The Great Wave

Hands-on workers in the tech industry are swimmers in the open sea: if we stay still too long, we sink and drown. By necessity we’ve embraced a culture of continual self-education, not only to advance, but to simply keep our heads above the surface. This was always part of the deal, and having regular opportunities to learn new skills is a way to keep a career interesting.

But in recent years, the pace of change has accelerated. The once steadily rising waters have become a deluge. Many of us now thrash and flail inside a seething whirlpool, one that threatens to overwhelm even the most capable of swimmers. Looking back on my decades in the industry, I already see plenty of wreckage on the water. A shard of Flash MX drifts by, still sporting a faded Macromedia logo. An outdated version of PHP pokes out of the waves, part of a once proud ship now obliterated by the deadly torpedoes of SQL injection. The rotting wooden hull of Good Ship Angular creaks by, still manned by a skeleton crew, their race lost long ago to a newer and sleeker React dreadnought.

As we tread water and gasp for air, an enormous battleship glides into view. The crew leans over the railing and mocks us from high above. “Hey bros, if you had the right skills, you’d be up here with us. Have you tried Copilot? What about Claude? Hand-coding is dead. Work smarter, not harder!”

But glancing at the underside of their seemingly unsinkable ship from below, I see what they don’t: small cracks are creeping across the hull. Rivets are popping loose. Water is seeping in. The battleship too is sinking, slowly but surely, and the lifeboats won’t save everyone. The crew might not realize it yet, but soon most of them will be swimming down here with the rest of us.

It’s been years since a good friend in the industry told me he’d been colouring his hair before job interviews, to look younger. Now that I am nearly twice the age of many tech industry job interviewers, I see myself on the webcam the way they probably see me: I look tired. I look like a man who’s spent years hunched over a keyboard tracking down parse errors. I look like a man who likes to use the thumbs up emoji on Slack. I look like the older developers I met at IBM when I came on board during the dotcom boom, right before they were mercilessly culled via rounds of buyouts and layoffs when the bubble popped in 2000.

At the time, those of us in our 20s thought it was normal. Surely those grizzled 50-somethings understood that it was time to step aside and make way for our new ideas. We presumed their pensions would supply them with all the Metamucil they needed for their encroaching decrepitude. This was the circle of life. The economy recovered a bit, and soon enough the rest of us got raises and promotions and bought new cars.

In reality, to be laid off at any age is upsetting, especially when your industry is in turmoil, and your recently in-demand skills are suddenly punchlines. New grads are currently fighting their own hard battles, struggling to land their first jobs in a chaotic political environment where many companies are reluctant to make big investments in their employees.

But to be laid off around age 50 raised extra worries: I am not old enough to stop working yet, but not young enough to completely start over from scratch. I have zero aptitude for management, yet I do not have the unicorn skills that might make me an elite hire. I do have a thousand smaller skills, all highly appreciated by my various bosses throughout the course of my meandering career, but none of them set me apart. I need to be nimble, to rearrange my existing skills, to make myself marketable, and I need to do all this in an industry that is becoming increasingly unfamiliar. I no longer have time for false starts and poor decisions, yet both those things feel inevitable in our current reality.

I can choose to blame my woes on ageism in the industry – and it definitely does exist – or I can gamely try to sell my varied experience as a positive, not a negative. It is true that the knowledge I’ve gained across countless projects helps me to notice familiar pitfalls looming on the horizon. I’ve learned what questions to ask up front. I’m much better at avoiding time-consuming and messy approaches that might have lured me astray when I was greener. I can recognize when a newfangled library or framework is just an old idea with a new name and logo.

But the wisdom I’ve gained through experience is an intangible skill, and there is no Leetcode test that employers can use to pretend to measure it. And simply adding up years of employment doesn’t guarantee wisdom — everyone knows someone who worked for decades in the same role and seemingly learned nothing.

I’m also willing to concede that some common criticisms of older tech workers are valid. Neither my mind nor my body works the way it did 30 years ago. My eyesight is blurry, my glasses give me headaches, and my patience for timewasters wears thin sooner than it used to. I no longer retain the ability to sit at the keyboard until two o’clock every morning, teaching myself new skills, fueled solely on fear and 2L bottles of Pepsi. (That’s how I taught myself PHP in my 20s, and also how I hospitalized myself with kidney stones.)

