There are a number of reasons I’d site for the current job market tightness:
- political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause.
- economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go.
- AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos before normalization. We’re still in the chaos phase.
- Business Pain: Right now I don’t see any sector that’s in pain. Inflation has hurt consumers, but we’re still spending. When consumers lock it down, that pain comes back and job market shifts with it.
I have no solution other than figuring out a way to do your own thing. There’s no better time to be a founder.
- GenAI becomes a foundational requirement for tech and non tech sectors. If you’ve refused to engage, you’ve self-selected out of any of those sectors.
- GenAI usage shifts down to just the tech sector, but in an integrated fashion where current engineering practices are still desired. Everyone survives, but pay scales are adjusted down by a not-insignificant amount.
- GenAI bubbles badly, OpenAI and Anthropic merge with Google/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/???. Tokens become extremely expensive and no one is leaning into agentic integration. Everyone thrives.
I've not seen anything from the base models that replaces my engineering harness (workflow). There's a significant gap between what a generic LLM does and the domain I work in (software construction for complex applications).
- political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause.
- economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go.
- AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos before normalization. We’re still in the chaos phase.
- Business Pain: Right now I don’t see any sector that’s in pain. Inflation has hurt consumers, but we’re still spending. When consumers lock it down, that pain comes back and job market shifts with it.
I have no solution other than figuring out a way to do your own thing. There’s no better time to be a founder.