The Job Market Bubble and Technical Debt

Now that the overhiring has ended and layoffs are finally beginning to stabilize, it makes me wonder how much companies, specifically tech, are overvalued by the stock market. If a company that is not generating profit can lay off 10% of its workforce and have the stock price be unaffected, how much economic value are tech workers really generating?

I recently learned that an overwhelming number of tech workers are unsatisfied with their job or unhappy with it. This is sourced from the 2024 Stack Overflow survey which says that the majority of unsatisfied workers are frustrated with the amount of technical debt. This technical debt has, in my opinion, largely been a result of the grind and turnover culture that tech seems to encourage.

There are constant deadlines in which engineers are forced to compromise on the quality of their code. I have no data on this, but I imagine that this issue is not nearly as problematic in companies that have not gone public. Being beholden to shareholders to be constantly growing, constantly earning more in the short term is a recipe for failure. Any good programmer knows that in order to have a successful project, it must be planned out to an extensive level. Even after this planning there will be setbacks that you have to adjust for and adapt on the spot. When there are hard deadlines in place and a constant need to push out new features, no time is left to iterate on previous code. This accumulates technical debt with a codebase that is so fragile that making any adjustment can lead to downtime or unrelated code failing to function. This leads to a never ending cycle of profit-focused deadlines to lower quality code to technical debt to frustration to eventually burnout and turnover.

Seeing this happen as a new dev coming right out of college is really disheartening. I have a couple of friends who I can see going through this exact cycle and it gives me worry for the future.