#techcrisis — Public Fediverse posts

Late-night thoughts... sparked by an engineer on Mastodon asking how, with all the "vibe coders" out there, the demand for actual, competent code reviews is ever going to be met: https://mastodon.world/@paulschoe/116894894916264050

So I just started writing...

The end of the tech exception

For almost thirty years, IT had this sort of "immunity." It was (yeah, was...) the ultimate safe-haven sector. Almost non-stop growth, incredibly comfortable (sometimes even indecent) conditions, and companies always begging for more people than were actually available. Cutthroat, sure, but the kind where you could just hop from gig to gig in Silicon Valley to always land a better deal.

But we have to look at two things. First, historical instability. The way we absorbed past major crises (oil shocks, the dot-com crash, subprime)... those were mostly economic or geopolitical. They hit the global economy, and tech felt the shockwaves, but never as hard as other sectors like real estate or the auto industry.

The second point is the current instability. Today, the crisis is homegrown. It’s coming from inside the tech industry itself (whether that’s Fintech, space tech, or even gov tech). Generative AI and agentic tools are changing the very core of how value is produced. (And the money and physical resources are taking a hit because of it, by the way).

This isn't just an economic dip or a structural pivot. It’s a full-blown identity crisis for a massive, multi-layered profession that honestly thought it was untouchable.

This existential crisis about an individual's actual usefulness in a sector points back to a really old concept... one theorized by Émile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society (he called it anomie) back in the late 1800s during the Industrial Revolution.

The human need to look ahead

No drama here, we’re just talking about the need for stability. Not economic stability pushed by some brand-new liberal market, no, but purely personal stability. The ability to see your own future. A human being needs a marked path. Until very recently, a developer’s career path was pretty linear, predictable, and reassuring (with the usual life bumps we all go through). But looking a bit deeper, the sector had these very rigid, schematic rules for the social escalator:

Learn the syntax and the basics of engineering.

Practice like crazy (the famous "eating lines of code") to actually become autonomous.

Move up to Senior, Tech Lead, or Architect roles (for the people who want that).

Today, the fog comes from the fact that Step 2, the part where you actually build your critical thinking and experience, is at risk of vanishing entirely, replaced by instant code generation. The future is a blur because devs literally don't know what skills to bet on anymore to guarantee they'll still be employable in 5 or 10 years.

In the end, we're just watching tech go through the exact same loop as other sectors. It’s normalizing. It’s becoming a classic industrial sector: like mining, the auto industry, textiles, canneries, fishing, whatever. A normalization complete with its own automation, the hunt for extreme profitability, and now, this new "Taylorism" settling in.

#SoftwareEngineering #TechIndustry #FutureOfWork #AgenticCoding #VibeCoding #CodeReview #AI #TechCrisis #SociologyOfWork