The good times in tech are over

During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing&#x2F;ignoring <i>why</i> they&#x27;re doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the &quot;career startup founder&quot; card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market.<p>Now we&#x27;re seeing a readjustment as the &quot;free money&quot; is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.<p>The good times for the career <i>software engineer</i> - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there&#x27;s still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career <i>problem solver</i>. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say it&#x27;s anyone&#x27;s fault - I don&#x27;t blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it&#x27;s a <i>game</i> and plan your exit. The danger is that there&#x27;s an entire generation that <i>started</i> their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.

Can I offer a contrarian point of view? Tech is still a great place to work.<p>Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.<p>We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.<p>The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.<p>The hardware platforms we&#x27;re coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.<p>I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I&#x27;m not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.

In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I&#x27;ve ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 different kinds of beers. Free drinks, snacks, lunch.<p>I jokingly said out loud, &quot;what did we do to deserve this?&quot;. A coworkers overheard and replied, &quot;speak for yourself&quot;.<p>The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.

I think the good times are still on for anyone who continues to focus on the customer and their experience.<p>From the perspective of the typical software engineer&#x27;s salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.<p>I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also <i>significantly</i> more rewarding to work with.

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&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;t happen. But something will happen - I&#x27;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).

I&#x27;d say the good times have just moved around a bit, there&#x27;s always demand for smart&#x2F;experienced STEM folk. What&#x27;s happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there&#x27;s other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.<p>A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning&#x2F;hungry.

The tech industry is based on copying the cool kids. Once Google and Meta started laying off, startups started laying off random people because it was cool. When Apple created the worst keyboard on earth (the arrow buttons squished together in a square) all other brands followed. Apple stopped squishing the arrow keys together but the rest still didn&#x27;t notice. If someone &quot;cool&quot; thinks AI will replace engineers, all companies will follow blindly.

Genuinely don&#x27;t think it was the end of the ZLB or Covid. The good times began declining well before that, when MBAs reached critical mass. Interest rates may have accelerated this, but it was always inevitable. When serious money starts getting made, a bunch of spreadsheet jockeys who&#x27;ve never shipped a product in their lives show up, blame engineers for declining quality, and &quot;solve&quot; the problem by<p>1. imposing more process,<p>2. diverting hiring budget to managers and PMs, and<p>3. making everyone take some snake oil training courses (run by some consulting firm staffed by people who last shipped something in the early naughts)<p>Then the middle management culture gets entrenched and metastasizes. ICs get swept aside (they&#x27;re just infinitely replaceable &quot;resources&quot; of course), and the engineering culture starts to atrophy and die.<p>Then new companies come up and make a splash because they don&#x27;t have any of that crap, and talent goes to them, and the cycle begins anew.

Not trying to throw shade on the article because I think its worth reading, but also important to note that the &quot;good times&quot; he&#x27;s describing in tech never really existed to begin with for most people working in the tech industry or doing software development generally.<p>I&#x27;m not going to ascribe it to &quot;FAANG&quot; as the freedoms he&#x27;s describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn&#x27;t really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.<p>Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don&#x27;t pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.

This has happened a few times, even in my career. I doubt we&#x27;ll break that cycle in the near term. We&#x27;re going on 50 years where tech was like this.<p>Any time you have an industry can go from zero to world player in a decade or less is going to attract this kind of boom-bust cycle. Companies get overzealous about the land grab, hire too much, are careless with their money. Then the correction comes. It lasts a few years, and then it&#x27;s back to boom times. Interest rates were certainly part of the equation this time, but back in the dotcom boom, e.g. US mortgages were running around 8%.<p>If people would stop playing the gold rush an invest in building products that people like and will use long term, we might instead flatten the peaks and the troughs into a more sustainable work environment. Don&#x27;t see that happening.

I would add a point 4 to the &quot;job of software engineering&quot;<p>4. Even if the value you provide is measurably great and your manager(s) love you, in a sufficiently large company you are still just a row in a spreadsheet, and you may be terminated at any time independent of the quality of your work&#x2F;output.<p>Stay ready to interview.

There&#x27;s definitely a silver lining in that being a software engineer at a normal-ish company feels more satisfying now. Being more focused and KPI-driven has some upsides.

There has been a large influx of new software developers over the last 15 years. All fighting for the jobs, which lower their value to employers.

They found out that most of us are just plumbers, most of the time. And on top of that LLMs can do soft plumbing just fine.

