Writing about layoffs and the tech market has been on my TODO for several years. Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it.
Disclaimer: I worked 5 years at Shopify. This is probably why such posts come one after another on my feed but Shopify isn’t the point here, they are just a micro piece of the whole fucked up system.
AI is Just a Scapegoat
Tech job market is fundamentally broken and we all pointing fingers at AI.
But having spent almost 2 decades in the industry, I think the rot goes much deeper than ChatGPT.
Truth to be told tech market hasn’t truly ‘improved’ since the 2008 financial crisis. It just mutated into something evil.
The Liquidity Trap: “Haste Makes Waste”
After the 2008 mortgage crisis, the economic regime significantly changed. Which was also around the time my interest in Finance began and recently I started to build my own investment tool you can read more about it here.
At that time time we entered an era of extensive liquidity (cheap money). When interest rates are near zero, investors demand growth above all else.
As a result, tech companies stopped building for sustainability and started building for exponential expansion.
... continue reading