Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

It’s a bit naïve—almost a textbook neo-western, ego-centric mindset—where everything is attributed to a brilliant personality, and all setbacks are blamed on some mysterious villains.

But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.”

It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled.

Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems.

The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.

>This is a really terrible article.

I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.

TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one.

The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.

This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).

This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.

Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.

In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.

There. FTFY.

I don't think that's the case in TFA, because then why would recent layoffs matter?

Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.