The Age of Monopoly — Tech Edition

Every week there’s news of a new layoff in the tech industry; the world is changed by the pandemic; however, COVID-19 only exposed more of the dark side of greed to many problems that already existed.

I want to begin by sharing my own experiences in the tech industry without actually stating the company names for legality reasons. Within the past 10+ years, I went through three mass layoffs, two before this pandemic, and witnessed three more while working on the other side as a 3rd party software vendor to corporations. Each of these layoffs starts almost the same way, almost like a class taught in MBA school. Usually, there’s an internal email or announcement by the top leadership. A very dreamy statement about how much impact we made, and how great the company is. Then it goes on to talk about unexpected financial hit that we must account for, and without stating the obvious, some adjustments need to be made, but do not worry, we will do the right thing.

I used to be a company person, the one goal one mission type of guy, you know. Even after being laid off, I justify the leadership’s decision as the correct move to make for the company’s future.

Each one of these layoffs usually follows with hiring for the same position or changing the role to contract-based either by outsourcing or moving one of the development hubs to another country. (India, Ukraine, China, Philipines, Poland, etc) This has been the norm in the tech industry for the past decade. I have never worked at a tech company where I did not meet software engineers, qa, dev-ops, product, project, and business analysts worried about their job security constantly. Of course, productivity is never the same once trust is broken, and people are scare for their lively-hood. These initiatives are usually followed by years of delayed-release to products and endless problems caused by mistrust between employees, resulting in an unmeasurable dollar loss hidden by short-term gains from cost-cutting decisions. The result of this is in flushing out accounting books, share buy-backs raising the stock prices. Incompetent leaders are rewarded while the entire organization suffers as a result, and creating highly political environments where politicians flourish while talent slowly diminishes.

I hope I don’t sound too negative; over the years, I learned to be more analytical, and I decided to read the boring stuff after each layoff, the quarterly earnings report, and 10-Ks. What I found was fascinating, especially from the companies laying people off during this pandemic.

While individual businesses are hit by this virus affecting our way of life, some of the tech corporations that are doing layoffs are not affected enough for the type of salary reductions and layoffs implemented. For example, many enterprises-only software companies serve in sectors that are not indirectly effected and still report record profits. These guys are accumulating more cash and using the pandemic to layoff and reduce the salary of employees legally through loopholes as a world crises to prepare to buy more companies as the economy gets better. This is especially obvious if anyone wants to look up tech companies that have a wide range of portfolio products. Usually, if you do more research, most of those products came from company acquisitions, not from project initiatives. These tech-acquisition companies offer generally no value, and since they grow by buying companies and cutting-cost, the products they purchase remain in maintenance mode until their end of life.

I don’t have a solution in mind for this, and throughout my years in this industry, almost every person I talked to even in Director and VP levels all think it’s an unsolvable problem and none will stick their own necks out. I also do not see any politicians tackling this at all with no ways for the public to vote for these laws on corporations. I think these big tech companies are destroying our country by creating monopolies and destroying fair competition. I love to see anyone comment for thoughts on this and your own experiences in the tech industry.

In conclusion, I want to end with some Dr. Seuss-ism that many of these crooked CEOs and leaders like to reference for morale on the people they hurt to benefit themselves.

“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”

Yours truly,

Yoda E