What High Tech and Media Layoffs Say About the Economy

Having worked in the service industry for quite some time and now working as an engineer in tech I can tell you my experience is not anywhere close to yours.

The amount of stress and pressure to perform and understand wildly complex, ever shifting problems is just not comparable and I can assure you, it is indeed "work". I feel it every day.

Not all tech is the same. "Working in tech" does not mean someone is doing tech related things or that they even come close to anything requiring any deep technical skill in an area. They may work in more creative areas and have the freedom to try new ideas and fail, while other areas require absolutes and are more akin to a precise science.

The tech industry churns and burns, and tons of people hit the wall and burn out because of the demand put on us tech folks. There simply aren't enough people who can fill the necessary roles and actually do so with proficiency, so the pressure is at minimum doubled. This is why the pay and benefits are high, because the pool is very limited and the job is incredibly difficult, every single day. Yeah lots of people get hired, but turnover is also high - workers end up leaving due to insane pressure to keep up or they simply don't hack it in the role because of lack of knowledge/skill or simply not being ready for the realities of the job. If I had a dollar for every self-proclaimed programmer/dev/hacker I met who couldn't solve a basic IT issue I would be retired by now.

Maybe your partner lucked out and is on a particularly chill/relaxed team or department, but I can promise you that for every team or department that is hyper-relaxed there is another department carrying the extra weight and working double time. If the entire company is producing nothing and being laissez faire, then that company won't last long anyhow.

This entire attitude towards tech is so myopic. Sure there are a lot of tech douches, scammers and fakes who ruin the industry for everyone else and of course media/TV paints a picture of super glamorous work with tons of perks and yadda yadda, but this is simply not the case for most tech people.

I work with some of the most brilliant and hard working people (who are far better than me), so if they want to take a long lunch or goof off in a meeting, I honestly don't have a problem with it. Not everyone can (or should) do this line of work and there is in fact a shortage of people who can do these roles. These are the people behind the scenes who invent the shit that makes your life better, whether you want to accept that or not.

/r/technology Thread Parent Link - theatlantic.com