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I think it's more that the tech industry feels that normal growth is unacceptable and that the massive growth of the 80s and 90s is what's to be expected. They can't come to grips with being a mature, boring industry that makes incremental advancements; there aren't any 25-year-old multimillionaires who made their fortune starting a construction machinery company out of their bedroom. So when the industry starts contracting, it can't be because their growth projections were overoptimistic, but because they're actually doing a lot better! Their products are so advanced that they don't need employees anymore, and your job is next, even if they don't know what that job is. I don't think it's a coincidence that LLM hype coincides with tech employment peaking.
I mean, tech employment peaked because they flooded the space with low-quality hires who only picked up programming because of the high salaries.
The median quality of programmers has plummeted over the last 30 years, despite the fact that the quality of the tools available has skyrocketed. The guy who designed the multiplayer networking backend for the original Age of Empires games was some 18 year old kid with no degree they grabbed off the street because he said he liked programming. You’d have to get a senior dev and pay him like $300k now to hope to get someone capable of architecting anything like that now.
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