<i>insert I&#x27;m The Captain Now meme</i><p>My hot take is that we&#x27;re in a forced reset period for employers to &quot;re-assert&quot; their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work&#x2F;etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.<p>This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we&#x27;ve reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We&#x27;ll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.<p>Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.

This matches my experiences. I see a lot of side projects being dropped. I’ve been hired (as an external consultant &#x2F; developer) to maintain some of these side projects while their core developers are either fired, let go, left or are put on their main projects.<p>It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah

&gt; Providing value to the company gets you rewarded<p>This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.

Consider what companies are launching these days and the talent they need to do it. It&#x27;s AI companies, it&#x27;s hardware, it&#x27;s hard science. It&#x27;s fewer Uber for pet grooming. There&#x27;s less appetite for investing in the latter companies and _normal_ software developers are less useful for the former. Yes, ZIRP has contributed, but there are wider economic and social issues that are above my pay grade at play.<p>The safest space continues to be distributed systems and systems programming in general IMO. You&#x27;ll still find work at hyperscalers. You&#x27;ll still find work in the new spaces. Until AI can operate these systems, there&#x27;ll be a spot for us bit janitors for a little while longer.

I&#x27;m an engineer at a large tech company. I am by all means considered a successful engineer. I am actively looking for a way to exit the field, and am assuming that in a few years my career options will be vastly diminished. I am worried about ageism, and can already feel it in my early 30s. Its certainly become more up or out<p>A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come

The times for &quot;resume driven development&quot; are over, yes. And I&#x27;d argue that&#x27;s a <i>good thing</i> - there just isn&#x27;t any money left to develop &quot;the next hot database&quot; or whatnot, with hype chasers forcing developers to reinvent the wheel and make all sorts of basic errors that other mature tech has long since passed again.<p>Maybe the industry can now focus on making the hype tech of the last 20 years finally somewhat <i>stable</i> and secure again before the next boom-bust iteration hits...

Good article!<p>The only missing bit around COVID was that the cost of the economic policies which were implemented by governments caused an inevitable interest rate increase.<p>Sure, we can argue that the response to COVID was planned in a certain way on purpose and that powerful hands could have used another excuse to get to where we are now (just press more the pedal on government spending, illegal immigration, wars, green policies) - but that&#x27;s what happened.

This probably means there&#x27;s a competitive advantage to tackle non short term ambitious innovations which everyone else is cutting away as fat.

The article needs as much stronger premise. Employees being pampered and investment money flowing freely are not strictly connected.<p>Employees being pampered with high wages, benefits, and extra perks like free meals has everything to do with talent scarcity.<p>The only reason these extravagances are being cut is because tech employees aren&#x27;t in the same level of demand. That may (or may not) change.

I think the article is mostly spot on. Software engineering got detached from business goals, then forced business goals to move its way in the easy money times. The advice to software engineers to focus on building what executives request instead of trying to tell executives what must be built is good.<p>The only thing I do not agree with is over focusing on ZIRP. Money pumping into the economy can have other forms and switched from monetary (bank lending) to fiscal (government printing) with quantitative easing strategies. Some beneficiaries changed, software is a step or two lower on that ladder, but we are still in the &quot;plentiful money&quot; state if you check world or your country M2 levels. And a lot of that money eventually pumps tech. The real sobering (when it is critical to be a key contributor to a profitable business or have an FU path thought through) starts when pumps inflating M2 stop. My 2c.

I&#x27;ve been aware of the ZIRP phenomenon and potential things that might happen when it ends since 2017. I prepared myself to slowly add more skills (finance, writing, management, etc). All this was while I continued to be a full-time dev.<p>The problem for me has been that nobody outside of myself is OK with me taking any other role, either within the company I work for, or as someone looking for a fresh new role. When I ask why, it&#x27;s always been a variant of &quot;oh, you&#x27;re more valuable to us as an engineer&quot;.<p>Now with the advent of LLMs and bullshit experts talking about AI taking over everyone&#x27;s roles, neither do people want me to remain an engineer (I quit in frustration a few months ago), nor do they want me to be anything else (even when I have skills directly relevant for other types of jobs). It&#x27;s frustrating to keep on trying to switch when nobody&#x27;s taking the bait.

