the point of a gun, and it'll work over time if it is allowed to continue.

I am pretty sure tech is about to devour itself entirely, leaving everything even more consolidated and what's left even more entrenched in our lives, with more power to influence and demand presence in the zeitgeist, no matter what the average person wants.

Like, yall, we need to be thinking really hard about what that technology is intended to do and the logical consequences of it persisting. Do not sit and hope the old normal will return. Historically this has never fucking happened. The .com crash did not kill the internet, it just heralded the end of it as a frontier.

I imagine that the amount of useful activities which can be performed on a computer remaining which haven't been implemented in some form of application or digital service is virtually zero. The tech industry boomed in the 90s because consumer access to PC hardware and the Internet was skyrocketing. It boomed again in the 00s-10s because smartphones filled a niche which computers couldn't, and consumer access skyrocketed further. Today, the market is saturated and there are no meaningful hardware innovations left to make, no new apps to write.

Of course, all this existing software and IT infrastructure requires maintenance, but the era of "upstart" VC-backed apps/websites becoming multi-billion dollar firms is finished. With "AI," we've reached the mountaintop removal phase of a dying industry.

In hindsight, the writing was already on the wall when they started introducing shit like smart ovens and washing machines. They already ran out of runway.

For the last decade or so, the tech jobs market has been dominated by big tech hiring everyone they can, so they can't wander off on their own and make new competitors. That's predicated on big tech having so much money that they can't find anything more useful to spend it all on. It won't continue past the tech growth stock bubble, whenever it pops. (Which might not be the pop we're currently headed for; if it's just AI instead of the whole thing somehow, then those jobs will bounce back.)

On the positive side, if that ever stops, some of the unemployed tech workers will make actually useful things, some of which will become businesses that can hire the other tech workers. This is more like how it worked in the early 2000s.

However, those new tech companies have to actually make money somehow, which means somebody has to be able to afford their products, which means new tech will be beholden to the shape of the wider economy. For example, currently startups are all B2B, because businesses have money and consumers don't. In a wide scale economic downturn where businesses are cutting costs, even those B2B startups won't be able to find customers, so they'll have to fold (or just not get founded).

So I don't think the market is going to recover to the old maximum, and afterwards it'll be much more cyclical, following the rest of the economy along whatever nonsense it does.

Depends on a few things.

• Does the definition of "tech sector" broaden to essentially the entire economy? Hard to think of a large company that doesn't have some kind of tech department outside of IT at this point. However, when people say "tech sector" they're mostly talking about the big FAANG (or whatever the acronym is now) companies where you make lots of money working for a somewhat prestigious brand. Safe bet is the number of jobs requiring tech skills will increase overall, but probably won't pay as well.
• Does AI actually pan out well enough to replace coders within the next few years? If so it will eat entry-level programming jobs first, but I think it will be quite a while before AI is effectively writing OS or database code further down the stack. Thus the task for tech workers becomes specializing faster than AI can. However, the issue with specialized jobs is that there are fewer of them. And they are more difficult, technically.
• People are bad at predicting markets and are almost always cursed to become "bagholders" (here, of a CS degree presumably) perpetually waiting for the market to hit again. Psychologically it is very difficult to break out of this state and accept the good times aren't coming back, due to the FOMO of bailing right before the long-awaited gigantic green candle. However, the analogy breaks down here because while skills do decay with lack of practice, the fundamental programming skill is more like riding a bike - you don't forget. Thus if you retrain as an electrician or something it isn't unthinkable you could switch back to programming when times get better.

Personally I think it’s a bit of cope, but it’s also realistic that there is a bounce back.

Unless there is a societal collapse, there will always be a tech industry. However, not to the level it was. I think it will be more of a correction than anything.

You now basically have a basket-weaving degree.

Absolutely nobody could have predicted the current state of things based on Attention Is All You Need. Tech moves so quickly and unpredictably that trying to predict another 7 years is an easy way to make a fool of yourself. Someone could introduce an alternative to transformer architecture that makes AGI possible, Google Glass might catch on for real this time, companies might start generating content to increase engagement, as opposed to just recommending it, photonic chips might create a breakthrough in compute, or some secret other thing that nobody realized. Personally, I see robotics as a field with a lot of achievable progress to be made. Self driving cars already exist, and the market for them is real. Airlines are looking at single pilot cockpits, the demand and theoretical feasibility for fully autonomous forklifts exist, and tons of other things. The world hasn't run out of software to build yet.

LLMs are good enough at coding now to replace the average fresh comp sci graduate. You still need a couple senior people to check the output, but tech companies don't need nearly as many grunts as they used to. It's very possible that AI will plateau where it is now for a long time and the people with experience get to keep their jobs, but it's gonna be brutal for newcomers from now on.