The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

There have been mass layoffs that leave more tech workers than ever looking for new roles in the worst market we’ve ever seen. Many of the most talented, thoughtful and experienced people in the industry are feeling worried, confused, and ungrounded in a field that no longer looks familiar.

If you’re outside the industry, you may be confused — isn’t there an AI boom that’s getting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments? Doesn’t that mean the tech bros are doing great? What you may have missed is that half a million tech workers have been laid off in the years since ChatGPT was released; the same attacks on marginalized workers and DEI and “woke” that the tech robber barons launched against the rest of society were aimed at their own companies first.

So the good people who actually make the technology we use every day, the real innovators and creators and designers, are reacting to the unprecedented disconnect between the contemporary tech industry and the fundamentals that drew so many people toward it in the first place. Many of the biggest companies have abandoned the basic principle of making technology that actually works. So many new products fail to deliver on even the basic capabilities that the companies are promising that they will provide.

Many leaders at these companies have run full speed towards moral and social cowardice, abandoning their employees and customers to embrace rank hatred and discrimination in ways that they pretended to be fighting against just a few years ago. Meanwhile, unchecked consolidation has left markets wildly uncompetitive, leaving consumers suffering from the effects of categories without any competition or investment — which we know now as “enshittification”. And the full-scale shift into corruption and crony capitalism means that winners in business are decided by whoever is shameless enough to offer the biggest bribes and debase themselves with the most humiliating display of groveling. It’s a depressing shift for people who, earlier in their careers, often actually were part of inventing the future.

So where do we go from here?

You’re not crazy.

The first, and most important, thing to know is that it’s not just you. Nearly everyone in tech I have this conversation with feels very isolated about it, and they’re often embarrassed or ashamed to discuss it. They think that everyone else who has a job in tech is happy or comfortable at their current employers, or that the other people looking for work are getting calls back or are being offered interviews in response to their job applications. But I’m here to tell you: it is grim right now. About as bad as I’ve seen. And I’ve been around a long time.

Every major tech company has watched their leadership abandon principles that were once thought sacrosanct. I’ve heard more people talk about losing respect for executives they trusted, respected, even admired in the last year than at any time I can remember. In smaller companies and other types of organizations, the challenges have been more about the hard choices that come from dire resource constraints or being forced to make ugly ethical compromises for pragmatic reasons. The net result is tons of people who have lost pride and conviction in their work. They’re going through the motions for a paycheck, because they know it’s a tough job market out there, which is a miserable state of affairs.

The public narrative is dominated by the loud minority of dudes who are content to appease the egos of their bosses, sucking up to the worse impulses of those in charge. An industry that used to pride itself on publicly reporting security issues and openly disclosing vulnerabilities now circles its wagons to gang up on people who suggest that an AI tool shouldn’t tell children to harm themselves, that perhaps it should be possible to write a law limiting schools from deploying AI platforms that are known to tell kids to end their own lives. People in tech endure their bosses using slurs at work, making jokes about sexual assault, consorting with leaders who have directly planned the murder of journalists, engaging in open bribery in blatant violation of federal law and their own corporate training on corruption, and have to act like it’s normal.

But it’s not the end of the world. The forces of evil have not yet triumphed, and all hope is not lost. There are still things we can do.

Taking back control

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed at such an unprecedented time in the industry, especially when there’s so much change happening. But there are concrete actions you can take to have agency over your own career, and to insulate yourself from the bad actors and maximize your own opportunities — even if some of those bad actors are your own bosses.

Understanding systems

One of the most important things you can do is to be clear about your own place, and your own role, within the systems that you are part of. A major factor in the changes that bosses are trying to effect with the deployment of AI is shifting the role of workers within the systems in their organization to make them more replaceable.

If you’re a coder, and you think your job is to make really good code in a particular programming language, you might double down on getting better at the details of that language. But that’s almost certainly misunderstanding the system that your company thinks you’re part of, where the code is just a means to the end of creating a final product. In that system-centric view, the programming language, and indeed all of the code itself, doesn’t really matter; the person who is productive at causing all of that code to be created reliably and efficiently is the person who is going to be valued, or at least who is most likely to be kept around. That may not be satisfying or reassuring if you truly love coding, but at least this perspective can help you make informed decisions about whether or not that organization is going to make choices that respect the things you value.

This same way of understanding systems can apply if you’re a designer or a product manager or a HR administrator or anything else. As I’ve covered before, the purpose of a system is what it does, and that truth can provide some hard lessons if we find it’s in tension with the things we want to be doing for an organization. The system may not value the things we do, or it may not value them enough; the way they phrase this to avoid having to say it directly is by describing something as “inefficient”. Then, the question you have to ask yourself is, can you care about this kind of work or this kind of program at one level higher up in the system? Can it still be meaningful to you if it’s slightly more abstract? Because that may be the requirement for navigating the expectations that technology organizations will be foisting on everyone through the language of talking about “adopting AI”.

Understanding power

Just as important as understanding systems is understanding power. In the workplace, power is something real. It means being able to control how money is spent. It means being able to make decisions. It means being able to hire people, or fire them. Power is being able to say no.

