'Winter is coming for tech engineering', influencer's big warning and tips

The demand for tech engineering has significantly risen over time. However, big tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, have laid off thousands of employees in recent years. Deedy Das, a tech influencer on X, formerly Twitter, is now warning the industry players of the coming “winter” for tech engineering. In a series of Twitter threads, Deedy has drawn a contrast between the situation at hand and the industry, about two decades.

Influencer warns tech engineers, says ‘Winter is coming’

Deedy began by mocking the popular phrase “Study CS and work in Edtech.” Further explaining the dire situation as of now, Deedy pointed out how, despite the huge layoffs, companies are not willing to hire. Meanwhile, startups mostly prefer tenured hires.

“Beyond that, there seems to be less and less whitespace for software to create value in people's lives. Compare how much time we spent with tech in the year 2000 as a society vs 2024,” the influencer wrote, adding, “Companies are trending to being smaller and more efficient, not large and IBM-like.”

“It's not there yet, but AI is also slowly and steadily eating away at jobs humans used to do. LLMs will only write more code over time,” he continued. “BigTech fueled a lot of the hiring with their consistent 20% YoY growth but they realize revenue doesn't come for free anymore,” Deedy added.

“Startups often dislike hiring new grads because the cost to train them and get them up to speed (unless it's in something new grads know more about, like AI) is quite high. Colleges have such high %age of CS majors who are NOT finding jobs today,” he added.

Deedy further notes, “This is not meant to be a doomer post, but I just don't see a future where it really returns to its heyday. I can see people migrate away from software for a bit before coming back to it in the next boom cycle.”