The Future of Tech Jobs for Americans
Over the past two years, a few young people have asked me for career advice and have been surprised when I encouraged them not to pursue "tech".
I grew up near Seattle, where I was surrounded by people who worked at Microsoft and Amazon. When I was studying at the University of Washington, there was a well-oiled pipeline that moved thousands of graduates (and even plenty of non-graduates) into tech companies each year. Graduates had abundant choices at places big and small, near and far, and certainly looked forward to a high quality of life after their years of study. We entered the workforce feeling invincible. Many of my fellow millennials in tech enjoyed years of unsustainable venture-backed perks, and we lived well in booming cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder, or New York.
Around a year ago, I was working on data projects for an amazing company that was at the forefront of tech, startups, and investing trends. Something that continues to impress me was the strength of their culture and their efficiency working with a completely globally distributed team. I was working on a powerful graph database tool, and my teammates in the data group were all working on similarly exciting projects with the most recent tech. The company was growing quickly, and I remember being impressed by the talent of the new teammates that we were onboarding from North Africa, Brazil, and Eastern Europe.
Companies like Deel, Remote, Oyster, Rippling and many more now make it easy for even small companies to pay people around the world.
Well this has made it possible for companies to pay people far less around the world than West Coast developer rates. These new teammates were talented, creative, motivated, and had excellent English skills. They fit in easily at a company that was built as a global remote first company. Shortly after hiring them, this company laid off nearly all of the American data team.
I was not upset about them laying me off. They really did it in the best way possible and gave a generous severance. On the contrary, I am thankful that they were once again head of the curve. I am glad I went through the stages of layoff grief1 before this round.
Everyone has heard that massive rounds of layoffs are happening in the tech industry.
I currently live in Turkey. Not only is there is a huge glut of graduates from local universities (thanks to a baby boom in my age cohort here), there are now thousands of talented Russian developers who are found working in nearly every coffee shop and co-working space around me. With remote work normalized, they can all access many of the same jobs that you can.
Things will never again be like they were before
I can't imagine going back to an agency-designed office with infinite snacks, office-provided lunches, and seeing coworkers take extended ping-pong breaks. The paradigm has changed.
So how can you thrive in this new world?
Consult
Become a consultant or join a consulting team. Enter into projects with set scopes and get used to looking for new ones as those end. Learn to sell. Learn to reach out to people or how to funnel them to you. Learn to make effective proposals.
I enjoy coding and personally doing the data work.
While all the full-time developers on the data team were laid off at my previous role, the consultant team remains.
Specialize
Many companies hired developers looking at them as tools, just there to program something that someone else came up with. They didn't seem to care much about the developers' personal interests or subject matter expertise, and the feeling was often reciprocated by the employees. I saw this as I was working in IOT, travel data, social data, fintech, NLP, mapping, and medical devices over the last few years.
With the wisdom of hindsight, I encourage people to reject this kind of thinking and to specialize. Life is too short to relegate what you actually care about to “side projects”. I am far more aligned in my work now and interests and am so much happier for it.
Make a legacy instead of a list of yearlong gigs.
Seek more leverage
The role of the developer in 2023 and onward is shifting. may be a dramatically shift from how it was in the past. Be open to new ways of working and communicating.
Don't be afraid to hire people for tasks. Communicate this to people you work with. Continuously show up and show value.
Unless you are talented at finding roles where people hand you well-posed problems on a plate for you to hack away at, I would encourage my fellow devs to push their comfort zone and try something new.
The developer of 2023 may find themselves responsible planning projects, sourcing a team, and then quickly executing and evaluating it. I recommend becoming familiar with the platforms that enable this.
Careers of the Future
So would I still not recommend someone to “go into tech”?
Consider what you care about. If you truly enjoy programming for programming's sake and are interested in building platforms for other developers, then by all means, dive in and go for it.
If you enjoy solving problems and growing a business, then think about how much computer science education is necessary for you to achieve those goals. You have more data and tools then any generation before you, and access to leverage the last generation could only dream about.
The people I know who made the most money off of “crypto” were not technical.
The people I met who made the most money off of programmers were not programmers themselves.
And if you want to work at a big company and think you can come in by 10 AM, leave by 3 PM, and enjoy things like office meals, free gym memberships, unlimited time off, etc, then think hard about what you really care about doing. That kind of easy tech world is gone and never coming back in the States.
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denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance ↩︎