The fall
by Matt May
First things first. I promised that office hours would be back this week, and here they are. Sign up now for slots on Thursday, the 21st. As a reminder, I only have one day open at a time. If you don’t see any available days, then this week is full; more slots will open up over the weekend for the next available session (usually, the following Thursday).
(Author’s note: this newsletter was supposed to go out on Monday morning! Apparently the auto-send didn’t take. I was wondering why nobody was signing up.)
My Thursday sessions are free. You can sign up as many weeks as you like, as long as there’s still an opening in Calendly. I’ve been doing this for almost eight years now, and have never had to turn anyone away for using too much of my time. I do offer longer or more structured mentoring for a fee, but this is not a free trial of that. If you want to talk with someone about your career, inclusion in tech, etc., and there’s a slot, you can book it for free. And that’ll be how it goes, indefinitely.
Over the years, there have been common ups and downs among my office hours participants. I’ve seen the trends: upticks in university students taking an interest in accessibility or inclusive design; engineers and designers pushing for (or being pulled into) inclusion work; and organizations swinging from team and opportunity growth to indirection, negative outlooks and job instability.
What I would say right now is that morale is uniformly low, and the issues people are having are very similar, in public sector and private, at all levels. Jobs that people loved, including ones they helped to create… well, they suck now. Early-career folks can’t find openings. Later-career folks are facing waves of layoffs, or doing the work of former colleagues, or being assigned unrelated work in addition to their own. People out of work are finding slim pickings, at wages that wouldn’t sustain them where they have to live. Remote work, a literal lifeline for many disabled workers, is disappearing, leading many to wonder not only how to keep doing tech inclusion work, but how to make any kind of living at all.
This is all set against a backdrop of political cruelty and unbridled greed. Many have been confronted with their own long-time suspicions: for example, that their company doesn’t consider their work integral to the overall strategy, but rather a cost center meant to grease the wheel for government and education customers. The problem being, the largest of those customers not only doesn’t care about its own laws and policies for leveling the playing field—they have their hearts set on making it as unfair as possible, for as long as possible. Many tech DEI organizations that weren’t sacrificed outright have been instructed to lay low. Don’t make waves.
People sign up to my office hours for my advice, and I don’t see a benefit to sugarcoating it. We cannot find a way out of the situation we are in, both individually and collectively, if we can’t clearly frame it for ourselves. I’ve been working in tech since the mid-1990s, and I can tell you that the field of today is more hostile to workers, and particularly to those who want to work ethically and inclusively, than I can remember at any other time.
I owe most of my career to the fact that I was entering the workforce right around the time something called the World Wide Web came around. The book I learned HTML from was 95 pages long. Without a degree and with minimal formal training, I was making a comfortable living as a web developer within months of studying how the web worked.
A lot of the mythology of working in tech as a career panacea took hold here, in the time before the dotcom crash of 2000-2002. Companies couldn’t hire fast enough, and all kinds of 20-somethings like me were getting scooped up to fill seats. Then the money dried up and most of us got washed away. Many of us who stayed with it through the down times ended up with more or less stable careers, but a lot of people got flushed out of tech entirely. True or not, a line between tech prosperity and non-tech stagnation was drawn. “I want a tech job” became the socially acceptable way of saying “I want to make a lot of money as fast as possible.”
Since then, though, the barriers to entering this market have risen dramatically, and seem to be borne solely by the worker. Universities can easily load students with a quarter-million plus in debt from the start, for the privilege of fighting for internships and underpaid starter jobs. New grads are expected to apply to hundreds if not thousands of openings, compete against candidates and contractors the world over, code in front of a hiring committee, have AIs scan their faces for undesirable expressions, hand over social media passwords, take personality tests to show “culture fit,” complete company projects and more, all before they get an offer. And even then, they have to hope it’s an actual job at a real company and not a scam to steal your labor, or your identity.
Also, they’re all trying to replace you at their earliest possible convenience with the Box that Sells Pleasant-Sounding Lies.
I don’t usually get this deep into the weeds around the employment side of tech, but there’s a reason students and recent grads sign up to talk to An Old like me. It’s because so many people they’re in contact with have more to gain by deceiving them.
If you happen to believe that the situation that we’re in is normal, or cyclical, or will magically reverse itself when we get a new president or whatever, I need you to snap out of it. We are not yet finished with the first wave of damage. A reasonable best-case scenario is that some states, municipalities and universities keep the work going, along with peers around the world, and that a great restoration of the federal institutions that have been gutted in the first eight months of this term brings us somewhere near where we were in 2024 by the end of the next presidency. In 2032. That’s if everything breaks our way, and peacefully so.
While I always advocate fighting the good fight, it’s also realistic to know when one is losing. I think we have further to fall. More to lose. But this is also the very moment to think of what could be. We will not lose forever. And when we do start winning again, we must be prepared to act. If doing this work was just a feel-good moment to go with the paycheck, you can see yourself out. For the rest of us, this is a time to start rethinking tech, and government, and education, and how we are each and together going to get by. The seed of that is knowing that it’s not just you, it hasn’t always been this way, and it doesn't have to be. We can, and must, do better.
That’s all. Have a good week. We all deserve one.