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My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.
I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Globally it's still going strong.
For most younger people here this may come as a shock but tech jobs can disappear, for years.
The job market in 2019 felt a lot like the job market in 1999, people rushing to get upskilled so that they could get into software and make ridiculous money. After the dotcom burst huge number of people left tech, or at least left the world of software development. Salaries also went way down for nearly a decade.
A common comment here on HN with layoffs is "well they're just getting rid of superfluous employees, so this is no big deal". This assumption is both ridiculously callous about real people losing job, it also underestimates how much work is superfluous in SV.
It is very possible that tech will take a serious hit this time, and that the total number of software engineers, data scientists, dev ops people etc will go do... for years. And likewise salaries will also drop (TC automatically does this thanks to the magic of RSUs).
Certainly people will need software and software engineers, just likely not nearly as much as they do now. Once FAANG realizes there's no longer a need to keep talent off the market, expect salaries to take a dive.
One obvious counterpoint to this argument is that this recession was not caused by markets realizing that many publicly listed tech companies actually had no market and no path to profitability.
Also, non-tech companies took on a large number of engineers in the late 90s to address Y2K - many of whom got laid off afterwards. Not an issue here.
Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon".
So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult to discern, why should we assume that there is no other horizon for us?
I also don't know if I agree that we are at a "logical endpoint of all of these changes". Is computing truly continuous?
However, I think Ben's main point here is about incumbents, and I agree that it seems it is getting harder and harder to disrupt the Big Four. But I don't know if disruption for those 4 is as important as he thinks: Netflix carved out a $150B business that none of the four cared about by leveraging continuous computing to disrupt cable & content companies. I sure wasn't able to call that back in 2002 when I was getting discs in the mail. I think there are still plenty of industries ripe for that disruption.