Tech & Work Predictions for 2023
I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most exciting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …
I’m a prolific reader as some of you know and this year, as usual, I racked up a lot of proverbial “reading” miles and they are still none the wiser to all my offline and non-tracked reading ;) Speaking of, I’ll put a list of book recommendations but if you’re looking for one thing to read I highly recommend Matthew Ball’s “The Metaverse”. His essays on the Metaverse are also brilliant.
Thank you for being here and on to today’s update. As y’all know I’m catching up a bit with writing here and so I’m a little late to the party on 2023 predictions. Here goes …
Layoffs continue to happen but are a huge mistake
I’m optimistic about tech even though companies continue to lay off people. There hasn’t been a single day during which people did not get laid off in January. Open the news and you’re hit with [Enter tech company here] laying off [nnnnn] people.
It might seem like a scary time to be in tech and to use a maxim that doesn’t fully fit “The days are long but the years are short”. As with each cycle I have seen during my career, tech always came out stronger than before. This is not the end of tech’s scenius. I’ve been around the block a few times and one of the first “scares” I had was in 2001 when I was a young wide-eyed buck. The twin towers had just fallen and everyone watched in horror. That was my first downturn. I survived that one and every single one after that. You will, too. My hair however did not.
Zoom out a bit and look at tech. We’re just freaking getting started. One of the job hazards of being a Product Manager is that I look around at every single experience and most of them are still crappy. Just yesterday I visited a dentist and this was my first visit to a new dentist and I had to fill out an annoying amount of … paper forms. PAPER FORMS. The 16th century called, they want their paper forms back dear dentist. But hey here I am in the tech capital of the world and I’m writing my name out eight times on seven forms using this weird thing called a pen. A pen!
Last night I caught up with a few Haasies (and some of you I met last night read my blog or lie about it. Either way, I love you guys!). Our discussion centered around centralized identities and Web 3.0. Interesting and has so much potential. The FAA had an outage and the failure was caused by an unintentionally deleted file on a system that is probably older than all of us here reading this. In one day my product “sense” exposed me to so many sub-optimal products or experiences all of which tech is poised to solve. All this to say tech is getting started!
Employee loyalty and dissatisfaction hit an all-time low
Employees are pissed, upset, and feel like they're being treated badly and I have two different lenses as I tease this out. Do we, as employees, especially in tech, think we are super special and deserve to be treated a certain way because we’re in demand? I don’t know how accurate this is but filter by tech and the answer is .. probably?
Here are the top 20
On the other hand, employees could expect to be employed for their entire life and build solid friendships with their coworkers, and that no longer happens. People are treated as fungible resources by companies and trust on both sides is broken. I expect this trend to continue as more companies lay off people. This cycle has played out multiple times in tech over the past couple of decades and has led to a complete loss of trust between employers and employees. Yeah, sure employees love the free snacks and food but what they love more is psychological safety. Candidates however are losing trust BEFORE they become employees and start working with a company since their offers are rescinded. This didn’t happen with auto manufacturers in Detroit because of two things 1) Unionization and 2) Manufacturing was local. Software however is not and companies have a global pool to choose from. I don’t believe this trend will reverse and in fact, I think what will happen is something in between DAOs and full-time employment. We’ll, like actors working for multiple production houses, work for multiple companies. This is in one way future proofing yourself!
Pay Transparency laws do not become effective.
Pay transparency laws continue to cause turmoil in labor markets as companies continue to skirt around pay ranges. Not much else to say about this
Cryptocurrency recovers, regulation kicks in
Crypto has gotten such a bad rap that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The next couple of years in crypto are important as regulation kicks in as well as ETH and BTC recover (These are two I am bullish about and in BTC’s case it's just the first mover advantage). Other Layer 1 protocols might survive (and bridges, too) but I do not want to discuss those.
SBF WTF is behind bars forever
I think SBF’s self-proclaimed innocence is bullshit. So much so that I think I’ll just change his name to WTF. William the Fraud. I ultimately think it's a CEO’s responsibility and claiming innocence is not an acceptable argument resulting in poor people around the world losing their hard-earned money. Note: I also lost $ via FTX.US but I am not pissed off because of that. I’m pissed off because of his cockiness and his attitude!
BONUS: Bitcoin reaches $46500 and ETH reaches $3500 .. again at the end of the year.
AI Boom
The generative AI boom reaches a peak frenzy as companies and entrepreneurs try to assess where in the value chain value accrues. Generative AI use cases result in an autocomplete for everything. I predict that we’ll see the first company to have completely AI-generated multimedia (Think a movie where the story/screenplay is generated by one product, motion/graphics by a 2nd product with soundtracks/promotions being auto-generated. It remains to be seen how good a storyteller AI would be but this could work for training videos!