But the greatest challenge is that I am losing the sort of idealistic delusion that inspires younger people to work in blind faith. I can no longer convince myself that online work is more important than anything else in the universe, because I know it isn’t. This particular challenge may be personal, part of the jaded curmudgeonliness some of us acquire with age, but the tech industry has objectively done very little in recent years to inspire anyone.

Idealism is a powerful motivator in tech, as it is in any creative industry. Young, bright and ambitious workers love to make a lot of money, but they don’t want to simply slog for a paycheque. They also want to feel that their work matters, or to see themselves as part of a new generation of thinkers that will sweep away the rust of the past and drag the rest of society into the future. The Futurism artistic movement of early-1900s Italy promoted this concept explicitly, publishing taunting manifestos that declared new and powerful combustion engines superior to the fusty paintings of the Greek masters.

“We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath — a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” – F. T. Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, 1909.

Futurism retreated after the First World War, when the horrors of mechanized warfare became clear, but the movement’s ideals were soon resuscitated and repurposed in the service of Benito Mussolini’s fascism.

Modern Silicon Valley startup culture is similarly driven by a desire to not only build new things, but to intentionally disrupt the old. And that disruption often amounts to destruction. In recent decades, venture capital tech has arguably destroyed journalism, publishing, taxis, local retailers, education, and the music industry, among many other examples. Our democracies and our economic stability appear to be next in line.

The digital products that have replaced those core institutions are funneling ludicrous wealth to a tiny minority of people, while diminishing the richness of life for many others. It is unsettling to realize that I have probably played a tiny part in this process over my career, but in my defense, the current state of the industry was not always an obvious eventuality. Now having been fooled once, twice, three times, I find it increasingly difficult to look at any proposed innovation in the tech industry without immediately recognizing some clear destructive downsides.

Donald Trump’s second term has fully opened the floodgates, and many tech companies no longer even pretend to hide their evil plans behind a veneer of public good. One new startup has apparently devised an entire business model around selling hacked personal data to debt collectors. Another company with a name baldly inspired by Tolkien’s terrifying Eye of Sauron is enthusiastically compiling a vast trove of interconnected personal data about American citizens, knowing that Trump will likely use it to punish his political opponents. Tesla, a once-admired electric car company with a progressive customer base, now has a CEO who promotes far-right political parties and tosses out Nazi-esque salutes at rallies.

Countless other small tech startups we’ve never heard of are now rife with young males who imitate and celebrate the brash, careless, and bullying management styles of their more famous role models. Their bullying extends even to their product end users, who are no longer even asked what they want or need. The industry now presumes that users will obediently go wherever they are led, like leashed puppies repeatedly yanked back onto the sidewalk by an impatient dogwalker.

With these behaviours normalized, the dream of working in tech is far less appealing than it used to be. I realize that everyone must make some compromises to earn a living. No job can be fun or heroically meaningful all the time. But those who still care about their personal impact on the world are not enthused about getting up every morning to work for an employer that makes them feel sick to their stomachs. And it seems many tech companies no longer want to employ those sorts of thoughtful people anyway. They are already busy purging internal critical voices. Other workers who aren’t overtly laid off drift away on their own accord, intuitively understanding that they are not welcome in the industry.

None of these trends are completely new, but all of them are being accelerated by one unavoidable new force: Generative AI. Whether you believe this particular technology is destined to transform society completely, or whether you believe it’s mostly smoke and mirrors, it is coming for you. Those in charge have fully bought in. American corporations are now cooperating to invest a trillion dollars into infrastructure designed to support Generative AI.

To help justify their investments, these corporations are jamming AI-powered chatbots and tools into every conceivable application, even when users don’t want it. At the same time, they are laying off workers and modifying tech job requirements to leverage the presumed efficiencies of AI. Creative problem-solving is out, and Copilot usage quotas are in. Digital artisans are being turned into assembly line drones. As this wave of desperate AI optimism crests, resistance from within the industry has become risky. Asking too many questions about the assumptions underlying AI investment is now very unwise for those who wish to stay employed. Writing an essay like this one is downright foolish.

After causing waves of disruptions to other industries, will Generative AI be the innovation that finally comes for the tech industry itself? Will the same designers, architects, and coders who build the tools be the ones made redundant? For now, hubris keeps most in the industry believing their unique brilliance will save them from the coming carnage, confident that they will ride the enormous wave safely to shore. But many will be pulled under and smashed against the reef.

