Figuring Out Your Next Move
Joe's Nerdy Rants #70 - Weekend reads, podcasts, and other stuff
While I’d love to write about all the awesome stuff happening in AI and tech right now, it’s hard when many people reading my newsletter are anxious about their jobs and their next moves. I regularly field a lot of questions and have conversations about tech careers. Yesterday alone is a good idea of the types of conversations I have.
In the morning, I had breakfast with my friend Nick Freund. He's doing awesome things with his new project, Not Another CEO, which aims to give practical advice to founders and CEOs. No hustle culture bullshit. Just real talk. Interestingly, this is his next move after shutting down his startup in mid-last year (we discussed this in a very emotional and raw episode of my podcast). He’s doing great work giving back to the community, and I’m stoked for what he’s doing.
Later in the afternoon, I went to the climbing gym and ran into my friend “John” (name changed). He was a project manager at Microsoft and was laid off last week. He mentioned that a prior round of layoffs left his team working 80+ hours a week, doing the work of other departments that were downsized or eliminated. He explained his firing as “getting an email telling me I had 15 minutes to collect my belongings and shut everything down. No thank you. Nothing. It was very cold.” Yeah, that sounds cold as hell. And the people left after this latest round of layoffs can expect to be even more overworked than before, all while anticipating when the grim reaper will show up to take them out in the next round of layoffs. Thankfully, “John” has been doing prerequisites to attend nursing school over the last couple of years, starting this Fall. He’s glad to be leaving the tech industry, which he describes as an unrewarding and useless meat grinder.
Sadly, these are the sorts of things I hear about daily. Let’s be real. The job market is a MESS right now. Corporations openly give employees the middle finger. US government jobs, once considered a safe haven, are being sloppily chopped down with a proverbial chainsaw. Nothing is safe, and workers are feeling very insecure. And if you’re out of a job, it’s usually very gnarly. While some people can land a job pretty quickly, I know people are still looking for work after being laid off almost two years ago. The amount of anxiety in the tech space is insane right now.
This is unlike other market inflection changes to labor dynamics I’ve experienced. While offshoring (in the 2000s and 2010s) was seen as a way to cut US employment costs, AI technology is now available and sold to reduce headcount. As this technology advances, it will affect nearly every knowledge worker.
I’ve written a lot about this, and my advice is pretty simple. Invest your skills, build your network, and get good at marketing. Most people hate self-promotion. You’re going to need to get over it. As I’ve said before, obscurity is the enemy. Be the best version of whatever you know you’re great at, and build your network based on mutual trust and benefit.
It’s that easy. And it’s that hard. But I think the days of banking on a steady 9-5 are ending in the next 5-10 years. People will need to expect to freelance and be much more entrepreneurial than in the past. That’s reality, so start preparing now.
Because I receive daily messages from everyone from C-levels at the world’s biggest companies to line workers and everyone in between, if there’s enough market interest, I might create more content around career topics. Stay tuned.
Please listen to the audio above or on Spotify (or your podcast platform of choice).
Have a wonderful weekend,
Joe
Cool Weekend Reads & Listens
When the dotcom bubble burst - The Silicon Underground
CoreWeave serves as bellwether for AI in soft IPO market | Semafor
Let’s knock down social media’s walled gardens
Intentional Arrangement: From Digital Hellscape to Information Nirvana // Jessica Talisman
How the Ontology Pipeline Powers Semantic Knowledge Systems (Jessica Talisman)
The Lost Art and Science of Data Modeling (Bill Coulam)
This Is How Tesla Will Die - by Will Lockett
Apple innovation and execution — Benedict Evans
Podcast
Freestyle Fridays - Figuring Out Your Next Move (Spotify)
Willis Nana - Navigating Data Engineering Leadership, YouTube, and More (Spotify)
Salma Bakouk - Data Observability, the Balance of Running a Startup, and More (Spotify)
Freestyle Fridays - Public Speaking Tips w/ Jordan Morrow (Spotify)
Simon Späti - The Art of Writing about Data Engineering (Spotify)
Todd Beauchene - The Early Days at Snowflake, Modern Data Platforms, and More (Spotify)
Freestyle Friday - How I Use AI for Writing (Spotify)
Matthew Kelliher-Gibson - The Data Cynic (Spotify)
Carly Taylor - The True Cost of Replacing Engineers with AI (Spotify)
Freestyle Friday - The Cult of Scrum (Spotify)
John Thompson - The Path to AGI, Writing Books, and More (Spotify, YouTube)
Freestyle Friday - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch of AI Data Slop (Spotify)
Eric Broda - AI Agent Ecoysystems, the Death of Consulting, and More (Spotify, YouTube)
Hugo Bowne-Anderson - Exploring the Future of AI and Automation (Spotify, YouTube)
Ghalib Suleiman & Kevin Connolly - Data Team "What Ifs" (Spotify, YouTube)
Anne-Claire Baschet & Yoann Benoit - Unifying AI and Product Development - (Spotify, YouTube)
David Jayatillake - Semantic Layers, Proving Value in Data Work, and More - (Spotify, YouTube)
Freestyle Fridays - Old School vs New School Data Modeling (Spotify)
Way more episodes over at the Joe Reis Show, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also available on YouTube.
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More to be announced soon…
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Thanks!
Joe Reis
You're doing a great service to the community by raising so much awareness on this topic, and others related to it!
The level of uncertainty and unfairness we're experiencing is unprecedented. When you use your platform to speak openly about it, I believe it helps everyone feel a little less lonely in this journey, less of a failure.
These are tough truths to acknowledge. It is incredible to witness the instability of technology sector and how reliant it has been on low interest rates and growth of client companies in the same sector. There are not enough executives in VC backed companies speaking out about the incredible pressure they have been under to shift from a growth-at-any-cost strategy to one that is profitable, leaving 100s of thousands of employees as collateral damages along the way. It appears all companies are now expected to operate with a fraction of the headcount they have been used to. I think we will look back in the near future and see this period marked a dramatic reorganizing of our economy; it’s just still fuzzy on what that may look like.