Many people want to blame AI for significant disruption in the IT job market. I think this is true to a small degree, but it seems to me that it is not sufficient to explain what is going on.

I have personally wanted to blame a growing sort of rapacious value extraction. I think this is true to a moderate degree, and has various contributing factors relating to the watering down of Western Christendom; but I think this is also not sufficient to explain what is going on.

I recently stumbled across this blog post from Sean Goedecke: The good times in tech are over. Taken together with the considerations above, I think this has great explanatory power. Discretionary IT spending is naturally growing far more cautious.

In particular: in the SMB space you already see a pendulum swing away from cloud; consider the notable example of 37signals. Corresponding to this, large enterprises seem to be growing increasingly cautious with IT and cloud expenditure. Famously, for the past two years Hock Tan has insisted that his VMware customer base is largely interested in repatriation of public cloud workloads. This does not mean that cloud has no future whatsoever, but it does mean that some contraction and consolidation lies in the near future for public cloud.