...and the vibes are definitely off
It feels different in tech right now. We’re coming off a long era where optimism carried the industry. Something has curdled. AI hype, return-to-office mandates, and continued layoffs have shifted the mood. Managers are quicker to fire, existential dread has replaced the confidence that a tight job market for developers provided for decades. The vibes are for sure off.
What’s Changed?
(What follows are generalizations. If your company is escaping some or all of these, I applaud you. I’m sure there are exceptions.)
AI has injected some destabilization. “I don’t need junior devs when I can just pay $20/month for Cursor” has an effect on everyone even if this turns out to be silly down the road. I see lots of people worried that the aim of all of this is to ultimately have a robot do their entire job. Whether or not this is possible doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try. And it’s the trying that raises people’s anxiety. On top of that, we’ve also got “AI Workslop” to contend with as well, which is making work harder for the diligent among us.
Return to Office feels like trust has been broken. Teams that continued to work well (or in some cases, better) after everyone in the industry went remote are now being told to come back to desks in offices. I’ve even heard tales of this happening despite there not being enough office space for everyone, which seems very silly. Also, for the first time in my nearly 30-year career, I’ve even heard of people being told they need to be “at their desks at 9am” and “expected to stay until 5pm at a minimum.” Even before COVID-19 and the mass move to remote work, most companies were flexible on start and stop times. I almost never heard of set hours for software developers until recently. Rules like that scream “we don’t trust you unless we can see you,” even if that’s not really the reason for the mandates. (IMO there are benefits to working in the same location as your colleagues but ham-fisted, poorly thought out mandates are not the way to achieve them.)
Layoffs changed the market. For probably 20 years, job security wasn’t really a concern in the industry. Layoffs happened here and there and companies folded, but the demand was always strong and most people capable of writing code or managing people who write code could lose their job, spend the severance on a nice vacation, and return with the confidence that they’d be able to land a new gig in a couple of weeks, likely at higher pay. With the acknowledgement that this was a privilege not enjoyed by most of the working world, it is no longer true. The size and scope of layoffs over the last couple of years have injected more anxiety into the tech workforce.
C-Suite Energy has changed. Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven. The days of “take care of the employees and the employees will take care of the business” feel like they’re in the rear-view mirror, and a new “do your job, or else!” mentality has taken its place.
You can’t change the macro forces that are driving these trends, but you can control how you show up for your team.
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