dreampepper: jhayne sitting in a window near a piano (by the piano)
[personal profile] dreampepper
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January 6: Today was tough because __________.

I still have no motivation to make anything or continue to exist.

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The Atlantic: Why Everything in Tech Seems to Be Collapsing at Once: The industry is having a midlife crisis. By Derek Thompson.

"The period after the Great Recession was defined by a weak economy with low aggregate demand and low interest rates. This created the perfect conditions for an era of endless cash that venture capitalists, seeking high rates of return, poured into low-marginal-cost software companies. As smartphone penetration rose in the U.S. and around the world, the app revolution took off. Social-media and consumer-tech companies became some of the richest and fastest-growing in the world. Hollywood went streaming, content went digital, and the services economy became intermediated by smartphones.

Then came the surge of post-pandemic inflation. Rising interest rates have meant the end of easy money. The Millennial Consumer Subsidy—my term for VCs splitting the bill with consumers to grow their companies—has come to a close. As the cost of risk has gone up, venture funding has gone down, and companies have had to cut costs, raise prices, or both. Meanwhile the narrative in markets has flipped from growth to profits, and valuations for tech companies have crashed.

The inflation explanation is fairly technical. I’ve got another story that’s a little bit harder to prove. It goes something like this: The tech industry is experiencing a midlife crisis."


I've been reverse engineering job positions at offices I'd like to join. Collecting lists of required skills, certifications, degrees, and more. Each item added to a checklist, then weighted by time, effort, and capability. Building a path from here to there, class by class, portfolio piece by coding test, a map to build expertise with, brick by brick.

A plan started coming together. The list of bootcamps was culled, prerequisites began to be gathered, the options narrowing as I homed in on a destination, a job that could fold into a career, rather than my usual jump rope skip from thing to thing, never quite climbing the ladder high enough to truly reach safety before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Then came the waves of lay-offs. Five of the seven places I was looking at suddenly don't even exist. An industry brought to its knees.

Five recessions in fifteen years. How many once-in-a-century crashes have happened within my small lifetime? Too many. And here I am, too late again. 

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