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A look back at 2022 and a look ahead to 2023
It’s been a topsy turvy-year for tech, to say the least.
Big Tech layoffs and the pull-back of VC funding were dominant stories clouding much of the tech landscape. The meltdown of the major tech stocks (Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft) led to an industry-wide hiring slowdown, investor jitters, and something new to Silicon Valley: mass layoffs.
What started as a slow burn grew into a full-fledged wildfire by November. Meta, Twitter, Stripe, Snap, Lyft, and Redfin are among the tech companies that axed more than 10% of their positions. An estimated 150k tech jobs were incinerated over the year.
Meanwhile, for many upstarts the funding environment got as cold as a crypto winter. Investors pulled back in just about every arena, ending a years-long run of easy money and growth at any cost.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad news. Read on below for our recap on the year's top innovations, growing industries, and jobs.
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The year’s top innovations
Perhaps lost in doom-and-gloom headlines are the innovations tech companies managed to pull off this year that could lead to significant upgrades for humanity.
Top innovations of the year, according to MIT Technology Review, include the end of the password and new synthetic data to better train AI. There were several key breakthroughs in energy, including iron-based batteries to improve the grid, decarbonizing factories, and practical fusion reactors. Healthcare companies, too, made progress with Covid variant tracking, AI for protein folding, and a Malaria vaccine.
Climate tech, healthcare, and automation among year’s bright spots
Though arenas like e-commerce and social media took a post-pandemic plunge this year, others like gaming, healthtech, and automation made headway. Mobile mindfulness grew into a billion-dollar industry.
Climate tech emerged as one of the biggest winners. Increased global attention to renewable energy, along with a collective race to achieve net zero, was a major boon for EVs, battery technology, and carbon capture. Progress was also made removing plastic waste from the oceans.
Automation was another highlight, as companies progressed things like robotic process automation (RPA), mobility-as-a-service, and collaborative robots. Stanford researchers call advancements in foundational machine learning models like GPT-3 a “paradigm shift.” Though, there’s increasingly recognition that AI bots don’t always tell the truth and it can be hard to know when.
Better benefits and home office view
Despite a tough job market for recent college grads, experienced developers found themselves in high demand.
Companies leaned into redefining the workplace to attract and keep stars. They offered attractive salaries and creative new benefit offerings. Perks like unlimited PTO and a four-day workweek became commonplace. So, too, did mental health benefits and home office stipends.
Return-to-office mandates, attractive job offers from competing employers, and revelations about better work–life balance motivated a “record-breaking departure from jobs in a shockingly small window of time,” as one report put it. Amid this so-called Great Migration, Black employees left toxic work environments to start their own companies. Women founders also made strides in 2022 — though they still receive a tiny portion of overall VC funding, leaving plenty of work ahead in 2023.
The top startups of 2022
We've selected 10 top startups across 10 trending industries to highlight who's been making advances in 2022. See who made the list and read more about the startup, founder, and job opportunities. See our 10 of 10 list
Questions for 2023
Some intriguing questions about what 2023 will hold are emerging, like:
- Will hall-monitor censors of social media shift their focus to AI?
- Will AI produce anything weirder than talking to dead relatives?
- Will Alexa survive?
- Will humans return to the moon?
- Will self-driving cars happen?
- Will Snoop Dogg run Twitter?
- We'll have to wait and see.
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