Goooood mewning my dear genial simpletons, do I have a corporate soul-crusher for you today.
I am just the melodramatic harbinger here, so before I start, don’t come crying at my door if your life flashes before your eyes as I describe how startups are turned into good ol’ Russkie gulags – русский for my friends.
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So, I walk into my inbox and there it is. A company called Cognition, which has a valuation of say $4 billion plus or minus a few of my monthly paychecks – they were the first to bring us an automated coding agent they called Devin that tries to do some of the coding on behalf of the devs out there. I say try, because they have gone through – how shall I put it – ‘some’ upheaval. Read: Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn. But with enough VC money that it’s spilling onto the floor, they decided to “acquire” Windsurf which is another one of those automated software engineering tools
Conform corporate culture, and to scare the shit out of the internal populus, they immediately laid off 30 folks, and then handcuffed the remaining 200 with a choice. . . either you take nine months’ salary and quietly crawl out, or sign up to a six‑day, 80‑hour work week, like weekends, holidays and nights included.
I think it must have felt like they were just invited to live at an office-abattoir.
Work‑life balance is for pussies.
Cognition’s CEO, Scott Wu-the-fcuk-r-u, actually had the gall to say that “building the future of software engineering is a mission we care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two”.
🤢
🤮 BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARF
The man is clearly Satan himself, cause he’s basically saying “your soul is now collateral on this project”, and then he had the balls to double down on X, when he talked about the “extreme performance culture” at that company, and he bragged about people literally liveing where they shit and code.
I mean, if that isn’t modern‑day slavery in business casual, I dunno what else is.
First OpenAI nearly bought Windsurf for $3 billion, but poof, deal collapses. Then Google swoops in, grabs the CEO and top engineers for $2.4 billion (like they always do), and leaves the rest kicking dust, and now Cognition snaps up what’s left which is a hollowed team and their IP, for pocket change, in a low down and shameless move. It was an asset acquisition, and not a full merger, but to the peeps working over there it must have felt more like a dismemberment.
One poor sobbing dev called Prem Qu Nair, he spilled how his equity payout was just 1% of what people imagined it would be. Equity is being treated like a lottery ticket, and basically their payout is the punchline to a big joke.
A Redditor said “it’s not about work‑life balance anymore as it was in the ol’ days during COVID, it’s about pushing humans until they break, to train the AI that’ll replace them sooner than later”.
This cult-like culture isn’t unique either.
It has become the new template for partial acquisitions, hardcore “997” work ethics, and reverse acqui-hires, and all are designed to squeeze every last drop of juice out of its hoomans before handing the wheel over to the algorithm. And Cognition’s gulag is just one dark fucked up chapter in what I like to call The Cult of the Clock, the new corporate religion where you either work double-time or take a bit of blood money and leave.
Twitter – or X, or Xwitter, whatever Halloween costume it is wearing this week, they actually built the template for this game back in 2022 when Elon sent his now-legendary “extremely hardcore” pledge to his employees to click yes or take three months’ severance pay. Which, translated out of Musk-speak, means – sell your weekends to the company store or go learn how to survive on instant noodles.
Another company Coinbase (crypto) went for the same vibe in 2020 with a “no politics” decree. They made a deal with four to six months’ pay for anyone willing to take a sip of the poison goblet. Basecamp (project management) followed in 2021, first letting about a third of the staff moonwalk out of there, and offering the rest a make it till you break it (yourself) deal.
Kraken (crypto) did its own remix of X’s hit in 2022, and branded it the “Jet Ski” program (I did not bother looking up why), which included four months’ pay for anyone not feeling the CEO’s ideological surf and the rest was off buying camper vans so they wouldn’t have to sleep where they shat.
And then there are the pure lords of the grind, like CD Projekt Red (games) who were forcing six-day workweeks before Cyberpunk 2077 (is a game), or the Chinese 996 outfits like Pinduoduoduoduo (don’t know how many duo’s, but e-commerce) that offered a “buyout or burnout” deal to its employees, but in practice is was just a full blown burnout, full stop, nine to nine, six days a week, no exit, and an HR department that probably laughs when your number comes up.
It is the same formula every damn time with these Big Tech firms.
They draw a hard cultural line, bring out the Guillotine to scare the shit out of the remaining staff, crank the workload up until the walls sweat, and then dangle a cheque just fat enough to make you forget you’re signing up for servitude with beanbags. And they don’t even have to chain you to the desk because they just shackle you to your own ambition and watch you sprint yourself into oblivion while the AI you trained oils the gears of the next replacement round.
I said it.
When do we revolt, or do we just let this happen?
Signing off, with blood,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. It’s job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins.
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To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- The chicken that refused to die | LinkedIn
- Vibe Coding is gonna spawn the most braindead software generation ever | LinkedIn
- The funniest comments ever left in source code | LinkedIn
- Today’s tech circus is a 1920s Wall Street reboot | LinkedIn
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- How corporations fell in love with AI, woke up with ashes, and called It ‘innovation’ | LinkedIn
- The corporate body snatchers | LinkedIn
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- The state of tech-jobs 2025 | LinkedIn
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