Once upon a time in Techlandia, where kombucha flowed like code commits and bean bags were sacred, there lived a man named Tobi Lütke. The guy behind the $125 Billion empire Shopify. A self-proclaimed Zen monk in the Valley of Chaos. “I only work 40 hours a week, unless my soul’s on fire”, he once tweeted.
Ah, such poetry.
That tweet, by the way, now rots in the graveyard of deleted posts, just like every ideal this industry once pretended to have.
More rants after the commercial brake:
- Comment, or share the article; that will really help spread the word 🙌
- Connect with me on Linkedin 🙏
- Subscribe to TechTonic Shifts to get your daily dose of tech 📰
- Visit TechTonic Shifts blog, full of slop, I know you will like !
Fast forward to um, now
Tobi’s tweeting something a little different.
Says he works 10 hours a day, weekends too.
Still makes it home for dinner though.
What a champ.
And why the sudden change of heart? Simple.
The hustle cult came knocking again. You can’t build a “breakthrough startup” and also have a spine, apparently. He didn’t want to “mislead” people. No worries, Tobi.
We’re not misled.
We’re just tired, underpaid, and out of serotonin.
And yes, before the pandemic, Tobi was that rare unicorn in a sea of caffeinated, coke snorting startup zombies. He bragged about balance. Said family came first. Said health mattered. Said his job was “just a job”.
Awww. What a cute little lie.
Now that the VC fairy dust has cleared, and there’s a surplus of engineers, he is also “clocking ten-hour days” and grinding through weekends like the rest of the Big Tech elite who are pretending they aren’t running glorified sweatshops with ping-pong tables.
The mood has shifted across the smoldering wasteland of tech campuses, where hope once rode electric scooters and “innovation” meant a new Slack emoji.
Efficiency, intensity, and performance are the new HR-approved euphemisms for “bend over and and take it up the . . . “. Gone are the massages and stocked kombucha fridges. Now it’s layoffs, return-to-office mandates, and managers channeling their inner Mussolini.
What used to be a playground for manchildren building billion-dollar LEGO sets is now a pressure cooker where the words “efficiency” and “intensity” aren’t slogans. They have become battle cries.
Tech workers are getting shoved off the rollercoaster mid-loop.
No parachute.
No golden handcuffs.
Just a slap on the back and a cheery “do more with less, um, whatsyournameagain?”.
Now here is Elon a.k.a. Skum, and “I Burn Empires for Fun” Musk. This guy gutted Twitter like it owed him money. Axed 80% of staff. But while everyone and their mothers thought it would die a painful death right after, he proved them all wrong.
Because it didn’t die.
And he didn’t flinch.
Hell, the platform didn’t even crash hard enough.
It kept limping along, bleeding relevance but still alive. And now every CEO in Silicon Valley is copying his playbook like it’s the goddamn Dead Sea Scrolls. Welcome to the Church of Elon. All hail the high priest of carnage and efficiency.
And the results? Twitter, sorry, “X”, nah, let’s call it Xwitter, is now a husk held together with duct tape and rage-tweets of the big man himself, and held together by the remaining 20% who either can’t leave or are too terrified to.
Yet, miracle of miracles, it didn’t explode.
And that non-explosion? That is now the benchmark for “success”. Turns out you can throw thousands out, kill every perk, and still pretend the machine runs fine.
Emphasis on “pretend”.
Cause, who has posted anything on Xwitter, lately?
Be honest.
You @DreesMarc? Yeah, you, absolutely. You’re the king of Xxx.
And Zucky, of course, didn’t want to be left out of the alpha brolympics. So he culled 4,000 “low performers” from Meta. He blamed it on a lack of “masculine energy”.
Right.
Yeah, he really said that.
Laying off people between VR headset sprints is a sure sign of high testosterone levels.
And “Bozo the Benevolent” of Amazon went full Orwellian and demanded workers back in the office every damn day, like it’s 1999 and Jeff still delivers books from a garage.
