The Seatbelt Light Is On
Recent events have thrown a wrench into the hamster wheel that our software tech infrastructure is revealing itself to be.
On October 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage, followed by Azure on October 29. These aren't isolated incidents and, ironically enough, these events occurred in a season that finds the tech industry grappling with significant, haphazard layoffs in the name of “efficiency.”
Consider the experience of a close friend who works for a large tech enterprise. Her company aimed to reduce staff by 800 people through voluntary layoffs. While some "bad apples" saw the writing on the wall and left, some very valuable "good apples" also volunteered themselves out the door. Oops.
In this case, three highly specialized developers–the only three of their type in the enterprise–departed, taking critical institutional knowledge with them. Big oops.
And my friend’s company is only one example of many in tech today.
As Joe Procopio points out in his article on Amazon’s return-to-office mandates, such decisions can backfire. And just because most of us don’t work in tech doesn’t mean that most of us won’t be affected by the hiring and firing decisions of the big tech companies whose products we all rely on to run our small businesses.
Every technology company carries tech debt, and that tech debt is “serviced” by the people working in the company. What do you think happens when these companies get rid of the people “making the payments” on that tech debt?
These companies get sent to “collections”--and that looks like service outages, degraded customer support, and degraded product performance.
This is our new reality as small business owners.
It’s time to adjust our expectations about how all the software we currently depend on will function going forward. It’s time to recognize the current landscape and adapt now.
What does that look like?
We don’t have proven recommendations for you yet, but it’s always a good idea in these situations to start controlling for what you can control. Here are a few suggestions we have to help you navigate this shift:
Create regular back-ups of your important data so that it can still be accessed in the event one or more of your software tools is offline
Back up your essential files onto a physical hard drive
Download your entire client list from your CRM and store it on your local computer (not in the cloud)
Download your email list from your email service provider and store in on your local computer (not in the cloud)
Create more white space in your schedule each day to ensure you have time to adjust if things don’t go as planned
We’re never going back to the way things were before cloud computing and AI. And we’re also not going to be able to continue much longer with the way cloud computing and AI are functioning now. So we need to be mentally ready for a paradigm shift.
And the best way to do that is to slow down, back up our data, build more space into our schedules, and note that the seatbelt light is on because there is more turbulence ahead.