The other thing is the management and boards of tech companies are incredibly incestuous. Your board is made up the boards of everyone else, they’re all CEOs competing for the same workers.

You’ve got two or three big investment firms that run the boards of all the major companies, which is anti competitive too. They’ll always push for a product they own to their other companies. They know when their other portfolio companies are doing layoffs, what they’re paying their staff, etc. they even share that with other companies so they can “compete” on salaries.

For an industry that cargo culted anti cargo culting, the management and execs all cargo cult the same over hiring and mass layoffs.

Employees get treated like crap now.

10 years ago I’d work overtime near a big release or when there was an outage. But now you get pinged all the time, there are no boundaries, and there’s an expectation. I’ve had CEOs joke about 9-9-6 work schedules and just openly flaunting how much worse they can make your life.

The terminal rot starts when your company brings in some ex Amazon or Meta execs (C suite, VP, director, whatever). They push for an almost pure numbers perspective. Judgement and morality be damned, think of the metric first.

Numbers are what these people know — these people survived the natural selection process at the most hostile and politicking companies you can think of. They’ll do anything to survive and get ahead.

You cut your support team as a cost centre — support doesn’t scale.

Then before you know it you’re 4 years into “we just have to push extra hard this year guys, the pace will slow down next year, we’ll get headcount too”. The whole time your performance reviews are getting more frequent and become more invasive — we’re adding an AI use component, make sure to list your growth areas and the impact (metrics!) of everything you’ve shipped. Remember, you’re competing with everyone we could hire, so how did you get better than them this quarter?

This field used to be good. And no, it wasn’t free lunches that made it good. It was having teams that gave a shit about the customer, it was putting the customer above all else, and it was going home feeling like you worked on something useful and good. You worked hard, you delivered value, and you got paid well.

Its like a bad ex you dont go back to them. You move on and find better. In this case join/make a better one, or if still in a company then mass unionize