Tech Disasters Part 1

Did you know: more than one third of workers changed jobs or were fired in the past two years.

To say that the Tech & Finance industries are undergoing some challenges would be an understatement. We are facing mounting pressure on all sides with Supply Chain Issues, the Energy Crunch, global talent shortage and war in Europe to name but a few.

Yet we aren't exactly making it any easier on ourselves, from Alexa telling a 10-year old girl to touch a live plug with a penny, to regulatory breaches from Uber test driving autonomous cars without state permission, running 6 red lights as a result.

The bottom line hasn't escaped unscathed either, multiple institutions have lost significant wealth from poorly deployed AI, there has also been colossal investment wastage from backing the wrong AI sectors.

So what's going on here? Is it the leadership? Are the staff lacking? Maybe it's just external factors like market conditions to blame? These reasons are all valid, but they are merely symptoms of the underlying cause which can be traced back to a strategic failure in short term thinking. Let's look at some concrete examples first..

Table - Fintech Vs Enterprise hiring tendencies during Covid.

During the pandemic, both Enterprise and Fintech froze headcount during the first downtick but they decided it would be a good idea to keep those new projects rolling in.

Then the second downturn came and both decided to slash headcount. Fintechs thought it would be a good idea to cut their staff and transfer all the responsibilities over to a single rockstar (a.k.a 10x developer). That developer would get a small pay-rise and a pat on the back, and everything would be dandy.

Enterprise were a bit more sophisticated in their approach, they still cut headcount but they decided to renew toxic service agreements that they had planned to terminate and they filled in the gaps of fired staff with new tooling automation.

Surprise surprise their strategies backfired, within a matter of months when things began to settle the companies found they could no longer meet their project targets. HR immediately scampered back into recruitment drive, phoning up staff they fired just 10 months ago, “hey long time no see, do you want your old job back?”

This blog series and my associated talk can be thought of as taking Simon Sinek's infinite game philosophy and peppering it with real world case examples.

This is a classic act of balancing the books via mass lay offs, a redundant strategy from the 80s and 90s when the economy was undergoing the boom years. Today all this has done is to make a disloyal workforce even more disgruntled and untrusting.

What is the solution? Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn't mean it's right - companies need to abandon the bell curve, shareholder supremacy and other toxic outdated models. Not just because it's ethical, but because the market has changed, companies that get ahead have loyal long term talent, with products built in house that take years to develop, not months. So do that, we need to treat employees as people, not as cattle.

Video - Material sourced from my recent talk in London