Do you have an example of industry-wide, pervasive structural shift? Sincere question, as Blockbuster is a good example, but relatively isolated. By the time Blockbuster was done, viable replacements had already arisen.
I think that's the point. Something will come along to replace it, and that thing does not historically pay better. "Your margin is my opportunity," as Lord Bezos said. It's already kind of happening. I could get $25 per extremely plain HTML page when I was a kid because that was a rare, in-demand skill. Now $20 buys 10 fancy Carrds. Every new framework or language or platform is chasing an efficiency or simplicity that opens it up to people who'll work for less or lets one person do the job of 10. There's always an initiating event, and then the prophecy of the tech adoption curve takes over.
Someone is gunning for the margins behind those salaries, but the people making those sums don't know it yet. If I knew where it was coming from, I would email them about a collaboration, not post it here.
edit to add: It can be a slow boil or a rapid shift. Google swept the search engine space in a few years, but Netflix and Blockbuster traded places over decades. Now Netflix is struggling as third-party content retreats into publisher silos.
Sure. The easy money growth phase of cloud will slow or stop. People laugh at my mainframe example upthread, but no Data Processing Executive saw 1992 coming in 1988.
Most of the people making $500k comp at AWS, MS, GCP will all get nuked once the growth and investment phase slows down. You’re already seeing it happen at the margins - you don’t see “Uber for Litter Box” startups in 2022.
I’ve seen this happen with internal enterprise services as well. When you’re growing 50-500% a year, all of your sins and fuckups are hidden in the growth. Once dust settles and you shift to steady state, you suddenly care about cost accounting vs growth.
