It always comes in cycles with this industry, it expands and contracts and shifts and goes into a renaissance and then again. Dot Com, Crypto bubble, whatever. Sufficed to say, people losing roles in the tech sector is nothing new, it’s just we are at the start of it. Shaky ground.
Amazon culling, Salesforce culling, I’m sure there will be the requisite FAANG purge and then reporting stellar profits the following 2 quarters because it looks great for shareholders…but thats fine for a trillion dollar opex elastic business, but not for the smaller businesses, in particular within the media and entertainment industry tech sector.
Most recently we’ve heard of VFX/Post/broadcast facilities chopping the already lean teams they have and leveraging assets to a sweaty sweaty end, and in the process losing people…some of the clever ones have seen the light with this whole shift and have asked for help. Our industry is so HEAVILY reliant on the technology industry and tech stacks that the ripples of this are constantly felt and are quite bumpy for creative houses…who arent billion dollar enterprises, but require similar levels of infrastructure and support.
In times like this we at YO.CTO have stressed the themes we always stress to our content creation houses, many of them more flush previously, to get the fundamentals right particularly now. The building blocks of tech in media. So our recommendation to everyone doing things a bit tougher than usual:
- Sweat your assets yes sure — but get your warranty extended and your support updated…cause when you need it you will.
- That expensive firewall that you got quoted? You can do the same thing with open source PFsense, and yes it passes TPN & MPAA
- Learn how VLAN’s work — and stop buying network hardware cause you don’t understand how to use the ones you have
- Use your time to drill-in sensible security policy now! Set yourself up for acceleration OUT of the sponginess.
- What is your 3 year technology roadmap? How does it align with your business objectives? If they are divergent, maybe spend some time taking stock.
- Schedule vendor briefings about how to do more with less — that is the theme for 2023/4
Ask for help — there’s a million people who can help, contractors or allies it doesn’t matter — now is the time to be efficient and agile, learn from the best.
Give us a call/email/message — here to help — it takes a village/community/renderfarm/agileteam etc etc….you get it.