And take Microsoft.
Well, even the country club of Big Tech had a reckoning. They are now firing people mid-sandwich. Perks? Gone.
Reviews? Rigged.
Morale? Deceased.
Meta isn’t even trying to be subtle.
“We are culturally neutered” was the term Zucky used to describe his own damn company. So he brought the axe. Cut “low performers”.
Low, as in, defined by what, exactly?
Low vibes?
Weak protein shake game?
Probably just people who had the nerve to go home before midnight. And Amazon, bless their soul-sucking hearts, decided the pandemic was over.
Office.
Back.
Every.
Day.
No exceptions.
Want to see your kids? Too bad, Jeff needs you in a cubicle pretending you innovate.
Even Sergey Brin, yes, the dude who invented “I’m feeling lucky”, is now showing up like some rogue workday prophet in the flesh, and is telling people to grind 60 hours a week on Gemini AI.
He did.
Office every day.
Work every night.
Sleep is optional. Humanity is irrelevant. But hey, the stock price is up, so everyone shut up and smile for the shareholders.
Gemini, by the way, is Google’s attempt to not get eaten alive by OpenAI. Sergey Brin, who basically ghosted Google for years, is now haunting the halls like a billionaire poltergeist. He is telling engineers to stay late, and come in early, and build the AI that will one day replace you. And Wall Street is eating this up like it’s crack cocaine.
Meta’s, Amazon’s, Microsoft’s, Alphabet’s stocks are up.
So the bloodletting must continue.
Startups? They’re not safe either.
The trickle-down effect has arrived, and it’s not champagne. It is battery acid. Leaner teams. Performance standards on steroids. You’re expected to build Rome in a day, and you better livestream the whole damn thing on Twitch while eating Soylent through your nose.
Krish Ramadurai, some damned partner at AIX Ventures who sold his soul to Mammon, says he has noticed a “pronounced shift”. That is of course secret VC-speak including handshake for “founders have finally decided to act like psychopaths again”.
They want results.
They want pain.
They want you to code through your divorce and deploy during your dad’s funeral. Welcome back to the real startup grind.
No Fridays off.
No Bali offsites.
Just KPIs and caffeine induced hallucinations.
And just to make sure no one misses the memo, the Tech bosses want it known; The party is over.
The fun is dead.
The perks were a phase.
Welcome to the age of perform-or-perish. Some brave little minions spoke to Business Insider, anonymously of course. Because talking to the press might get you a one-way ticket to “voluntary resignation”. And when asked for comments, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, they all ghosted BI’s request for comment.
Shopify too by the way.
Damn cowards.
You remember when Amazon doubled its base salary cap? That was 2022. Which now feels like a poetic psychosis. Microsoft was throwing raises around like it was Oprah giving out toasters. But then the Fed jacked up the interest rates, the tech bubble burst, and suddenly, those big hearts shriveled into black raisins of capitalist disappointment.
And today it’s not about growth anymore.
It’s about profits.
And blood. And fear.
Xwitter was the beta test for this horror show. No perks. No soap in the bathrooms. People begging for toilet paper like it’s a post-apocalyptic bunker during COVID-the-sequel. Fidelity (some giant investment firm that probably doesn’t live up to its name) now says X is worth 20% of what Musk paid for it.
But who cares about valuation when you’ve just invented the blueprint for mass layoffs with zero consequences? The system didn’t collapse. It just got meaner.
“Do more with less” is more than a phrase now.
It has become law.
It is carved into silicon tablets and handed down from Mount Musk.
Google layoffs are so common that people have started to track them like weather patterns. There’s even a Google Doc where you can check who is still employed, who’s crying in their Prius, and who’s suddenly “exploring new opportunities” on LinkedIn.
Middle management is being murdered in cold blood.
