Sure, it's just even worse with big tech.

Not every company under capitalism is publicly traded with shareholders to answer to.

It's mostly software, but somehow no one calls it that. It's weird.

It's because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

What investors being sold by "tech" companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

It's the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn't even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it's labeled as "tech", investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there's a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Europe we've been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that's just a gut feeling, I'm not an economist).

I'm a DevOps engineer, if that counts.

It is, at least in my experience. Further, my recently laid off colleagues have been trying to find work for months, some of whom have been applying for jobs that would require pay cuts, with no luck.

Pretty much every job listing in the tech space gets hundreds if not thousands of applicants because the layoffs have not stopped for three years. You can see what I mean at layoffs.fyi. In tech, 60,000 so far this year, 153,000 in 2024, 264,000 in 2023, and 165,000 in 2022.

That's not even counting those that graduated in the last couple of years. Those people are in an extra bad spot because they have a large amount of college debt with no way to make their payments.

All of STEM is suffering because of corporate greed and rising anti-intellectualism.