You probably don’t have enough power; that’s why you have worries. But you almost certainly have more power than you think, it’s just not as obvious how to wield it. The most essential thing to understand is that you will need to collaborate with your peers to exercise collective power for many of the most significant things you may wish to achieve.

But even at an individual level, a key way of understanding power in your workplace is to consider the systems that you are part of, and then to reckon with which ones you can meaningfully change from your current position. Very often, people will, in a moment of frustration, say “this place couldn’t run without me!” And companies will almost always go out of their way to prove someone wrong if they hear that message.

On the other hand, if you identify a system for operating the organization that no one else has envisioned, you’ve already demonstrated that this part of the organization couldn’t run without you, and you don’t need to say it or prove it. There is power in the mere action of creating that system. But a lot depends on where you have both the positional authority and the social permission to actually accomplish that kind of thing.

So, if you’re dissatisfied with where you are, but have not decided to leave your current organization, then your first orders of business in this new year should be to consolidate power through building alliances with peers, and by understanding which fundamental systems of your organization you can define or influence, and thus be in control of. Once you’ve got power, you’ve got options.

Most tech isn’t “tech”

So far, we’re talking about very abstract stuff. What do we do if your job sucks right now, or if you don’t have a job today and you really need one? After vague things like systems and power, then what?

Well, an important thing to understand, if you care about innovation and technology, is that the vast majority of technology doesn’t happen in the startup world, or even in the “tech industry”. Startups are only a tiny fraction of the entire realm of companies that create or use technology, and the giant tech companies are only a small percentage of all jobs or hiring within the tech realm.

So much opportunity, inspiration, creativity, and possibility lies in applying the skills and experience that you may have from technological disciplines in other realms and industries that are often far less advanced in their deployment of technologies. In a lot of cases, these other businesses get taken advantage of for their lack of experience — and in the non-profit world, the lack of tech expertise or fluency is often exploited by both the technology vendors and bad actors who swoop in to capitalize on their vulnerability.

Many of the people I talk to who bring their technology experience to other fields also tell me that the culture in more traditional industries is often less toxic or broken than things in Silicon Valley (or Silicon Valley-based) companies are these days, since older or more established companies have had time to work out the more extreme aspects of their culture. It’s an extraordinary moment in history when people who work on Wall Street tell me that even their HR departments wouldn’t put up with the kind of bad behavior that we’re seeing within the ranks of tech company execs.

Plan for the long term

This too shall pass. One of the great gifts of working in technology is that it’s given so many of us the habit of constantly learning, of always being curious and paying attention to the new things worth discovering. That healthy and open-minded spirit is an important part of how to navigate a moment when lots of people are being laid off, or lots of energy and attention are being focused on products and initiatives that don’t have a lot of substance behind them. Eventually, people will want to return to what’s real. The companies that focus on delivering products with meaning, and taking care of employees over time, will be the ones that are able to persist past the current moment. So building habits that enable resiliency at both a personal and professional level is going to be key.

As I’ve been fond of saying for a long time: don’t let your job get in the way of your career.

Build habits and routines that serve your own professional goals. As much as you can, participate in the things that get your name out into your professional community, whether that’s in-person events in your town, or writing on a regular basis about your area of expertise, or mentoring with those who are new to your field. You’ll never regret building relationships with people, or being generous with your knowledge in ways that remind others that you’re great at what you do.

If your time and budget permit, attend events in person or online where you can learn from others or respond to the ideas that others are sharing. The more people can see and remember that you’re engaged with the conversations about your discipline, the greater the likelihood that they’ll reach out when the next opportunity arises.

Similarly, take every chance you can to be generous to others when you see a door open that might be valuable for them. I can promise you, people will never forget that you thought of them in their time of need, even if they don’t end up getting that role or nabbing that interview.

It’s an evolution, not a resolution

New years are often a time when people make a promise to themselves about how they’re going to change everything. If I can just get this new notebook to write in, I’m suddenly going to become a person who keeps a journal, and that will make me a person who’s on top of everything all the time.

But hopefully you can see, many of the challenges that so many people are facing are systemic, and aren’t the result of any personal failings or shortcomings. So there isn’t some heroic individual change that you can make when you flip over to a new calendar month that will suddenly fix all the things.

What you can control, though, are small iterative things that make you feel better on a human scale, in little ways, when you can. You can help yourself maintain perspective, and you can do the same for those around you who share your values, and who care about the same personal or professional goals that you do.

A lot of us still care about things like the potential for technology to help people, or still believe in the idealistic and positive goals that got us into our careers in the first place. We weren’t wrong, or naive, or foolish to aspire to those goals simply because some bad actors sought to undermine them. And it’s okay to feel frustrated or scared in a time when it seems to many like those goals could be further away than they’ve been in a long time.

I do hope, though, that people can see that, by sticking together, and focusing on the things that are within our reach, things can begin to change. All it takes is remembering that the power in tech truly rests with all the people who actually make things, not with the loudmouths at the top who try to tear things down.