We're in for a rough ride as an industry
I think web devs need to be especially concerned about where things are heading for us as an industry.
There’s the not so small issue of the tech industry being quite invested in turning the US into an authoritarian dictatorship and seemingly succeeding. But even if you assume that the US will come out of this in four years’ time as a recovering democracy (an extremely unsafe assumption, I think), the web is likely to suffer as an industry either way.
We have monopolies or oligopolies who control much of the software market and, of particular concern to the web sector, they control how people discover websites.
Those monopolies have, over the years, not made a secret of wanting a bigger cut of the revenue made by the web media industry and have regularly made moves towards taking bigger and bigger cuts of the overall web revenue pie, like how Google has kept trying to divert more and more traffic to their own properties in search engine results.
What seems to have changed, after the pandemic bubble popped is none of them seem concerned about antitrust action any more, even as antitrust action ramped up under Biden and in the EU. Or, more specifically, their behaviour only makes sense if their execs believe they can take on nation states (or even coalitions of nation states) and handily win.
Aggressive moves, such as Google iteratively expanding “AI” summaries as search engine result replacements, are only possible if the company is more afraid of other big tech cos than it is of nation states. They’ve also managed to turn film and TV industry dollars into tech industry cents, but that suits them fine because they’re the ones getting the cents and they have no intention of sharing with the labour doing the actual work. That they are demolishing the media industries and preventing them from continuing to build and expand their catalogues of series and movies isn’t a concern. Oligopolies don’t need to worry about product quality. The consumer has to accept whatever it is they offer.
From the perspective of a regular worker in web tech, what we have now is monopoly and oligopoly dominance. These companies don’t feel like pushing traffic or revenue to partners, so they don’t, so the web media sector is dying off. They have absolutely no incentive to invest in their software products, because their customers have no alternative, so they can decimate their work force annually without it affecting their business. They don’t have to make good software, so they don’t.
This would all be happening without “AI”.
LLMs are convenient for creating a summary feature that lets them co-opt a variety of web traffic, but I think it’s safe to assume these companies would be trying to take that traffic and revenue anyway. LLMs might provide a cover story for the lay-offs, but these companies have been wanting to weaken the power and influence of tech workers for a long while and would be doing so anyway.
Us web devs need to be particularly concerned. If the ultimate cause here for these industry trends is market dominance – oligopolies and monopolies – and not the AI Bubble, these trends are likely to only get worse when that bubble pops. This already makes intuitive sense: we have the worst job market for web devs since the dot-com crash, and that’s with the bubble in full force. Billions of dollars evaporating from the tech sector is unlikely to improve the mood or provide them with an excuse to ramp up their hiring.
But, more importantly, that these companies have been allowed to become this dominant over the market is preventing the industry in general from growing and diversifying, so I don’t see how the web industry will ever become healthy without drastic antitrust action in the US or without the EU competently investing massive public funds in building a European alternate industry (a move that IMHO would be unlikely to succeed because of some of the dysfunctions that are particular to the EU as an institution).
Software development in general might fair slightly better because the collapse of web media (and the broader media sector) might be less likely to impact it.
But I genuinely think that it’s going to be especially rough for web developers for a while.
And if the US gets entrenched as a presidential dictatorship, all of these issues will get exacerbated. (Not to mention all of the other problems that come with entrenched fascism.) Oligopolies and monopolies are more easily controlled by a totalitarian than a diverse and plural market, so they have no incentive to break up the oligopolies. They might shift things around if one of the tech companies isn’t performatively obedient enough – like punishing a tech go by forcing it to “sell” a major property to a competitor – but they are unlikely to address the antitrust issues at the heart of the industry’s economic rot.
We’re in for a rough ride, as an industry, no matter what happens.