Comment by micik

Great comment. I’m thinking along similar lines — what is there in tech to build? And the answer is, not much for the current cohort of services.

Big product companies with big products are solved problems in their respective fields. Building an Amazon or a Facebook is quite a lot of work. Maintaining it is much less work.

For a while the industry has done a thing where you do e.g. infrastructure in five different ways across ten different teams across three departments. It created a lot of “work” but it didn’t create much additional value.

Another instance of this was myriad “internal products” with the idea that some of them will be blockbusters because Paul Buchheit built Gmail as a 20% project in days of yore. That didn’t go so well, either.

You get the feeling that all this merry but ultimately futile kerfuffle was done to fuel the hype of growth but the actual job positions were completely uncoupled from revenue growth. For a time this was hard to see while global expansion was happening. Revenue was growing rapidly and so was headcount. It seemed to check out, arithmetically, but it’s not sensible. It doesn’t take twice as many workers to service twice as many employees in this industry.

When the global expansion didn’t have anywhere else to expand to and revenue stopped growing, the workforce-sustaining illusion fell apart. Now those companies are unloading everyone but the skeleton crew it takes to maintain the products. That’s a lot of people.