I will be at Code BEAM Berlin featuring our first live episode of BEAM Radio. It will be a short and tight 30 minutes with Saša Jurić and José Valim.

The topic is about Fully Utilizing the BEAM and I hope to pick their respective brains for what they believe we in the community should be looking at to further take advantage of our rather unique runtime.

If you see me in Berlin, do come up and say hi. Dive in even if I'm talking. I'm never not talking unfortunately.

"The Market"

This is the most boring tech market in many years. Investments are down, the money hose is sinched quite tight and consequently tech companies that weren't profitable already are either dying, cutting costs or pivoting towards profit as fast as they can. Usually all of it.

Two ends of the programmer sphere get hit particularly by this. People looking for work, especially unproven inexperienced folks. Also us fancy consultant contractor types. Poor us.

Profitable, healthy companies and organisations also want to take this downturn seriously and consequently they stop hiring and might even start pinching some pennies. In some cases this is called for. What if all their customers are venture-funded startups, then there second-order money hose will also stop. In other cases I think it is a mix of fear and prudent care. But it sucks. Because it means that even the companies that could hire, aren't hiring.

The companies doing layoffs increase the available talent on the market. The companies not hiring increase competition for the roles that do get posted. This screws the new entry-level devs more than the experienced ones. Not surprising. Not sure what we can do about that. Capitalism, yay.

The other end is of course that cutting costs and doing layoffs should start with expensive people that have opted out of employee protections. We consultanty types should have our contracts terminated first in almost every case. It makes sense. And companies suddenly being cost-sensitive means we don't see as easy a path to the next client. This is the reality of it.

I have never worked through a downturn like this before. I don't know what to expect. If there was a downturn similar to this around the housing bubble I didn't notice. Might have been employed. The pandemic had a bit of a hit but tech was pretty steady overall. I lost a client and some cash when it happened but I immediately had an old friend reach out about pandemic response work and I rode that off into parental leave and when I was about to end parental leave I essentially had a client materialize out of thin air (in response to a post I did in #looking_for_contract, to be fair).

Underjord seems to be doing fine. Stable client for the team and me. And I actually had a walk-in prospect that I'm in talks with now. Fun and promising projects. The way that clients materialize just about when I need them is better than not. I would have preferred having a line out the door and saying "no" a lot. But I'll take it. I guess it indicates that I've laid some meaningful groundwork. Anyway, not too worried. I'd have to be dumb to not be mindful about the surrounding landscape going through a cleanse though.

This post doesn't have a pithy takeaway. Overall the situation makes the industry more boring for us developers. It might also help our industry mature. It is a time for good devs that can reliable produce useful software. At least I hope so. That'd be a pretty good trajectory.

I think there is some opportunity for companies that have healthy money to grab space in markets where companies are falling apart. I think there is opportunity to start small sound ventures with profit built into the foundation. There is still money flowing around out there as well. If you want investors, perhaps angel investors more than VC right now. I don't know. I have never run around with a pitch-deck trying to get funding. Other people know better.

I've been asked here and there about how the market looks for Elixir work and such. I will say to be truthful and not too optimistic. It has never looked worse to me. There is work out there but as someone who has helped companies recruit I hear so much more about cuts and cost savings than about building up a team. This is also true when I ask people in Agile consulting, terrible times, people freelancing as devs in other areas, terrible times. Some soloists are talking employment. Swedish contracting market is seeing aggressive attempts at price pressure. Half the typical hourly rates or less being floated for senior positions. It's wild. I don't think Elixir is worse off than anywhere else that has a lot of startups.

This too will pass. Who knows what the shape of the industry is on the other side. See you there.

Is your job steady or are you on a wild industry ride? You can reply to this email or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your attention.