Dear Techies, Maybe It’s Time To Admit We’re a Little Over-Saturated

Remember the days when everyone was shouting: get into tech? Seems not too long ago.

I remember the days in the early 2010s when every startup seemed to be so fresh and new. Everything around me felt like it had broken ground.

The people involved were so passionate about what they did. Every business was a mystery in a way. Would this be around in a couple of years? Was this going to change the world? We didn’t know but just went along with the adventure of a rapidly changing world.

Nowadays, it seems like the big players are making changes and small guys are all doing the same thing(s). This isn’t the tech scene I signed up for.

Everyone wonders where all the jobs are these days. My friends are complaining, my cousin’s been struggling and even my mom’s talked about it. Contrary to what everyone seems to believe, I don’t think it’s the fault of AI—the mythical end of all jobs.

t seems like everyone’s blaming this fresh technology for everything, and it’s gone all doom and gloom, as if programming is dead. They say no one is getting tech jobs anymore because of AI, but I want to argue that’s not the case.

I think the tech is just slowing down like any big boom. It’s kind of getting hard to innovate. The paper and pen industry once had new innovations, but don’t you think there’ll come a time where we can’t really change the “metaphorical pen” of tech companies?

Historically every industry experiences ups, downs and stalls. Some die and some grow. Why don’t we consider that for tech? We’ve had our fair share of progress in the last couple of decades. Isn’t it natural for things to slow down a bit…?

I’ve seen this recent boom of tech companies and maybe we should slow down a bit. Maybe we have enough tech companies for some fields. It’s possible our focus shouldn’t be too much on the same types of businesses that we keep repeating.

Let me give you some examples.

E-mail services

How many of these do we need? Competition is good and lowers pricing but we don’t need another service that sends emails. There have to be better ideas than this. I saw a y combinator-funded startup called resend the other day. From what I saw it’s quite fresh, and kind of cool but… was this needed? I’ve seen so many competitors like sendgrid, postmark, brevo, AWS SES, etc. Do we really need more? I can’t wrap my head around the logic of funding a business that’s so saturated. They used to fund cool innovative ideas and now it’s another e-mail service or calendar…

Job Boards

These are beyond overdone. How many job boards are there? Just yesterday I found a remote board called Work Remote Now! and an AI Job board named Mo AI Jobs they both are new job boards seeing some traction but I feel like I’ve seen enough of these that it’s time to stop. I think it’s best founders stray away from job boards especially tech-related job boards that service remote work or AI or whatever fancy trend pops up next. It feels to me like we’re over-saturated with these. Competition is good but consolidation happens for a reason. I’m not saying different job boards are bad but we could slow down a bit don’t you think? It’s time we consider other businesses.

ChatGPT Wrappers

Some of these are good but is this even a great business decision? I think there will be a wrapper one of these days that’s just really good at customizing and it’ll kill a lot of businesses. This could even be from open AI themselves. It seems that many of these wrappers are directly competing with chatGPT which is a free service. Unless you train and code your own unique AI I think basing your company off an existing LLM isn’t the best.

It’s not hard to learn how to prompt, and do you really think people aren’t going to find easy and free ways to customize their ChatGPT prompts? Why wouldn’t they just pay OpenAI directly and get access to the freshest GPT-4 key? I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m seeing too many of these nowadays. I think there are definitely some good wrappers out there, and many tech companies have enhanced their product offerings with ChatGPT, but I have doubts about the other wrappers that seem to exist without a real purpose.

Too many people coming in for no good reason

How many times have you heard that tech is the only career path forward and that everything else will be obsolete? Quite a lot, right? But what if that’s not the case? What if there are other skills that’ll be needed, and just like the early tech founders and coders, you can get in on a new slice of the pie? Entertainment is growing stronger every day, yet we’re all being taught to code. On top of that, there are other engineering fields seeing innovation, like genetic engineering and materials science. Why don’t we promote those? Isn’t it time our attention shifted to other fields?

AI will grow, but let’s be real—it’s a very capital-intensive technology that’s specialized and acts more as an enhancer of current products. It’s not going to be the savior of tech. What tech needs are new products we haven’t thought of yet. That’s hard and takes bold risks, but maybe that’s how we truly innovate and keep the industry alive.

Okay maybe there are too many services and we’re getting saturated. what next?

Maybe we need to start promoting other careers. Programming jobs and new programming companies are great, but the constant saturation of the same old companies and the oversupply of new grads chasing the golden ticket wage is getting out of hand. Hey tech scene, let’s take a step back, huh? Let’s focus less on the same old and more on the new.

And please, don’t create another ChatGPT wrapper. It's getting out of hand. Just my opinion. Who knows, maybe you’ll get rich, but things are getting too repetitive with everyone retreading the same ground. Let’s try something new.