Tech is dead, long live tech. Last week, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — laid off more than 11,000 employees. As early as this week, Amazon is expected to lay off as many as 10,000. In double digit percentages, workforce cuts have been made at Snap, Lyft, Stripe, Robinhood, Opendoor, and of course Twitter, with smaller but significant layoffs at Salesforce and Netflix. Over in the world of ‘Web3,’ almost forgotten by the broader public after the ‘cryptographically-secure links to monkey jpegs’ market burst, a bombshell report from Coindesk alleging misuse of funds at the world’s second-largest crypto exchange catalyzed the $14 billion company’s overnight evaporation. Brother, if you were expecting a roaring twenties 2.0, I’ve got some bad news.

While tech’s new winter is no dot-com crash, the industry does appear to be entering an era of uncharacteristic austerity. Where teams aren’t already gutted, hiring is frozen, and budgets are slashed. Climbing interest rates have increased the cost of risk, which means 1) easy venture funding is no longer something any company, at any stage, can rely on, and 2) the future profits of high-growth tech companies are now discounted in a way most young professionals — who came of age after the 2008 housing crash — have never seen. For nearly fifteen years the game was scale at all cost, and the costs were considerable. Now, to the chagrin of Boomers everywhere, businesses will have to make money. Like, today if possible.

Despite all midwit criticism to the contrary, the freedom to plan five or even ten years out has been an incredible boon to both the industry and world. There’s no short-term path to profitability for something like cold fusion, for example. It either works, and you’re the trillionaire savior of humanity, or it doesn’t, and you’re guzzling gas until we all run out and go extinct from mass starvation. Spending lots of money to take your time while you thoughtfully work on important, difficult problems is (when possible) a good thing, actually. But even the most die-hard apologist for the last ten years of cash glut has to admit, mixed in with all this very serious planning for the future, there has been significant bullshit.