During the past month that I’ve known a period of unemployment was coming, I was very busy planning what I’d be doing, getting my affairs and finances in order, and wrapping things up at work so there would be a good hand off. I was very much looking forward to being free of this two metre squared space I have been tethered to for so many years now. However, now unemployment is actually here … I must admit feeling a certain bittersweetness.
At the time, I worked very hard to get into Monad, more than perhaps any startup I’ve ever campaigned to get hired into. I was very keen on the proposition (a better implemented Ethereum), I thought the founders were the right mix to make it happen and therefore a good bet, and I wasn’t unaware that my participation in this project if successful would slightly change the future of all mankind, so my work there would have genuine true real long lived impact.
I had hoped to be contributing until mainnet launch, but after the Series A round the founders decided to localise my part of the workforce into New York and they now had the means to do so. I interviewed my replacements, and I was well aware that I was likely putting myself out of a job at the time. They’re the people which will take this to the end.
As I’ve been part of half a dozen startups by now and therefore more experienced than most startup founders, I’ve often said to startup founders that the people you need to bring you from tiny to small are often not the people you need to bring you from small to big. In my previous roles in startups, I tended to be retained across that transition as many others were let go. This time round, it was not the case, I ended up being one of those surplus to requirements. I am grateful that they kept me on as long as they did, and that they have retained me until the Autumn to hopefully see this thing through from the coalface.
I wish Monad/Category Labs the very best of luck with their mainnet launch, and my genuine gratitude to their founders for taking a chance on me – who was their first international remote hire of many since. I hope I was useful as I pitched to them at the time that I would be.
For the past eighteen months there has been headcount reduction in my industry, and in the past six months that rate has been increasing. When I go on LinkedIn right now, I see many high end devs I know personally who are unemployed, and they are not finding new work at whatever pay rates they’ve been willing to currently accept. A few weeks ago I began noticing lay offs even in AI, which until now has been insulated from the general tech industry recession.
I certainly think another year of tech industry downsizing remains. They over-hired during and after the pandemic, and the revenues just aren’t there to support that much workforce at those pandemic elevated pay rates. They therefore will keep downsizing until average pay levels get low enough that it makes business sense. We have a while to go on that I think.
Tech tends to precede the wider economy, so tech gets a recession first and the wider economy follows after. This has been the longest delay between tech recession and everybody else recession by far in my lifetime, but only from the perspective of the Anglo-Saxon countries. In Central Europe, the everybody else recession followed the tech recession within the traditional delay. What’s different this time is that the everybody else recession has not begun yet in the US, and therefore not in Ireland (much of whose economy is US multinationals).
I think much of why has to do with the US running such a massive deficit – they are borrowing at wartime levels to juice their economy and have been doing so for so many years now that the situation has become detached from normal economic fundamentals. Historically that will turn, eventually, into an especially deep economic collapse along the lines of Argentina which was once one of the richest countries in the world.
I’ve already talked about all that here before, and I don’t have much new to say about it. At some point the debt will need to be paid. Between now and then, it’s entirely possible that the US can carry on borrowing 8-10% of GDP per year for several more years to come. So detachment from economic fundamentals may continue for a while yet, indeed in the Anglo-Saxon countries the tech industry may exit recession into some sort of very weak recovery before the general economy enters recession.
The Irish economy may contain an unusual proportion relative to its size of the US economy, but it is more strongly tied to the European economy than the US economy overall. There are big market shifts happening in Europe. We’re about to build an absolute ton load of weapons all of which will require lots and lots of system engineers like me. The sixth generation European strike fighter is very noticeably completely independent from the US. It likely will be developed by a consortium of the major European powers and Japan and Australia (Canada currently wants to join after US threats upon its sovereignty, but I don’t think that will survive long term after the current US administration exits – after all, such a project has a half century long time horizon). Like the competing US, Chinese and Russian sixth generation strike fighters, it will be more an nVidia CUDA based supercomputer than airplane. As the programming languages well supported by CUDA is very limited (and does not currently include Rust), that could turn into stable long term employment for people like me who specialise in C, C++ and Python.
As this is Europe, pay rates will be a fraction of those elsewhere. But stable – or any – income is better than none. So I think Europe may be an exception to the wider pan-tech industry malaise if you’re a systems engineer. Ireland not being in NATO nor having any security clearances will mean Irish citizens won’t be allowed to work on anything secret, so we’ll likely be given dual use technologies like drones, resilient communications, and perhaps core stack stuff like deterministic runloops and work dispatchers. Anything secret will be reserved for citizens of the participating countries. I guess we’ll find out.
I’ve found myself pondering what do I want in my next employment? I do genuinely actually find AI appealing, and no I’m not lying nor faking that sentiment. I think AI will not solve 95% of the things everybody is trying to use it to solve. But that other 5% … I think it could be transformative to my personal productivity, and possibly to enough others to matter overall to an economy wide picture.
However, I must be realistic: I am forty-seven years old, and almost all of AI does not make direct use of the low level skillsets I specialise in. I am therefore unlikely to be a good fit for getting into AI at my age and skillset. Also – to be blunt – I think the AI balloon is beginning to deflate in any case anyway, and then it’ll go through a period of being out of fashion until it comes back into fashion again. Such is the tech economy.
Having pondered on this for the past month … why on earth hasn’t IoT become an expanding bubble yet? I, like many others, feel that IoT ought to be an exponential growth opportunity like AI has just been at some point. But we never seem to reach that point. Rather, IoT seems to just constantly keep incrementally creeping forwards and inwards subtly and never experiencing a ‘break out’ moment as it infests ever more parts of the global economy and human existence in general. Maybe those are its dynamics, who knows?
I guess what I’m really asking here is ‘where will the tech industry go next?’ i.e. what inflating balloon do I need to hitch myself onto before it rises? I have been relatively successful and/or fortunate in predicting/happening to be right place right time so far. I need to repeat that magic. I will admit that at the time of writing, apart from European weapons systems, I can’t think of anything likely to be the ‘next big thing’. Here’s hoping some clarity arrives on me in the next few months.
What’s next?
One of my long time unfinished projects has been a dedicated AI inferencing security camera PC. I combined a fifteen year old case with a ten year old PC guts and a ten year old second hand enterprise nVidia AI inferencing card plus a 28 Tb recertified hard drive to build a top of line security camera monitoring and recording box. This box has been built, debugged, and tested. I just need to write it up. There will surely be a post about that here soon.
Believe it or not sixteen months after I shook hands with my replacement builder a first draft of construction detail has turned up. Yes of course it would appear now when I’ve lost my job. In any case, there is now a reasonable expectation that a final quote could be issued some time in the next six months. I almost certainly cannot take a decision on build vs no build until the Autumn, but if we could get that final quote before then … that would be great as there would be actual forward progress at very long last. There will surely be a post here about the first draft of construction detail etc at some point.
The differential pressure sensors I mentioned some posts ago have turned up and those will need testing. I have also acquired an anemometer so I can finally say what air flow is passing for given readings of those barometric sensors. That will likely also result in a post here.
Finally, the next post will be all about cargo e-bikes, as I already have written that post due to buying and testing a cargo e-bike. All will be explained in that post!
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