More tech workers may soon learn, as innumerable writers, artists, teachers, and journalists have before them, that the automation that transforms their jobs does not need to be as skilled as they are. It merely needs to be good enough and cheap enough to convince those in charge of the money that the tradeoffs are acceptable. Generative AI is not by definition an evil technology, but it is being weaponized by people with questionable intentions. As with any technology that is not inherently good or bad, the distinction becomes academic when a small powerful minority determines how it will be deployed at scale.

From here, the future of tech, and the future of my drydocked career, could diverge in several directions.

The doomsday scenarios are the easiest to envision. Whether Generative AI succeeds at obsoleting millions of workers, or turns out to be an speculative bubble that bursts spectacularly, the result may be the mass unemployment of educated and ambitious creatives. The anger those workers will feel at having their dreams yanked away despite doing “everything right” will be palpable and understandable.

A jobless laptop class likely wouldn’t get much sympathy from the workers in industries that have been suffering tech-fueled disruptions for years, but the fallout from a total tech collapse would harm everyone. US financial markets, heavily reliant on tech stocks for growth, would finally plummet for real, wiping out retirement savings. Billions of dollars in vanished tax revenue would starve government resources even as safety nets are being dismantled in the name of efficiency, austerity, and partisan political ideology. The tools we all must now rely on to communicate, learn, bank, and shop would become even more awful than they already are, as surviving tech companies squeeze users harder to extract every penny of remaining revenue from their faltering investments.

With a little imagination, though, it is possible to conjure more positive futures. As the billionaire tech CEOs and their political accomplices grow ever bolder, there are signs they are beginning to overreach, and that the public may be tiring of their disproportionate unelected power. Readers were eager to get their hands on Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s exposé of the cynical inner workings of Facebook during the 2010s. Elon Musk’s popularity dropped when he wandered away from his various CEO roles to spend time terrorizing US government bureaucrats under the auspices of the mockingly-named DOGE. Recent polls show that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are very unpopular with Americans. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, had to adjust his wedding plans to avoid hordes of protestors angered by his conspicuous flaunting of wealth in Venice, a fragile city already overwhelmed by tourism and rising sea levels.

The Gilded Age, a fictionalized show about the Robber Barons of 19th century New York, is drawing millions of viewers. The characters have loose parallels with today’s tech billionaires. The instinctive admiration many Americans have for the ultrawealthy may last only as long as regular workers retain some hope, however remote, of one day joining the club. The industrialists of the rail and steel eras were eventually brought down by their own corruption, stock market collapses, labour reforms, and government regulation. Within decades, President Roosevelt’s New Deal was widely redistributing American wealth to help transform society from the bottom up. A similar outcome does not feel particularly likely at the moment, and I hope we don’t need another Great Depression to get us there, but the dream of societal correction remains on the table.

The many disaffected minds now being cast out of the tech industry are still here. They are educated, thoughtful, and creative, and some may be looking to devote their expertise to worthy causes, not tired exploitation schemes. Without the distracting temptation of easy tech money, they may choose to focus their skills on repairing the disastrous mistakes of the recent decades, and work to overcome the technical, financial and political obstacles holding us back. History shows that when change does come, it often comes very quickly, and tumultuous times can speed this along.

There are signs of life. After Trump’s re-election, Bluesky surged in popularity as an ad-free and fascist-free alternative to X. The social media site Cara was launched by artists hoping to give others a way to share their creations on a platform free of Generative AI and exploitation. Canadian tech corporations are being asked to voluntarily sign a Tech For Good declaration promising they will “use technology for the good of humanity and of the planet that sustains us use technology for the good of humanity and of the planet that sustains us.”

This is all very admirable, but it ignores difficult questions about who decides exactly what behaviours are good, and who ensures companies adhere to their proclaimed principles. Promises are easy to make and easy to break, as Google proved when they removed the famous “don’t be evil” clause from their code of conduct. Petroleum refiners and other corporations have mastered the art of greenwashing, and there’s no reason to expect tech companies won’t copy their tactics. Global attempts to regulate AI, and the tech industry in general, have faced repeated snags. Canada was forced to rescind a proposed Digital Services Tax during trade negotiations with the US.

But as algorithms continue to force-feed us ever-more-disgusting slop, more people may soon reject it. The voices and creations of real humans may soon become valuable again. This would be a world I could get excited about. And if anybody working to reassemble a better society from this swirling wreckage needs a web developer on their salvage crew, please don’t hesitate to reach out. My rates are very reasonable.

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