Is This Your Last Job In Tech?
There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the tech industry. Let’s debunk the dystopian tech future.
I put five long-term unemployed tech workers in a Zoom. I asked them if they felt like their last job in the tech industry really was their last and final job in the tech industry. I let them talk. What I found out blew my mind.
They all believe they’ve worked their last tech job. They all hope that’s not the case, and they’re all still searching for that elusive next gig. But each of them harbors the belief that the longer they stay on the outside of the tech industry looking in, the less likely that they’ll ever be let in again.
They’re not alone. In fact, most of the people I talk to who are still gainfully employed in tech — their greatest fear is that when the time is up on the tech job they currently hold down, the time is up on their entire tech career.
Ding!
I can’t say I blame all these folks for thinking that their tech careers might be ending or over. It’s a notion that’s been drilled into all of our heads for a while now, with the doom getting louder and the gloom growing darker every day.
The thing is, I believe the doom-and-gloomers are wrong.
A Focus Group Of Misfit Tech Workers
I’m no job market whisperer. I’m not even in HR. But I’ve been in tech for decades, hiring and being hired into every type of job market. I’ve been tracking tech hiring closely since mid-2024, and reporting back what I see and hear from the front lines, even trying to fix it.
It seems like the rest of the world is finally catching up to what us folks in the tech industry were already painfully aware of, that the collapsing “disaster” of a job market in the industry is being severely undercounted and underreported.
This Zoom gathering of five tech workers wasn’t intended to be a focus group. Each one of these folks was someone I either knew a little bit already or they reached out to me for advice — something that’s been happening a lot over the last couple years, as crushing layoffs and a broken hiring infrastructure has resulted in a growing army of tech workers being sat squarely on the dole for a year or more.
That describes all of these fine people. Three men, two women, different backgrounds and skillsets. I’m going to stereotype the hell out of their names so we can keep track of them in this post.
“Orville” and “Wilbur” are both men over 50 years old. Orville has been mashing the keyboard at big corporations for over 30 years. Wilbur made the devil’s bargain to get into project management halfway through his career.
“Esther” gets the double-whammy of being a woman over 50 years old in tech. She worked mainly in finance, as a consultant, connecting and integrating fintechs and ERPs and custom systems.
“Justin” is a dude, not a bro, in his mid-twenties who worked in marketing automation — think HubSpot and ads and social and such. And “Rachel” is in her mid-thirties, a native mobile developer who also manages tech teams at mid-sized startups.
All have been out of work for at least nine months, Wilbur for close to two years.
The good news is the reason they believe they’re out of tech forever is not due to any single factor. The bad news is it’s a lot of different factors.
AI Is a Threat To Tech Jobs
Let’s start by poking the elephant in the room.
“I use AI all the time!” Orville spoke up. “I probably know how to operate these tools better than most. It’s not AI that’s taking our jobs, it’s the belief that AI can do our jobs.”
Then he got salty.
But he’s not wrong. The AI hype cycle began with a lot of the players both inside and outside of the science making promises that AI could replace 50 percent, 80 percent, even 100 percent of labor, from HR to customer support to developers.
As the AI hype cycle peaked, the tech went through various iterations of misuse, either in scenarios where AI was too early to do the job properly or AI was merely a misguided solution in search of an expensive problem. But the strategy among corporate leadership has been to wait for the tech to catch up, not to correct the mistakes of overcutting, because those dollars are squarely back in the budget, making investors happy.
And make no mistake. AI was used as a smokescreen to please those investors and boards who were increasingly calling for profitability after all the drunken post-COVID spending. AI was also used as an excuse to lop off a bunch of people who never should have been hired into tech in the first place, but the money was too cheap not to spend.
Solution: AI is not your friend, but it’s not going anywhere, and neither is the hype. This tech evolution cycle isn’t much different than mobile or the internet or even spreadsheets. It’s just a bigger and quicker shift. And look, every techie over 30 thinks the skillset they cut their teeth on is the one true skillset. At some point, every techie must decide whether they’re an old dog or if they’re going to learn the new tricks.
I know a lot of “Orvilles” from 2007 who were confident that no one would ever use their phone to do the things they were doing on their laptop. And at the time, they had a point. Just don’t let that be their excuse to not hire you.
Tech Has Been Reduced to a Numbers Game
When everything is a number, all you need is a bunch of calculators. Rachel misses the creativity that used to be a part of her profession.
“I understand the reluctance to let engineering be a part of the solution and not just a black box,” she said. “But all we were doing was rolling new releases every two weeks to get closer to the [quarterly] goals.”
She’s right. Stay with me. I’m going to turn left-brain thinking into right-brain necessity.
