For the last decade or so, the tech jobs market has been dominated by big tech hiring everyone they can, so they can’t wander off on their own and make new competitors. That’s predicated on big tech having so much money that they can’t find anything more useful to spend it all on. It won’t continue past the tech growth stock bubble, whenever it pops. (Which might not be the pop we’re currently headed for; if it’s just AI instead of the whole thing somehow, then those jobs will bounce back.)
On the positive side, if that ever stops, some of the unemployed tech workers will make actually useful things, some of which will become businesses that can hire the other tech workers. This is more like how it worked in the early 2000s.
However, those new tech companies have to actually make money somehow, which means somebody has to be able to afford their products, which means new tech will be beholden to the shape of the wider economy. For example, currently startups are all B2B, because businesses have money and consumers don’t. In a wide scale economic downturn where businesses are cutting costs, even those B2B startups won’t be able to find customers, so they’ll have to fold (or just not get founded).
So I don’t think the market is going to recover to the old maximum, and afterwards it’ll be much more cyclical, following the rest of the economy along whatever nonsense it does.
For the last decade or so, the tech jobs market has been dominated by big tech hiring everyone they can, so they can’t wander off on their own and make new competitors. That’s predicated on big tech having so much money that they can’t find anything more useful to spend it all on. It won’t continue past the tech growth stock bubble, whenever it pops. (Which might not be the pop we’re currently headed for; if it’s just AI instead of the whole thing somehow, then those jobs will bounce back.)
On the positive side, if that ever stops, some of the unemployed tech workers will make actually useful things, some of which will become businesses that can hire the other tech workers. This is more like how it worked in the early 2000s.
However, those new tech companies have to actually make money somehow, which means somebody has to be able to afford their products, which means new tech will be beholden to the shape of the wider economy. For example, currently startups are all B2B, because businesses have money and consumers don’t. In a wide scale economic downturn where businesses are cutting costs, even those B2B startups won’t be able to find customers, so they’ll have to fold (or just not get founded).
So I don’t think the market is going to recover to the old maximum, and afterwards it’ll be much more cyclical, following the rest of the economy along whatever nonsense it does.