This will not be popular, but I think the real problem with tech these days: <i>too many</i> software engineers.<p>Used to be just 40k comp sci graduates in the US per year, now it’s 150k plus and growing. Everyone wants tech money, but nobody wants to write all this damn code.<p>We have people in this industry who have no real love or passion for the engineering and the science, and soon they will become the majority. Vibe coders and prompt kiddies are not satire, they are a real thing. A lot of incoming graduates would not consider this field if it wasn’t for the money and remote work opportunities. They are not like the true enthusiasts who would still be doing this even if it didn’t pay well. We need to gatekeep harder. Crush people in interviews, make it damn near impossible to get in a company unless you really want it. Redirect people to other careers like finance or sales and marketing.

&gt; <i>[...] “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives<p>It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop.</i><p>An interesting side effect is that the tech industry is rapidly losing the &quot;good guys&quot; image it had in wider society for a long time (with a little help from Elon and friends, but certainly they aren&#x27;t the only reason).<p>If both devs and users are realizing that the &quot;make the world a better place&quot; spiel had always been a marketing lie that was kept up as long as there was spare money for it, maybe we could now also start thinking how to <i>really</i> make the world a better place.

I believe this guy&#x27;s analysis misses the point. My perspective is shaped by having navigated multiple market bubbles and three significant tech recessions – 2000, 2008, and 2022-2025.<p>The core issue, consistently, is the imbalance between supply and demand within the high-quality SWE talent pool. We witnessed hiring bubbles in 1999 and 2021 precisely because the demand for skilled SWEs far outstripped the available supply.<p>Essentially, major tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) appear to have miscalculated the sustained need for SWEs during the peak of the WFH trend. They subsequently found themselves with a surplus of talent relative to the number of compelling new projects.<p>A similar dynamic occurred during the dot-com boom, where companies aggressively pursued web developers. The perceived ROI, often reflected in inflated company valuations rather than immediate profits, justified each hire at the time.<p>The crucial question is the ROI of each incremental hire. If it remains strictly positive, robust hiring will follow. Currently, this condition is not met, particularly within large tech firms.<p>Looking ahead, a market equilibrium will eventually be reached. A sustained oversupply of new graduates entering the field will undoubtedly face employment challenges. Conversely, a decrease in the supply of qualified SWEs will likely lead to a stabilization, and potentially an increase, in their perceived value.

Notice how all the coasters at big tech companies are now being called in and with RTO policies? This is what we have here.<p>The &quot;good times&quot; where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a &gt;$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.<p>Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.<p>These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.<p>There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.

&gt;“Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives<p>If you are a software leader, work on discovering and filling customer needs. Filling those will boost both your success and the company&#x27;s success.<p>Executives at most companies rarely do anything other than figure out how to get a bigger paycheck. They have no clue about, nor do they try to discover, customer needs; but they have and aggressively acquire a strong sense of their upchain&#x27;s needs.<p>This means a software leader who does basic research on customer needs is the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind at most companies.

&gt; After ten years of their opinion being consulted on big company decisions, they’re trying to hold on to that power.<p>I feel this one. I&#x27;ve been doing this for twenty years, and we get listened to the least now of any point in my career. Rather than what we build being a conversation about what&#x27;s possible, we get told what to build and have to push back when the requirements are impossible.<p>The opportunity cost is just silly. So many times we could build something better than the requirements but it&#x27;s not worth the effort to try to get it through the bureaucracy.

It makes sense that there was a flood of folks coming in as they saw that it look like the place to be if you wanted to be in the good times... then you layer in interest rates. Good Times Never Last Forever

Great article that summarizes a few important truths.<p>I&#x27;m hoping that some of the good news is:<p>* If you care about focusing on business success, and requirements descending from that, then you&#x27;ll gradually have more company, and fewer people working against you.<p>* If your experience extends beyond the crazy Potemkin Village investment scam period of tech, or you otherwise have experience working business-focused, then hopefully that will soon be widely recognized as positive signal for hiring (as it used to be, and is, in many sane fields).

For me, delivering value is acquiring new skills which I can use to augment my existing skills. Beside backend development (my main skill) and frontend, I am trying to learn more devops&#x2F;infrastructure, a bit of data engineering, more cloud specific functionality and some people management.<p>I think there is some value to be had in &quot;jack of all trades, master of one&quot; strategy. If I would be an employer, I would hire someone like me. :)

You forgot to mention outsourcing. Everyone always forgets massive outsourcing post-Covid.<p>Go to any tech company job site and youll see many of the engineering jobs are non US.

