Earlier today, on the way home from an Easter service, I read Baldur Bjarnason’s post “The one about the web developer job market,” an analysis on the tech industry’s current direction that I thought was really thoughtful and smart. I don’t quite agree with the level of pessimism he expresses about the tech job market in particular but the “this is reaching an existential breaking point” theme spoke to my attitude lately about, well, a lot of things.

For what it’s worth, I’m optimistic that although the tech job market may never bounce back in terms of getting bigger, over time it will get better. I graduated college alongside plenty of people who only studied computer science because they had heard “if you want to make good money, just learn to code!” about a thousand times too many. I think that in any lifetime where computers existed, I would have found a job working with them, so it’s always nagged at me a bit studying and working alongside people who are there primarily for a good ROI on their undergrad degree. If the tech job market really does stop growing, then the people looking to participate will shrink sooner or later. The more money- and clout-oriented among us will move on to whatever profession is the Next Big Thing. We may end up with a higher proportion of developers who prioritize successful software over business objectives. Tech may return to the happier, geekier profession that I think people farther along in their career are used to, but young people like me have never experienced. Maybe.

I think at scale, it’s easy to see things getting worse and worse and then failing. Apparently ranchers in the US have been more-or-less purposely giving their cows gangrene for decades by planting their pastures with fescue, a grass that is toxic to cows but still makes good business sense to use. (I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything good about how the cattle industry works.) And according to the grist article I learned this from a few days ago, the problem is only getting more widespread as climate change broadens the area where fescue can grow. We certainly are in the golden age of “Making it Worse”, aren’t we?

Buried in this miserable story about a miserable industry, though, is a really beautiful and inspiring story of the rebirth of Amy Hamilton’s ranch after she replaced her fescue monoculture with native grasses:

Now big bluestem, little bluestem, and sunflowers fill the main body of the pasture, and freshwater cordgrass and ironweed decorate a creek’s edge. Quail have returned for the first time in decades.

Something about this touched me to my core when I read it, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since then. Especially not this morning, at an Easter service, thinking about death, and resurrection, and the belief that good will win in the end, even if it’s impossible to see how, or scary to consider what all will have changed by the time we get there.