Is there a bubble in the tech market? Is it about to explode?

In London at least. Tech companies dislike the fact there aren't enough engineers to fill roles which has led to a few things. 1. Permanent salaries on the increase that also has a trickle down effect on other related IT roles.

2. A healthy contracting market with rates steadily increasing despite IR35. Contractors are deciding what they'll be paid and are still be lapped up. Nothings worse then a late or undelivered project to your end clients. Maybe layoffs are a strategy in shaking this trend?

There's certainly a recession happening and or on the way but why should markets such as the UK be worried when roles in my company at least go unfilled for 6+ months at a time.

Personally, I think that there's definitely a correction going on, but it's far from explosion on the scale of a dotcom crash. "Tech" is not a separate industry now, but a set of technologies and professions that are used in a wide array of different industries. Companies in food, tourism, real estate and wherever else are hiring software engineers, dev ops and data analysts and are building "tech". And this tech that they're building, even if it's only "CRUD apps" that HN crowd loves to scoff over, is still creating a lot of real business value.

It's a buyers market, with such reliance on tech in virtually any industry I don't see a decline in demand for CS roles at least within the next decade.

Sure, why not. I have seen the dotcom crash and 2008 crash, they were healthy in terms of pruning the tech market from speculative ideas and returning it to something working. Yet another healthy correction is long overdue.

Tech is so intertwined in everything these days, much more so than the previous tech bubbles, that even if there is a prolonged slowdown I doubt techies individually are going to end up too effected. Tech firms sure. But who cares about them. They don't stand for anything worth shedding a tear about.

Bubbles are usually caused because people think to sell to a greater fool down the road and at some point there are not enough fools to sustain the upward price momentum. At some point all the fools want to be out and the price collapses. Crypto going from a 3 trillion market cap to 1 Trillion in the space of a few weeks is a great example of that.

Technology stocks are mostly different with the exception of some startups that are valued based on user growth instead of revenue growth. Users are not customers though, and customers are the only real sustainable source of finance.

There are a lot of technology firms now that are financed by their customers so even if there is a full stock market meltdown in tech stocks, you shouldn't be afraid of unemployment but salaries will adjust to the reduced competition from VC-funded startups.

The belt tightening has certainly begun. Down rounds and layoffs to reduce burn are all around [1]. These are fairly natural given the macro economic forces at work eight more.

Will it ‘explode’ and lead to an ‘apocalypse?’ Your guess is as good as mine.

Personally I don’t expect it to be like 99 again as many tech companies have real profit and VCs have plenty of cash… but I suppose there are plenty that don’t as well.

[1] - https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

Money was being thrown at any tech stock that showed momentum no matter the price. Heck, shopify was 150 in november as a great example of this and now its 30. People were buying it at 215x FORWARD earnings.

Was there a bubble? There is noone with a conscience who can claim there was not.

Is there still a bubble? I think so. I think a combination of current fiscal policy combined with a need for companies to react to their stock price (fiduciary duty to investors) will result in cuts almost everywhere.

Stay safe out there.

So far it appears that most of the layoffs are outside engineering. It's probably that the other salaries in the org are overinflated if anything in contrast to the value they generate for the organization.

I anticipate it being a bad time for middle managers with no skills outside of that.

I wonder if companies using tech will go back to preferring CapEx as opposed to high OpEx. Back to buying perpetual licenses that will be renewed when it is worth it instead or because you'll lose access to the product. Partially back to raw hardware or VMs hosted at not one of the usual suspects instead of suboptimal cloud implementations that sometimes resort to expensive VMs anyway because it was implemented by cheap outsourced labor rather than subject matter experts.

What answer would you like?

I'm not sure that "explode" is the right word for what's happening, but where I live we went from "we'll double our teams in 2022" to "we stopped hiring" to "we're laying off x% of our staff" in under 7 months. I personally love it, too many YouTube self-made engineers on the market.

It’s not a bubble. Just a garden variety recession.

I live in a European country and our salaries will not go down nor do I expect any layoffs. Your question is very US/Silicon Valley centric.

No. The tech market is doing fine

We are about to be called on to automate everything, because we are short workers. And we will be for a decade.

That's what you get for replacing the worlds largest generation, the Boomers, with the worlds smallest generation, the Zoomers.