The second big tech boom has finally cooled. But I think the future still looks bright.

I am old enough and been in tech long enough to see the two major booms come and go. The first of course was the “dotcom” boom. I saw this boom first hand when I worked at Charles Schwab in the late 90’s and the company grew so quickly we had to implement our Disaster Recovery plans just to get enough computers and desks to accomodate all the online trading.

But then we had Pets.com and f*ckedcompany.com which became emblematic of the empty hucksterism of that era. Everything consolidated around a few key players and things largely went back to normal. Except we had a new class of programmer, the “web developer”.

And of course the second boom was the smartphone boom which in many ways was even larger as it leveraged the power of the internet and “apps” to put a computer in every persons hands, even people who didn’t like computers at all. Smartphones allowed them to do everything from order dinner to get a date, to get someone to drive them to dinner to meet their date.

This boom brought with it some “sub-booms” such as the “gig economy” in companies like AirBnB and Uber, but they were still all powered by the smartphone boom.

I’ve seen this boom ending for a long time, but I think the pandemic really put a fine point on it. Hiring in tech surged when bosses seem to think that everyone buying everything online was “the new normal” and then layoffs surged when they found out they were wrong.

And a lot of what allowed a lot of this stuff to happen was cheap money. VC’s had money to lend and they were willing to bet the whole house on something that sounded like the next DoorDash. But those days are over. The Fed will probably never go back to those nearly 0 interest rate days in this era of skyrocketing inflation.

The days of creating your little app idea, and needing to scale it up to a million users overnight is over. Consumers are tired and most problems that can be solved by an app have been solved. There’s no gold rush any more. The need to “fake it till you make it” and have a poorly thought-out and poorly executed MVP just to show value is over as well.

While everyone will miss the heady days of the startup era I think two things will be true:

1. Companies are going to be more cautious with their tech spending
2. Developers are going to be asked to do more with less
3. Companies will be going back to “boring” technologies like Django/Rails, etc that allow them to move fast and developers are relatively cheap

This is why I am very focused on the idea of the “Product Engineer”. An engineer who can take something from idea to production. I believe with the advent of AI coding tools that it’s going to be less and less about can you write perfect code, and more about can you get a customer’s problems solved without having to have that solution to spoon fed to you. I am going to be writing a lot more about that over the next few weeks as I put together what I think that looks like.

I think generally developers who can adjust will end up being ok, although I think it’s going to be a struggle if you are just entering the industry now, but on the other hand you don’t a lot of time sunk into learning things the wrong way.