The Millennial SaaS-era Retrospective: Part 5
"Hey. Steven. You're not on mute. Steven. STEVEN. Can you please mute yourself?"
I was at a comedy show at the Lincoln Theater in DC on the night of March 12th, 2020. It was packed. The comic had flown in from Ireland, and I only remember one crack about people getting sick in China and Italy in an attempt to lighten the mood. A few of my coworkers had returned from a San Francisco conference feeling quite sick, presumably with this new coronavirus that was all in the news. While we were at the show, I got a work email - don't come into the office tomorrow. We're temporarily closed as a matter of public health. I went to the gym Friday morning, which likely resulted in me getting sick a few days later.
Over the weekend, things would escalate dramatically. What turned into a few days' shutdown would become a full city lockdown. Grocery stores were full of shoppers and empty on supplies. By Monday, Outlook calendar invites were updated with conference lines, or cancellations altogether as key people got sick. I refreshed news feeds constantly to get some sense of hope. My wife disinfected our Amazon packages before they were allowed in the apartment. We tied bandanas around our faces in lieu of masks.
As it became apparent that we were not going back to the office for at least a few weeks, work moved online. Zoom was rapidly approved by our security team, and I saw inside my coworkers' homes for the first time. The stress was etched on people's faces as they tried to juggle work, childcare, and their own personal lives in cramped city apartments and small DC houses. Slack became an ever-present part of the day. We debated the virtues of reliable Google Docs versus the upstart Notion.
Living in a 600 square foot apartment is not living. It is surviving. And for the first time in human history, we could survive while working, thanks to the collaboration software we'd spent the last decade building. We got what we had always wanted - a fully digitally transformed economy. It just felt horrible.
Every generation, I suppose, has its moment when it leaves the action-packed city life behind and moves to the suburbs. We were due for ours. City dwellers suddenly asked why they were paying so much money to live in so small of a space now that all the communal energy had evaporated. They moved back in with parents or headed for the hills.
After six months of sweating through the pandemic in a cramped DC apartment, I finally abandoned the city in September of 2020, never to return. I headed to Denver, joining a migration of peers that had begun two years prior. I could have gone to Miami, or Nashville, or Austin. They were all just urban enough that city dwellers could pretend we were still in it. But the scene wasn't there. The scene was gone. Our new scene was bread-baking and dog training. We were hitting our late 30s, not with a bang, but a whimper.
We scrounged together space in spare bedrooms and basements. We bought second monitors and standing desks. We figured out how to work from home and not drive ourselves mad.
We rode the final mania of 2021, as companies competed for remote talent anywhere and everywhere, and we rode out the minor crash of 2022 as layoffs came for those same companies. We watched employers who had thrown perks at employees reduce those in the name of austerity. We were going back to the office, and then we weren't going back to the office, and on again, and off again.
We watched CEOs say publicly that they weren't going to make new hires due to advances in AI, then watched them pointedly ignore their own job postings when AI didn't deliver all that it had promised. We watched one poor entrepreneur publicly extol the benefits of vibe-coding on a Wednesday and then complain that his startup had been hacked the following Monday.
We settled. We've been an uncertain generation all our lives. Why should 2025 be any different? Bankers took my job in 2008, failed startups took my job in the 2010s, Covid took my job in 2020, and now AI's threatening to take my job in 2025.
I am still here.