Tech runs in cycles.
There are times when tech needs workers desperately, and there are times when tech needs money just as desperately. There are times when tech is overvalued, and times when it’s undervalued.
Today tech is both overvalued and short of cash. Will the market notice that Meta has become AT&T, and start valuing it that way?
If it does, watch out!
Building a career in this environment is tough. When the work isn’t around you train, and you contribute, without regard to the money. Maybe you live at home. The joke about 30-somethings in mom’s basement? It’s a real thing.
This life is not for everyone. I know of a Rice Ph.D, a biochemist, who found himself in a failed start-up during one of these times. He became a stand up comic.
For tech 2025 is the best of times and the worst of times. There are trillions of dollars going into new tech infrastructure. AI has created an enormous shortage of computer power, and customers will gladly pay for more of it. Suppliers of computing power are struggling to keep up. They don’t look like they’re struggling, thanks to enormous market caps, but they are struggling. Those market caps are all that’s keeping them going, they must be protected, so they’re looking for every dime they can find under the seat cushions.
Employees represent those dimes. I wrote for years about how software was the last product that is made by hand, but AI is the automated loom. Coding has been replaced by editing, and by conceptualizing. People whose first language is C++ instead of English are no longer wanted or needed.
Where Is the Hope
It’s been this way since I started covering technology in 1982. You’re not “updating” your skills. You must acquire whole new ones and there’s no school for it.
But there are foundations. The Internet is filled with open source foundations, places where you can learn about AI, become part of a community, and gain new skills that will be valuable once the tide turns.
When this happened a quarter century ago, I went through two years with zero income. We only kept my heads above water thanks to my darling wife. It was a struggle, and our family never completely recovered from it. I went from being an e-commerce expert to a semiconductor market consultant to an open source expert, over the course of four hard years.
Of course, I was in my 40s then. From 70, 49 looks pretty good.
The point is that there are opportunities if you can take them. It’s going to be harder this year, because the wealthy driving the national train are as high on their own power as Casey Jones in the Grateful Dead song. But this too shall pass.
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