I said to a young friend the other day that this might be the best job market they will ever experience and she looked at me like I was crazy. I get it. When you’re young the experiences you have had limit your understanding of what it’s like when things change. When you are old (like me) you’ve been through some stuff and you have a different outlook. This piece in the NY Times looks at the different ways the generations are experiencing the contraction in the tech sector:
When Lyft laid off 13 percent of its workers in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company.
“It seemed like tech companies had so much opportunity,” said Ms. Chang, 26. “If you got a job, you made it. It was a sustainable path.”
Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that the crypto exchange Coinbase was eliminating his job. Ever since the 48-year-old engineer was laid off from his first job at the video game company Atari in 2003, he said, he has asked himself once a year: “If I were laid off, what would I do?”
The contrast between Ms. Chang’s and Mr. Pulliam’s reactions to their professional letdowns speaks to a generational divide that is becoming more clear as the tech industry, which expanded rapidly through the pandemic, swings toward mass layoffs.
Microsoft said this week that it planned to cut 10,000 jobs, or roughly 5 percent of its work force. And on Friday morning, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it planned to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6 percent of its total. Their cuts followed big layoffs at other tech companies like Meta, Amazon and Salesforce.
Millennials and Generation Z, born between 1981 and 2012, started tech careers during a decade-long expansion when jobs multiplied as fast as iPhone sales. The companies they joined were conquering the world and defying economic rules. And when they went to work at outfits that offered bus rides to the office and amenities like free food and laundry, they weren’t just taking on a new job — they were taking on a lifestyle. Few of them had experienced widespread layoffs.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X, born between 1946 and 1980, on the other hand, lived through the biggest contraction the industry has ever seen. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s eliminated more than one million jobs, emptying Silicon Valley’s Highway 101 of commuters as many companies folded overnight.
“It was a blood bath, and it went on for years,” said Jason DeMorrow, a software engineer who was laid off twice in 18 months and was out of work for more than six months. “As concerning as the current downturn is, and as much as I empathize with the people impacted, there’s no comparison.”
Tech’s generational divide is representative of a broader phenomenon. The year someone is born has a big influence on views about work and money. Early personal experiences strongly determine a person’s appetite for financial risk, according to a 2011 study by the economists Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stefan Nagel of the University of Chicago.
The study, which analyzed the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances from 1960 to 2007, found that people who came of age in the 1970s, when the stock market stagnated, were reluctant to invest in the early 1980s, when it roared. That trend reversed in the 1990s.
“Once you experience your first crash, things change,” Professor Nagel said. “You realize bad stuff happens and maybe you should be a bit more cautious.”
I came of age in the 70s and then experienced the hideous recession of the early 80s. It’s certainly colored my view of the job market which has always seemed cruel and capricious to me. My ciew is to take advantage when things are on the upswing but be prepared for when it crashes. Which it always does. By now I’ve been through way too many downturns to ever feel like it’s always going to be morning in America. On the other hand, morning always shows up at some point.