Amazon wants 15% fewer managers by the end of the month. Google chopped 10% of VPs and managers like they were dead weight, because to Sundar Pitch-AI, they probably are. Microsoft monitors something called “span of control”, which sounds like a Bond villain’s plan to dominate Europe but is really just a corporate org chart laced with fear.
Performance is the new God.
And Zucky and Skum are your preachers. Zucky says layoffs are about “raising the bar”. Well, lemme translate this for ya: You are the bar. And you are about to get shoved under it. Pichai’s redefining “Googleyness” as “mission first”. And that, my friends, is just a classy way of saying, “Don’t expect empathy, you measly peasant, now bow to your Tech God!”
Microsoft used to be the industry’s retirement home in the past, way-waaay back.
Chill.
Safe.
Easy.
But now, they are firing 2,000 people without severance pay. Oh, and just for fun, no health benefits either. One manager said other companies did it first.
So now it’s okay.
Monkey see, monkey execute.
TikTok. Oh, that one is a real carnival of stress. Managers were told to give more low scores. People on Performance Improvement Plans, left and right.
Goals made harder.
Expectations dialed up to “unreachable”. And just when you thought your anxiety couldn’t spike any more, BAM !, mandatory eight-hour office days.
Like it’s prison, but with boba tea, and without Bubba.
“You feel like if you’re not hitting a target, even if it’s a moving target, you’re in trouble”, one employee said, hanging upside down on Zucky’s cross, except no one was getting resurrected.
Damn right.
That’s the business model.
Set impossible goals. Watch you fail. Blame you for failing. It’s like psychological warfare, but with stock options.
And finally, let’s talk about the rotting corpse of startup culture.
That lovable lie about “doing what you love”. Yeah, it’s dead.
Valley of Death is back.
Hustle or die.
There’s no in-between. Remember Bolt giving people Fridays off (ex eCommerce)?
LOL.
That was adorable. Now founders are calling people lazy if they aren’t coding at 3 a.m. in their underwear.
Mang-Git Ng of Anvil (yes, that’s a real name, and ditto real, but stupid, company) said that founders forgot that the goal is to make money. Like he’s unveiling some ancient truth.
No shit, Sherlock.
They forgot because they were too busy writing Medium posts about “mindful disruption”. But now it’s back to basics.
Cut headcount.
Kill remote work. Squeeze what’s left until it breaks.
Decagon’s Jesse Zhang says that “there’s no such thing as a rocketship that doesn’t require intensity”. Bro, what you’ve built isn’t a rocketship. It’s a sweatshop with slightly better branding. He himself badges in six days a week.
I think he wears a corporate halo.
And I’m pretty sure the man dreams in Jira tickets.
Recruiters are even getting real.
“If you’re not all in, take severance”.
Pffff.
No hugs.
No HR-speak.
Just late nights, crying in conference rooms, and crashing at your desk because going home is for underachievers (and people from my country the Netherlands).
But I am calling it for what it truly is: “This is corporate eugenics, dressed in Patagonia vests”.
If you are a software engineer, you are now living in the Silicon Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Enjoy the view.
And hey, don’t forget to update your LinkedIn before you’re escorted out.
Signing off from writing for now, hope I still have my day job tomorrow.
Marco.
Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s worst PR nightmare. Stick around if you like what I write. And if not, don’t worry, the AI already already knows you were here.
To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- The AI kill switch. A PR stunt or a real solution? | LinkedIn
- ‘Doomsday clock’: it is 89 seconds to midnight | LinkedIn
- AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
- Open-Source AI. How ‘open’ became a four-letter word | LinkedIn
- One project Stargate please. That’ll be $500 Billion, sir. Would you like a bag with that? | LinkedIn
- The Paris AI Action summit. 500 billion just for “ethical AI” | LinkedIn
- People are building Tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers | LinkedIn
- The first written warning about AI doom dates back to 1863 | LinkedIn
- How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
- The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
- Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
- Sam’s glow-in-the-dark ambition | LinkedIn
- The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
- Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
- Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
- Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
- Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
- The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn
Leave a Reply