Quite possibly AI could be one solution to an aging population
Highest number of startups formed since 2008
This makes sense — it’s difficult to start a business when talent pools are not accessible or allocated to their best use. As more and more super smart tech folks get laid off and get more and more jaded they’ll rise from the ashes like a phoenix and company formation will be 2x what it was in 2008. As a side note, I do not believe that we’ll have a prolonged or deep recession. I think we’ll have a small and short recession and it will be done in 12-18 months if that.
Mission Driven dies a slow death
Every tech company expects loyal mission-driven employees but I think this concept is going to start fading away. A lot of us move (or moved) to the tech mecca because we’re mission-driven and we want to use tech to improve people’s lives but let's face it all of us can’t be Mahatma Gandhi. I think what I am trying to say is that startups can’t just be mission-driven and expect employees to work primarily for stock. I think more companies (and startups) will start to offer variable compensation plans for employees where an employee can choose what % of their pay comes from stock and what % is salary.
RTO pressure
A huge number of companies are asking their employees back into the office and while some of this might be related to the revered collaboration that we are missing, the bigger issue is related to productivity. Companies also suspect that employees might be working two jobs and some of them are. So what we have here is a few bad eggs spoiling the lot. This is also the perfect time for companies to ask employees back as layoffs continue but things will change in a year or so when the economy is back to “normal”. The good employees will leave not because they’re lazy or want two jobs but because they’ll have options. One of the things I think about is why people take up two jobs. Well it's quite simple they can do both and still earn a meets expectation rating. I think this is because annual reviews are a crapshoot and perhaps 5% of the employees get an “exceeds” or “greatly exceeds” rating with a 10% pay bump and a pat on the back. Fine, 15% bump. That doesn’t come close to double pay AND it's super hard to get that rating so why bother? If an employee is good enough and the employer is not using the employee's skills, who is to blame? To be clear, I understand the legalities of this. The argument on the other side is that, well employees are not robots but are specialized and thus we can’t keep them busy 100% of the time.
Furthermore, RTO sets an expectation that you will be productive from 9 am-5 pm. In our world does that make sense?
Non-competes are dead
This is gaining legs and quite honestly makes no sense for most jobs. If you have such confidential information that someone is hiring you for it then you are likely a big shot exec but do the employees below a certain level really need non-competes? Nope. Companies say that they don’t want to train employees without a non-compete. Trust me if an employee leaves it's almost always because something was unfair not because they wanna sell your precious “secrets”. I think this will lead to companies investing more in employee happiness and no that does not mean the 37th variety of “healthy” soda.
Tech unionization continues
If companies continue to treat their employees as fungible labor I suspect we’ll soon start to see a significant number of white-collar jobs unionize. This might be a 3-5 year prediction but there are arguments in favor of unionization.
Tech pay stabilizes as tech’s luster fades
Per data from Linkedin’s Economic Graph the allure of tech might be fading.
“The industry’s appeal as a career destination declined in the fourth quarter from a year earlier in consumer services (-40.1%), administrative and support services (-39.4%), government administration (-35.2%), manufacturing (-31.1%) and retail (-30.8%). Across the board, employees in these industries are less likely to be leaving for tech jobs.”
I am not fully sold on the argument that tech has lost its luster. When it rains people usually stay indoors, and it's raining now as far as tech goes. I do think that pay will normalize a bit as companies content with profitable growth and as “profit per employee” start to go down.
Work “Family” loses its charm
My Linkedin feed surprised me a bit. When I saw people with 30+ years of experience getting laid off from MSFT and 10+ years of experience getting laid off from Google it reminded me of one basic fact - Corporations are for-profit entities as much as corporations speak about “work family”. People who’ve made their jobs their identity are the ones who suffer the most from job loss. While I haven’t lost a job in my previous life my job was my identity so I know! This does not mean that identifying closely with your career can’t be fulfilling or that having good friends at work is a myth. They are all true but calling it a work “family” frames it in a different way - the expectation changes. Your team is not your family, and just like in any job, layoffs can happen at any time. While it's possible to make close friends on a team, our careers often involve changing teams and moving on to new opportunities. Nothing wrong with this.
And finally quick disclaimer: None of the above are in any way form or shape investment advice and these thoughts are my own personal reflections and not a reflection of any past or present employer. This is intended to be a thought exercise. Nothing more, nothing less.
Stay safe, be well and have a great week!
