Some Thoughts on the Computing Industry

Here’s where I unload a bit and reveal myself to be a cranky old man. I’m going to comment on a change I’ve felt in the computing industry between when I was in college 15 years ago and the present, with the caveat that I haven’t spent time in a university CS department since 2010 – maybe the vibe I sensed back then still exists outside of sociopath factories like Stanford.

Anyway, I started my undergraduate degree in computer engineering in 2005 and finished in 2010. In retrospect, this was a weird time. The dot-com bubble had burst not too long before I started, and halfway through my studies we had the Great Recession. At least at RIT, there wasn’t this feeling that tech was a great way to get rich – and we didn’t really call it “tech”, either. My friends and classmates found computers interesting, so they came to school to learn more and eventually work on something they liked. We mostly expected to end up doing digital hardware design, microcontroller work, and lower-level programming at either a big established company like IBM or Xerox, or at one of the smaller engineering shops that do unflashy contracts for defense, public safety, etc. Good solid $80k/year jobs in upstate New York, that sort of thing. Toward the end, we were aware that Google was paying quite a lot of money, but it just really wasn’t a strong factor in my job hunt. When we talked about jobs, we talked about what we’d be working on, not salary or equity or cap tables or “exits”.

At some point in the 2010s, a software startup became a pretty good way to extract tens of millions of dollars from investors, and it feels like everybody rushed to get on board. Correspondingly, the industry vibe seems to have gone from being amoral (“look, I’m just building interesting technology, if somebody misuses it that’s not my problem) to immoral: use VC money to drive incumbents out of a space, then start squeezing. Run an illegal jitney cab service, run an unlicensed hotel, by the time the lawsuits catch up we’ll have exited or pivoted or just bought some friendly laws. And I feel like the VCs, by throwing money at just about anybody who can say “Tinder but for goldfish”, have played a neat little trick with the minds of software people: if valuations are almost random, if you can build a company that spends millions with no plan for profitability and then sell it for hundreds of millions, why, we’re all potentially Silicon Valley bigshots, so let’s not say anything bad about the current Titans of Industry™!

There’s a tired old bit of cant about how “all Americans are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires” that usually comes out when whining about poor people voting Republican, but I think it actually applies pretty well to tech people these days. Because any one of us could conceivably throw together a SQL database and some Javascript in the evenings and sell it for $100m, well, better hope that investment gravy train keeps rolling! AI will change the world, because I’m building an AI product right now (switch “AI” for “blockchain” if you’re reading this via time machine from 2019).

Is there hope? Maybe. But I also think that a return to sanity and responsibility in the tech industry may necessarily be accompanied by a normalization of tech salaries: if we rein in FAANG/MAGMA/MANGA/(insert preferred humorous acronym here), I don’t know that a 30 year old Meta employee can necessarily expect to make $400k/year, and I think that top decile of compensation has really been forcing everybody’s pay up over the years. See how easy it is to want the craziness to continue, just so you can continue to feel confident about making your mortgage in San Jose?