There has never been a better time to try and fail.
With the rise of AI-integrated IDEs, no-code solutions, free hosting platforms, and social media marketing channels, you’d be crazy not to take at least one big swing for the fences. Even more so given the trends currently playing out in tech.
The writing is on the wall for many professions. A degree from a prestigious university no longer guarantees a smooth transition into the professional world — it merely gets your foot in the door. The common path through professional life is well-paved but overcrowded. Worse, the cost of getting on that path has soared, with student debt, credential inflation, and unpaid internships becoming the norm, even as the promised security continues to erode. The blueprint that worked for your parents may not work for you, and almost certainly won’t be advice you’d pass on to your children ten or twenty years from now.
There is no safe career path, only different kinds of risk.
Knowledge workers are cheap. Office jobs of all kinds, from software engineers to executive assistants, are now open to the world. White-collar workers in the West aren’t just competing with their neighbors or classmates; they’re competing with the globe.
Why hire and train a few junior engineers fresh out of American universities when you can hire twice as many experienced Argentinian or Indian developers for the same price? Middle management might object, but to the VCs backing the company and the C-level executives in charge, the decision is a no-brainer.
To make matters worse for domestic workers, government policy shows no signs of slowing the trend. Despite hollow populist promises, President Trump and his inner circle of big tech oligarchs show every sign of maintaining or even expanding the current trajectory of America’s H-1B visa program. A program originally intended to fill specialty jobs that the American workforce could not meet, but one that is now routinely exploited.
There’s never been a better time to build.
From hosting to security, from marketing to payment gateways, the tools are all laid out in front of you. Today, any teenager in their bedroom or disillusioned office worker can spin up a working prototype in a weekend. You don’t need a resume, a network, or anyone’s permission. All you need is an idea and the drive to ship it. Your vision could be online tomorrow. The cost of failure is little more than your time, especially when a domain costs less than a meal from DoorDash.
Failure isn’t just expected, it’s the price you pay for trying something worth doing. Better to fail on your own terms than to wait around for the next round of layoffs.
The tools are cheap, the stakes are low, and the upside is limitless. Build your own dream or someone else will happily put you to work building theirs.