Tech organizations are all overstaffed from the pandemic. Engineering is usually boom/bust. Likely outcome is recession and purge. The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.
It depends on your perspective and context. I refuse to subscribe to the defeatist attitudes of "this is how it has been and therefore always shall be" that's in your post, because otherwise what's the point of participating at all if change is impossible?
The engineering boom-bust cycle is a recent phenomenon (past fifty years) relatively speaking, and it doesn't mean it's a permanent fixture of civilization unless we choose to accept it as such. I reject permanence and advocate change, and so should you.
Besides, "Gen Alpha" won't be in cube farms even with a RTO, because Glorious Leaders (TM) in tech threw out cubicles, personal identity, and privacy in favor of hotel seating and clean desk policies. A return to cubicles would be a marked improvement over the present status quo, if we could just figure out the right marketing buzzwords to trick the C-Suite into believing it's the Next Big Thing (TM).
I’m not defeatist. We’re at a high where massively capitalized companies have been in a hiring binge for skilled technical employees for a long time. It’s been good to me - my family is more prosperous by any measure than my parents are grandparents, who were arguably smarter and bolder people.
All of these companies have been incredibly successful… but can they sustain their historically unprecedented growth? Maybe. But when that train slows down, Intel is the example of what happens.
Oh goodness, if we’re talking about sustainable growth then boy do I have some hockeystick charts to reject that notion. For decades, growth has largely been an illusion created through clever accounting and inflation metrics - it’s why the industry keeps desperately trying to jump on “brand new” stuff like crypto, blockchain, and generative models: a new industry means actual growth as opposed to illusory growth, which would create a new wealth class above and beyond any of the existing billionaires of today. For all of Sam Altman’s own blowharding, he’s not wrong that whatever the next brand-new revolutionary industry turns out to be - AI, space mining, molecular fabrication, whatever - will require literal trillions of dollars to explode into a 100x ROI.
That said, if we abandon this idea of “infinite growth forever” and accept that market saturation and incremental improvements provide opportunities to rebalance structures and remediate institutional flaws, then there’s a lot more hope to be had. You can’t build new things forever, and eventually need to take time to pay off outstanding debts, improve existing systems, modernize legacy infrastructure, and basically make everything simpler and sustainable for whatever the Next Big Thing turns out to be.
…unfortunately for me, making that pitch to leadership usually just gets me laughed out of the room because maintenance and efficiency isn’t “sexy”, nor does it boost their share valuations. Ah well, won’t stop me from trying.
Does he? Don’t most people in tech roll their eyes when the suits, be it business or economy, talk about growth? Not saying what he said is wrong or stupid or whatever. I just thought that was the status quo outside of the business bubble.
I find it so ironic that around the turn of the century, cube farms and suburbia were the ultimate evil and seemingly a fate worse than death in the pop culture.
Meanwhile in 2024, me and my Gen Y/Z colleagues daydream about a comfy dedicated cubicle and a quiet 3.5 bedroom with matching furniture and a spot to grill.
I don’t know if I’d want to go back to an office regardless of how it looks but a cubicle seems perfect to me. I honestly thought about turning my office at home into a cubicle. Like, I have a large room in the basement (36 square meters or something like that) and it is office, gym, hobby room and TV / Gaming room all in one. I’d love to just have a little corner sectioned off to separate the office parts of it.
Same with the house of course. I somewhat achieved that but only through luck and I’m renting (which is fine here in Germany) but man do cubicles seem nice.
It’s kinda like the rooms in IKEA. If I built my own house, I’d just buy complete rooms from IKEA and build a house around it. They’re all so small and cosy.
>The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.
Gen alpha? You're talking about a generation that the oldest cohort is ~10-11 years of age.
Will there even be enough of them given their potential parents can't afford a house? Will they go into tech after seeing this "learn to code" cohort getting screwed in the marketplace?
