The era of endless prosperity in tech is over

‘I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,’ Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said at a company all-hands.

He might not have been talking about his company, but you could apply his words to the entire technology ecosystem, which after nearly a decade of unprecedented boom is afflicted by the disease of wealth. It’s grown fat, rich and bloated.

During the pandemic, the total headcount for Silicon Valley was on the way up. Yet the economic downturn, slowing growth, the end of cheap money and an increasingly bellicose investment community are making Silicon Valley now pause and undertake layoffs – a word we have not heard in these parts since the 2008 financial crisis.