My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018

> Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% to cut. What do you mean this revelation was recently demonstrated by Elon? The NATO Software Engineering Conference 1968 paper talks about the problems of having too many programmers of low skill. The 1969 paper talks about the same thing. Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man Month in 1975, covering this topic extensively. This has been talked about extensively for over half a century with regards to software, it wasn't just discovered by Elon in the last year.

I think we have another problem looming, beyond the realization that many engineers are unnecessary: Most of the business models in tech are unsustainable. The ad-revenue driven explosion of the Internet over the past ~15 years has long since reached saturation. The data mines are all tapped out, and what have we learned? Mostly, nothing. Following a person's habits can help you target ads and drive them towards (mostly) unnecessary consumption. Then what? Without ZIRP we're going to run out of the easy credit fueling such consumption. The economic hamster wheel is going to have to slow down. Then the realization that the SnR on the data being collected is practically 0 will set in. An immense amount of investment dollars was thrown at companies that charge nothing to the end user but collect and sell data to third parties. Yet that data is almost completely worthless. I personally think…

> So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers. This happened after the dot-com burst in 2000. At that time there were a lot of people in Tech who would have otherwise gone into marketing, accounting or whatever. A lot of these moved out of tech into other fields. Or they moved into less technical roles like project manager or management.

If the most valuable programmers have a personal interest in tech and use it as a hobby, then businesses will realize this and will look for people who do tech as a hobby or who go to hobbyist meetups, etc, and then people who just want the money will start going into the hobby spaces. I wonder how much more potent our industries could be if they were filled with only people who deeply cared, and everyone else just got a generous UBI?

>So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers. 1. I don't like the implication that junior = non-passionate. I'd even argue the opposite. Those new and hungry are most likely to be exploited and take whatever over the grizzled vet who's long had reality slap them in the face. There will always be non-passionate people but well: that falling passion seems to correlate quite well with the falling passion of companies to even pretend they want to better the world. Tit for tat. 2. The downturn is very much not correlated with passion. I've seen some 9-5'ers survive several rounds of layoffs and I've seen some of the hardest working engineers with almost a decade of experience slashed to the surprise of everyone. You look further in industry and you see som…