Recession and crisis in the IT industry. 7 months of interviews with 50 managers

https://trojanczyk.eu/crisis-in-the-it-industry/

by catinblack • 2 years ago

40 15 2 years ago

catinblack• 2 years ago

Over the course of seven months, I conducted more than 50 interviews with top-level managers, mainly CEO (chief executive officer), CTO (chief technology officer), CFO (chief financial officer), COO (chief operating officer) and CIO (chief innovation/IT officer), from countries such as Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Sweden. These meetings gave me the opportunity to hear a variety of perspectives on the onset of the crisis in the markets, especially in the IT and high-tech industry, and to learn about the current situation in companies. The following transcripts are based on these reflections and the data collected.

TedDoesntTalk• 2 years ago

Clarification: he is not interviewing to be hired for a job

ReleaseCandidat• 2 years ago

Whenever I read phrases like this

no one expected the industry to start experiencing a crisis, and certainly no one expected it to happen so quickly.

I always start pondering about Hanlon's razor.

flurie2• 2 years ago

I'm curious what the point of this piece is. If the goal is to sell the author's book, it has not done a great job of selling it to me. There's a lot of information missing here, and it is not clear to me that the author has a fundamental understanding of how to conduct qualitative research.

The introduction does not clearly state the problem, leaving us to understand that the topic is the "recession and crisis" from the title. But the United States is not experiencing a recession, and "crisis" is never defined.

Then we learn that 50 interviews of many different types of C-levels took place over seven months, but we aren't told which seven months, and we don't have any information from the interviews other than interview fragments. We don't even have broad topics, let alone an interview script, so the script could have been asking questions about the weather for all we know.

In-between information shared alongside pull quotes is a lot of editorializing, with lines like "There is no denying that the technology industry, for at least a decade, was seen as a symbol of stability and continuous development." I do not see Information Technology as synonymous with "the technology industry" more broadly.

hoxel3• 2 years ago

What do you mean by USA not experiencing a recession or stagnation? What about recent collapse of the stock market, which was experience due to predictions coming from the U.S. - inflation and recession exactly?

As for the book - it's hard for me to say, but I'm not convinced that the author is trying to sell us anything. Especially since, as you can see, the website doesn't have it yet. But if you switch to the Polish version (because the author is from that country, I think) you can see that the book is published for free and you can optionally donate money to some organization (I think taking care Bleeding Disorders).

aagha• 2 years ago

What about recent collapse of the stock market

What collapse!?

By the end of the week, the market was down less than 2%.

flurie2• 2 years ago

I didn't use the word "stagnation," and "recession" has a core definition that is pretty broadly accepted[1]. I have no opinion on whether or not the recent dip merits a recession, but it is not enough to define one on its own.

The other word used was "crisis," and my criticism is that the word is broad and never defined.

My usage of the word "sell" is more similar to "persuade" and is a valid definition[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#Definitions

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/sell

kkfx• 2 years ago

IMVHO the IT crisis is the cleptocracy crisis. I mean for business reasons there was and still is an immense push toward cloud+mobile, and archaic mainframe model even worse than the original one, and now a push toward ML for stuff ML is useless for or still far from being usable.

For a certain amount of time people bought the hype but the honeymoon period is short. Some recap for instance:

- full-stack virtualization on x86 push, selling the idea that's cheap buy a starship to visualize some OS instances, one per service, instead a much more modest iron or even a simple blade witch cheap iSCSI mounted storage. A push needed to sell early "cloud" VPS model, but definitively NOT needed by anyone else;

- when the bubble burst, time to scale down to paravirtualisation aka "containers" with K8S, a hell of YAML, a monster to orchestrate another big load of crap just to sell pre-made images instead of running OSes and service "infrastructure as code" style simply orchestrating with Ansible/Salt and co, this bubble is still to burst even if the NixOS/Guix growth suggest some start to understand that only giants selling *aaS stuff need it;

- "AI" promise, while all others services start to experience lower quality and higher issues than before, most have already see it's a fallacious promise, with very little to be of actual use.

How this system can last longer? How many in HN community still do not realize that with NixOS/Guix System model, or bult-in IaC in the OS, we can host on bare metal pretty anything slicing much attack surface, costs and crappy complicatedness using a fraction of code, services and in general resources, so costs, for doing the damns same job? How long it would take to realize that people damn need to know IT to be citizens in the modern society and with knowledge we can work back on a desktop model with few servers and at current datacenter resources we can run the entire planet in a much modern world than now?

IT industry it's failed because it's not an industry anymore, it's just manager run pure finance based on psychology more than IT. Current management can only change role allowing technicians to design where we can and should go instead of pretending to have their solution in purely economical terms. And BEWARE IT actually is the sole mass-industry we still master, automotive is Chinese now, automotive afferent like Naval, Aerospace etc as well for simple consequence, natural resources are elsewhere in the world, academia enslaved by big corp can only produce useful idiots, we are essentially broke. Software and semiconductors are the sole sectors we are still leaders with enough margin to keep up.

hoxel3• 2 years ago

Very interesting point of view

pierrelf• 2 years ago

What's up with the cookie banner not having a deny option

benterix• 2 years ago

My first thought: "Which cookie banner?". I was sure uBlock Origin has removed it for me. Then I went back and I realized it's not the case - I just became cookie-banner blind.

antisthenes• 2 years ago

What an awful UI for a website.

Selecting any text pops up social sharing links and trying to deselect it frequently doesn't work.

Stop messing with simple functionality!

tiahura• 2 years ago

This mostly seems like a recognition that Europe is being left behind. That was the choice they made and now their kids will get to live with it.

hoxel3• 2 years ago

Don't you think there's a war going on in Europe right now and it's affecting a lot of industries?

thntk• 2 years ago

Isn't it the technological cycle in IT? We have seen PC softwares in the 90s, then web apps, then mobile apps, and now AI services. Except that currently AI is immature, so companies do not know exactly what to do with it yet. They are just conscious about previous cycles, so they overreact with massive layoff to rebudget for whatever new threats and opportunities.

Despite their efforts, I suspect new companies will appear anyway and grow massively like previous cycles, and hiring will increase again. So if you were laid off or a new grad, it seems now is great time for startup, or at least to learn new skills instead of getting rehired immediately by the existing companies.

Recession and crisis in the IT industry. 7 months of interviews with 50 managers

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