Andreessen Predicts Trouble for Traditional Workers
February 8, 2013
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has some strong, educated opinions about the ups and downs of technology-related businesses and where the industry is headed. TechCrunch shares an interview with the professional prognosticator in, “Marc Andreessen on the Future of Enterprise.”
Journalist Alexia Tsotsis spoke to Andreessen for her piece, “The Enterprise Cool Kids” (also at TechCrunch), but thought the interview insightful enough to share in its entirety. The piece retains the casual, conversational tone of their chat.
The two cover a lot of ground: an industry focus that continually swings between enterprise and consumer markets; a decrease in hardware investments in favor of a shift to the cloud; the nimbleness of new businesses run by millennials compared to the comparatively bogged-down state of larger companies. The piece as a whole is a valuable read.
What caught our eye most, though, was Andreessen’s predictions for the worker bees among us. He states:
“It feels a lot like in the new economy you will have a lot more contractors. You will have a lot more people with sort of fluid careers contracting on a project basis, and then all this technology is going to be an enabling layer for that. . . .
“For some people it feels great to never be tied to a specific employer and to always be doing contract work and be changing jobs every two years, and it feels like it’s fun and exciting and exhilarating. For a lot of people that’s really scary. And so the lifetime employment promise that the big companies used to be able to make was very compelling for a lot of people because it felt safe.
“So now you are in a world where the big companies can’t deliver — even if they wanted to deliver on lifetime employment, they can’t.”
You have been warned.
Cynthia Murrell, February 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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