From 2020 to 2025, a series of economic and technical outliers artificially swung the tech industry economy from dismal lows to overexuberant highs and back again in shorter and more chaotic cycles. COVID, cheap money, remote acceleration, inflation, tariffs — and an AI evolution undergirding each tectonic shift. When this happens, like it did in 2001 and again in 2008/2009 — well, as Esther put it:
“The only thing MBA-trained management can trust is the numbers. That’s what closed half my deals.”
But I’ll tell you this. The stock market being healthy and the IPO market thawing is a good thing. When this happens, a number of upstarts — either within the ranks of the entrenched corporate giants or from the crop of startups maturing into what will become the next wave of giants — they stop being short-term fearful and start thinking long-term and creative.
Solution: Numbers that used to signal “safety” will soon make companies look like dinosaurs. The kinds of companies posting job openings on those big job boards are starting to look real dinosaurish. Don’t waste your time on them.
The Devolution of the Tech Industry
It’s no secret. An industry that was once beloved, showering its true-believers with miracles and magic that was cool enough to queue up for, now looks more like that life insurance guy that keeps trying to sell you shit you might need but don’t want.
Both older Wilbur and young Justin lamented the general lack of innovation and excitement in the tech industry.
Wilbur said, “When all we’re doing is incremental enhancements and integrating ChatGPT, there really isn’t any need for an experienced hand to get a complex solution built and to the customers. So of course AI could project manage or product manage for a tech company if that’s all the company is doing.”
Justin colored the same issue a little differently. “Honestly, I was bored when I was working, especially over my last year. [We’re] the same as everyone else, doing the [same stuff], selling it the same way. Even the AI companies. They just take turns being slightly smarter than the others. Then next week someone has a new release and they’re the [better offering].”
Solution: I don’t know. As an entrepreneur, I agree but all I see is opportunity. One change I know to be true, hiring is being split into two camps. In one camp, it’s who you worked for that matters. In the other camp, it’s all about what you’ve accomplished individually. It might be time to choose a camp and focus your search on that camp.
Ageism Is a Huge Problem
If there’s one problem I don’t have a positive outlook on, it’s ageism.
And I’m shocked at how much it plays a role in hiring and gets swept under the rug. I used to think I was the rebel, telling people to cut off the experience on their resume at 15 years or otherwise obfuscating the fact that they’re over 40. Now everyone’s doing it.
“It’s not about the money,” Wilbur said. “I’ve applied for jobs paying half of what I used to make. I’ve tailored my resume to show 15 jam-packed years of experience. I’ve got what… maybe a dozen examples where as soon as the company got wind of me being 59, it all got shut down. Maybe at the initial screen, maybe when they saw my ‘first’ job was as a VP, whatever. It’s frustrating. And I’m a protected class, but what do I do? Do I threaten them? Yeah. That’ll work.”
Orville and Esther could not have been more in agreement with Wilbur.
Solution: Ageism in tech, or anywhere for that matter, isn’t new. Much like I said above about old dogs learning new tricks, and as much as it kills me to say this, it might just be time, like an athlete, to go to the broadcast booth. But it doesn’t mean you have to leave sports. The corporate hiring machine might not be a viable path for you any more until people start getting fired for this shit.
But that’s OK because…
The Corporate Hiring Process Is a Hot Mess
Even if all the jobs were readily available, putting the right people in those roles is a nightmare of their own making.
“It’s difficult,” Esther said, “Because I know as I’m filling out the application that it’s a waste of time. I’m going to get ghosted at some point.”
And networking is no silver bullet.
“I’ve literally been through all my connections at least a dozen times,” Esther added. “And I was everywhere, being on the road, working with different clients. Half my connections are unemployed, a few have retired, the rest are often too busy to respond, let alone actually help me.”
It’s this kind of hopelessness that slows the ambition that makes the process take even longer than it should. So let’s cut down on hopelessness.
Solution: Be more selective. I know that goes against conventional wisdom, but instead of spending ten minutes each on 20 job applications, spend an hour figuring out an alternative way to get one job you really want. It’s harder to do, emotionally, and it’s a path full of insurmountable obstacles sometimes. But just remember, you’re not trying to land 100 jobs, you’re just trying to land one. Keep hope alive.
And when I lean into hope, it reminds me that I don’t have any magic answers here. Yes, for some people, sure, they’ve probably held their last job in the tech industry. But it irritates me to no end when I see people state rash generalizations with little proof and an easy enemy to target. Don’t listen to the noise. They’re usually trying to sell you something. Or justifying their own anger.
If tech has taught us anything, it’s that every problem has a solution. It’s all about how far you want to go to solve it.
I don’t have easy answers sometimes but at least you know I won’t bullshit you. If that appeals to you and you want more of it, please join my email list and get a quick heads up when I’m published.
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