Why Tech Employees Are Ready to Revolt

The last couple of years have been a shitshow for anyone who works in tech or at a tech-adjacent company. And it’s coming to a head. But before the revolution gets underway, we should look at how we got here. This will be short, but feel free to dive down any of the associated rabbit holes. Where to Begin? If I have to pick a starting point—the match on the dumpster fire, so to speak—I’d pick the period just after the period after the pandemic, so let’s call that mid-2022. That was when the free and cheap money started drying up, putting both the consumer and the venture crowd in an immediate pinch. This hit tech startups the hardest, and the earlier the stage of the startup, the harder you were hit. Here’s why. Startups, especially tech startups, have always existed in two different worlds, and they might as well be on two entirely different planets. One is Jupiter, a big gas giant with a storm that’s been raging for centuries. This is the world of unicorns, West Coast VCs, and people leaving Google or Amazon only to fail quickly and then go back to Google or Amazon. The other is Pluto, which is small and dark and icy. You hardly hear about what happens on Pluto, but a lot of entrepreneurs are happy there and making a decent living, sometimes becoming quite successful, but quietly. Now, I know it’s like this because I’ve built or been a part of several startups on both planets. And I can tell you, they have always been far apart, but when the cheap money dried up in 2022, they drifted even further apart. Once AI entered the mainstream in 2023, Jupiter got bigger and closer to the sun and everyone wanted to live there. Those of us on Pluto shrugged. More space for us. But then the gulf between the two became wider and wider, and suddenly Pluto wasn’t technically even a planet anymore. It happened fast. I stopped writing because it was changing so fast, I couldn’t keep up. When I started writing again, my once-optimistic take on the future became a cautionary tale, and reading those pieces again now, I was kind of spot-on about the reasons why: the tech industry taking the customer for granted, the infatuation with AI, and the money—across the tech landscape—losing its taste for innovation and instead hopping on any bandwagon it could find. As always, change, good and bad, impacts the startup world(s) first, then it comes for big tech. The Artificial Elephant in The Room Yes, I could blame AI for 99 percent of the problems in the tech industry right now. But also, I can’t help but feel like AI is a symptom here and not a cause. When I said that scared money was “hopping on any bandwagon” in the last section, I probably could have said “hopping on the AI bandwagon.” Now look, do not get me wrong. I helped start this fire, and I am not a Luddite or reformed nerd in any sense. I just know that when these major technical tectonic shifts happen, well, people go nuts. I’m old enough to have lived through a couple of these, starting with the capital “I” Internet, and we react to that tectonic shift the same way every time so, ultimately, we are the problem. By that, I mean that AI is neither savior nor villain. It’s not the answer for everything, and it’s not going to have us bowing to our AI overlords any time soon. But opportunists on either side won’t let nuance stop them from profiting. And the rewards and risks with AI are so big and so high that the natural amplification of advancement in the tech is deafening. This is crushing tech workers in two ways. It’s turning them into villains. And, oddly enough, the vilification is bouncing off of the Sam Altmans and the Elon Musks and landing squarely on to the unsuspecting head of Jane Programmer. Jane Programmer is increasingly being seen as expendable, regardless of what she does or how much experience or talent she has. We hate you now. And also, you’re fired. Doomsday Prepping for a Day That May Never Come So… tech companies are cutting tech employees across the board, and it’s almost like a fire sale in reverse. It’s so cheap and no one is going to know. So why not just pull the trigger? Did rampant over-hiring happen in the cheap money era? Absolutely. Will those folks be missed? Some of them. Most of them? Eh. Can AI do the work of all kinds of tech workers and maybe hundreds of them at once? Not now. Could it someday? People are saying there’s a chance. Hey, can we do this layoff thing surreptitiously by requiring everyone to come back to the office, even if it means our newly hired CEO will have to get on a private jet every week? Pregnant pause. And then you wake up one day and realize there is a consensus building that AI can do everything. Everything from your job to your co-worker’s job to the job of the person who is supposed to be buying the thing you work on. Then AI can hire all the replacements, and only the ones it needs. You realize this is not true, this is just another greater fool theory. But it takes so much nuance to explain why that you just shrug. You don’t have the time. You need to figure out what’s next for you. And quick. I have the time. Well, I don’t, but I write fast. And now that we’re on the same page, please follow me as I document what happens next, starting with the Great Tech Worker Revolution of… 2025? EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO