I have spent 15 long, a little tenuous, but more exciting years in the IT industry. I have been blessed to learn new things and travel the world to work on emerging technical solutions. Lately, though, it feels less and less blessed.
The tech industry is normalizing in this post-pandemic world. The crazy times are not gone yet, but a sense of sanity prevails within the major organizations.
AI brought all the crazy back.
What I am getting at is that the highly coveted tech jobs are fading in quality as a service and becoming cluttered more with influencer-like content marketers driving tech decisions.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Current Climate of Corporate Work
I have been on a corporate flywheel ever since I have been employed.
The company perks, the cubicle life, salary, and benefits have been at the core of my financial stability. Additionally, I have been blessed with a good work culture wherever I have been employed.
Something’s changed in the recent past. It might be the side effects of remote work brought about by the pandemic or just a natural evolution of the work life. Either way, the consensus around corporate work is changing.
As employees become more and more self-aware of their skills, the question has been switched around from -
“What do you bring to the table?” to “Is my time best spent on this employment?”
The answer to the question has given rise to some of the rarest job titles.
How do these job titles fit into the larger scheme of the financial world?
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The Finance of Revenue Against the Employee Benefits
It is not a surprise that businesses depend on making profits.
In the corporate world, the more money the organizations make, the more work the employees are supposed to take on for something called benefits. To extend that logic to the pandemic time, the organizations made no profit, so the employees got no benefits and were told were lucky to keep their jobs.
In this post-pandemic world, organizations are supposed to top up the revenues lost during the pandemic but if they do where does it go?
Since the start of 2024, it has been a layoff season while some of the popular companies are introducing some of the exciting features into their product ( I just didn’t want to mention AI).
Another question here - Does Severance count as a benefit or is it the value of the employee’s service thus far?
Being an investor rather than a Liability
Investors drive the growth of an organization decide the course it takes and inevitably decide the fate of the tech we use.
It seems like a fair question to ask about the profile of such investors and where their interests lie.
Take for example the question of ownership of the company that brought AI to the mainstream, OpenAI. Started as a Non-Profit but then quickly diluted with loads of investment from the Silicon Valley giants. Here’s a snippet of an article you can read here-
Here is another article that announced mass layoffs at Microsoft, one of the investors of Open AI. The layoffs might affect as many as 10,000 folks are Microsoft.
For all the vested interests and dreamy ambitions of those skillful employees at Microsoft who spent ample amount of hard work to get into their dream roles, were made redundant by people who value numbers more than resources.
A question to ask ourselves here is - How do we build a profile to be on the track to be a decision-making investor rather than a liability?
Chance to Build a Portfolio
Everything I need in my life I learned from my job. Everything I need in my job I learned from my life.
Both statements co-exist in the life of an employee who has toiled hard for years to make an organization of the value that many enjoy today.
As the jobs have evolved, our mindsets have evolved too and our priorities have shifted to align more in favor of being investors than employees.
This evolution in itself can be seen in the Independent Creators and Product Builders on the market today trying to compete with the big tech firms. Their portfolio includes the stuff they built rather than the stuff they worked on in their jobs.
A stark evolution from a service mindset to a builder mindset.
Conclusion
Today, we need to understand and nurture this mindset shift and learn the skillset to enhance our portfolio rather than those of the investors.
Remember the questions are still open and the difference between being an employee or an employer is who has answers to those questions.
For a more inspiring and detailed look at your career portfolio, read this article by Harvard Business Review.