(Only) One Terrible Year for High Tech?

TL;DR

I’m down-sizing my expectations that high tech will be a growth area for my long-term career.

The high tech industry has undergone seismic disruptions since the pandemic started, the recent sum of which are remote work whiplash, zero-intrest-rate phenomenon collapse, and “AI everything” false valuations. All the while, the usual unwarvering demand for “XX% year-over-year growth” in revenue leads tech companies of all sizes to make bizarre and twisted choices which are unintelligble to most inside and outside that industry.

Then there’s the influence of the ‘tech bros’ and classically-trained business management leaders. It’s all and only about money, forget (economic) sustainability, workforce development, and the fastest exit strategies to ensure personal gain. This has been going on for most of high tech’s history, but is now just about the only game in town. FOSS (free and open source) has largely been down-converted to ‘land and expand’ strategy despite a decade of warnings from industry practitioners that our national security, personal privacy, and global viability is at risk when supply chains rely on proprietary and unchecked sources.

Our daily lives are inundated with the “enshitification of the internet”, the commercialization of our personal data for corporate gains, the wholesaling of our data to any government or terrorist organization willing to pay enough, and the overstimulation and under-education of children. EdTech is one of the saddest examples of profiteering on underfunded workforces (educators), addicting students and education systems alike to digital workflows that undermine core principle of human learning.

Ultimately, each year high tech is allowed to operate in ever-increasingly selfish ways, people suffer. Accelerating gentrification between those who profit long-term from it all and those who don’t is a losing game, IMO. It’s been a terrible year for tech, even if you have the profit statements to show otherwise.