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Great benefits, work-life balance, flexible hours, and flashy office amenities. Not so long ago, these were virtually synonymous with working in tech.
For those still in the industry, the presumption of such luxuries can now feel like a hazy dream.
On top of the relentless layoffs that have plagued the sector for more than two years, salaries are stagnating, corporate hierarchies are flattening, and more and more companies are issuing ultimatums to either return to the office or leave the organization. Job security is eroding, let alone a culture of bountiful perks. Where software engineers used to be hot commodities, the power has suddenly shifted back to employers.
This shift is poised to reconfigure how engineers and their colleagues approach their careers and break down longstanding assumptions about workers’ rights.
A farewell to perks
In January, Amazon followed through on plans to enforce a full-time return to office for all staff, despite the logistical hiccup of insufficient desks across many of its offices. Dell enacted its own RTO for sales staff last fall, while Netflix quietly walked back its unlimited parental-leave policy in December. Before then, Google and Salesforce respectively downgraded their office snacks and offsite gatherings and cut employee retreats and “well-being” days off, according to The New York Times.
These initiatives mark a dramatic departure from the “perks culture” that once proliferated across Silicon Valley and the wider tech sector. In the 2010s, big tech companies such as Facebook and Google led a trend toward developing office campuses that looked more like luxury ski resort villages than corporate workplaces, offering such amenities as no-pay restaurants, in-house masseurs, arcade games and, of course, rotating selections of craft beer on tap.
Combined with the promise of robust salaries, exceptional benefits packages, remote-work flexibility and promising stock options, these perks helped make “learn to code” a meme for affluence, and put countless young professionals on the path to a job in tech.
However, in recent years, the rise of generative AI and mounting pressure on big tech to deliver consistent profit growth have complicated the equation. Last October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told shareholders that more than a quarter of the company’s new code was being generated by AI. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the company was developing an AI “that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” and that he expected to launch the technology as early as this year.
The very companies that, a mere decade ago, sought to woo top developers with utopian workspaces and unparalleled perks, are now making a point about their expendability.
When workers were in high demand, they also had the power to orchestrate large-scale acts of protest without losing their jobs. Google employees’ 2018 global walkout met little retaliation from executives. Last year, however, the company fired 28 staff for protesting Google’s contract with the Israeli government.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has sent a similar message, telling staff to quit if they don’t like the company’s controversial new policies. In response, Meta employees have taken to quiet acts of rebellion such as replenishing some of the company’s men’s bathrooms with menstrual product dispensers.
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The effects of expendability
This rising sense of expendability among engineers is already changing how entry-level developers approach their careers. It has also sparked caution and fear. It was unusually difficult to find engineers who were willing to speak to LeadDev for this story, even under a guarantee of anonymity.
“The fantasy of ascending the FAANG ladder is withering,” said Geordi Todorov, founder of the Bulgarian SaaS link-building startup Create & Grow. “New graduates are less idealistic, more wary, and more focused on abilities that apply outside of merely ‘big tech.’”
In order to expand their professional prospects, some new and established engineers are opting to develop skills in such fields as AI, automation, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and even business and marketing.
Others are choosing to leave larger companies for smaller organizations, focusing on freelance or contract work, or launching ventures of their own. “Companies went out of their way to draw talent five years ago. Right now? They make us glad to have a job. Some engineers have even been told things like ‘AI can probably do 80% of what you do,’ which would have been inconceivable in 2019,” Todorov said.
“We’re all aware that anything can happen to any one of us, which is changing the relationship we have with the companies we’re working for,” an engineering manager based in The Netherlands, who works for a global hospitality platform, told LeadDev. He added that, in his view, engineers are now adopting a “more utilitarian” perspective on their organizations. They’re less inclined to expect their teams to feel like families and their daily tasks to feel like groundbreaking innovations, and more likely to want a modicum of job security, work-life balance, flexibility, and compensation that feels fair.
This collective mindset shift among workers will soon be felt by employers, if it hasn’t been already. The 2024 Harvey Nash Global Tech Talent and Salary Report, which surveyed 2,700 tech professionals across 44 countries, found that 30% of global tech professionals were thinking of leaving their role in the next six months, and 45% within a year. Tech staffing analysts caution that a potential “tech talent exodus” could be on the horizon.
London • June 16 & 17, 2025
Speakers Gergely Orosz, Camille Fournier and Lara Hogan confirmed.
Getting organized
A loss of talent isn’t the only upheaval that may be in store for tech bosses.
In mid-February, former Meta employee Nichole Schwartz generated heated discussion when she took to LinkedIn to announce her termination from the company, allegedly due to low performance incurred during a medical leave of absence. The top comment in response to Schwartz’s viral post, which generated more than 650 reactions and nearly 50 replies within five days, was a plea to tech workers at large: “Enough of this nonsense. We can take back the power. Let’s make this happen: Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon . . . Let’s unionize.”
Particularly in the US, tech workers have been historically reluctant to form unions. Companies such as Amazon have honed an effective playbook for discouraging organized labor efforts within their workforces. Many tech employees, meanwhile, have internalized the belief that unionization is antithetical to innovation and, furthermore, only useful for industries in which individual workers play a marginal role in driving growth.
However, the current climate in tech may start to change this mindset. John Harris, the 25-year IT director in the Chicago area who left the pro-union comment on LinkedIn, told LeadDev that the response to his comment “has been kind of crazy.” In addition to the replies and thumbs-up votes his note has received so far, Harris has been inundated by private messages from fellow tech professionals who share his point of view that unions are the way forward.
August 2024 survey data from Blind suggests that Harris’s inundation of goodwill may not be so shocking, after all; according to the survey, 67% of more than 1,900 US tech workers said they would join a union.