It may have been good times for software engineers, but arguably a lot of harm has been done to society thanks to disruption and blitz scaling culture

&gt; throwing money at their software engineers (in the form of paid trips, in-house chefs, and huge comp packages)<p>That really was never that common, though, and reserved for a very small subset of programmers even where it did happen. I’ve been coding since 1992 and all the jobs I’ve had have been regular corporate type jobs, with a steadily (but not life changing) raising salary.

For those that need a translation....<p>1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.<p>2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...<p>In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.

So what JavaScript framework do I need to learn?

Been in the industry for 20 years. Things are always up and down.<p>Honestly I prefer the leaner times. Less clowns trying to cash in and more focus of engineering value, as it should be.<p>I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.

I feel like this observation only applies to a section of the industry (in America). I never worked in the Valley or the Bay, just slogging away out in the Midwest, and it has always been nose to the grindstone, always executive and bottom line -lead, and none of the latitude or pampering mentioned here.

Not sure if typo:<p>&gt; Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money.<p>&quot;...HIGH-risk high-reward...&quot; would make more sense in the context.

It&#x27;s the economy, stupid.<p>The good times will continue as soon as money does the same.

COVID-19 pandemic led to a shortage of developers, which in turn drove up salaries, and companies are now trying to reverse this trend.

<i>&gt; I think a lot of software engineers right now are planting their feet and refusing to change.</i><p>That&#x27;s not a good thing, in general, if you are in technology. We always need to be learning and moving forward. A lot of times, in my experience, it&#x27;s extremely humbling, because I find out that what I know is no longer relevant. I&#x27;m 63, and still need to learn new stuff, every day.<p>I know that he&#x27;s talking about culture, as opposed to knowledge, but I think they inform each other. If we allow ourselves to ossify in one context, it just moves over into the other.<p>I spent most of my career at a company that treated me like just another schlub. They were a hardware company, and I&#x27;m not sure if hardware engineers were ever treated like software engineers, so I am unfamiliar with free barista bars and tropical offsites. I was just another cubicle Dilbert.

I don&#x27;t know if interest rates can explain everything. It isn&#x27;t like start ups are being funded by taking loans out at the bank.

I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve the other four, even if they don&#x27;t have much to do day to day.<p>In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.<p>This allowed &quot;free&quot; side projects and cool stuff, too.<p>But as always, it&#x27;s time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we&#x27;re past the maxima.

PSA: It looks like more-comments-than-upvotes tends to make posts fall off the front page. If this is true, then, if you think the TFA and&#x2F;or comments are important, then upvote the post first. (Don&#x27;t just comment, and then forget to upvote.)

so weird to see people blogging about how great tech has been throughout their whole career because they weren&#x27;t yet working in 2008 or 2000

This seems silicon valley based. To me the real good times everywhere else ended in the early 90s.

Times are tough now but still, I hope we never have to go back to a 0% interest environment. It was a nightmare. It only created the illusion of abundance and opportunities but in reality only pure speculation was rewarded. I&#x27;m exhausted from running on that hamster wheel. I&#x27;d rather do something really difficult and really struggle but at least get somewhere eventually, little by little... Rather than the endless cycles of false hope and disappointment of the past decade. It&#x27;s like having a carrot always dangling right in front of your face. Success always appears very close but in reality, it&#x27;d be easier to just go straight for a different carrot perched atop mount everest.

Good riddance. I for one look forward to real technology becoming valued again, not digital rent seeking.<p>Let’s build something useful and amazing that elevates the human experience, rather than sucking the last drop of dopamine out of consumers.

Nonsense, programming still pays amazing salaries for the work. I earn almost as much as an MP, and I have 1000th of the responsibility.<p>The job market also seems to be totally fine if you&#x27;re experienced, based on the amount of LinkedIn recruiter messages I get.

none of the newer kids or managment now care about actual software engineering, unit testing or any such stuff.

In many ways it&#x27;s the same as it ever was.<p>If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell &#x27;H-T-M-L&#x27; you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical &quot;.com&quot; to their name, much like &quot;AI&quot; is today.<p>When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn&#x27;t the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.<p>This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.<p>If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.<p>&gt; The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.<p>I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the &quot;pampering&quot; was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned &#x27;Job Hopping&#x27; of the era.<p>Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It&#x27;s one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It&#x27;s quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of &#x27;startups&#x27; vanished. This <i>also</i> broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with &#x27;Job Hopping&#x27; and the incentives to stay were broken.<p>My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We&#x27;re going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we&#x27;ll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I&#x27;m betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.