The Tech Industry is Broken

Tech is broken. The pandemic provided an opportunity for redemption. It could have focused more on products that help people solve novel problems and set a positive example for how to get work done.

This did not happen. Over the last few years I’ve become disillusioned with the Tech Industry, so much so that I am no longer proud to work in Tech.

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Tech has never been more important to the global economy. The current leading Big Tech companies (defined as Magnificent 7, FAANG, take your pick...) make up an inordinate percentage of the value of the stock market. Data center investment is responsible for much of US economic growth in 2025. When I say the Tech Industry is broken, this isn’t what I’m referring to. It isn’t about revenue, stock valuations, or data centers.

What I mean is that those companies are no longer leaders of a positive Tech culture. Growth and scale aren’t a culture - they are goals. And those goals are being pursued with fervor, as if being Big is a value.

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I’ve belonged to the Tech community since the mid 90s. Much of that community was supported by Tech companies. I learned programming from Sun, through the online Java tutorial. In my first job out of college in the early 2000s I learned about distributed systems, largely by using products from IBM, BEA, and JBoss. I broadened my understanding of the full stack over that decade by learning about AJAX from Microsoft, and about mobile app development from Apple. Tech companies had a huge role in nurturing and defining Tech culture - not the only one by any means, but alongside hobbyists, the open source community, and the (much larger) tech press, for-profit companies were active and positive contributors.

Tech has never been perfect. Here’s a few examples, just drawing from my own experience. I grew up in Santa Clara, and my dad worked for Intel in the 70s and 80s. Intel was responsible for multiple Superfund sites in my hometown. They also moved my dad’s job out of state - I’m grateful that he left Intel instead of moving us to Arizona. When I was at eBay, I was negatively affected by “no poaching” collusion between eBay and other tech companies including Apple and Adobe.

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The decline started a long time ago. Major political and economic events have affected Tech, but there are some also specific choices made by companies and individuals that had an outsized effect, including (but not limited to):

• Twitter curtailing API access in 2012

• Yahoo’s multiple strategic blunders and poor leadership hires

• OpenAI’s board backing down and letting Sam Altman take over the company

It’s important to have a broader perspective, and to draw from history to understand what happened why things happened. Thinking about and then writing about examples like those is a good place to start, and it’s among the things I intend to focus on. Within Tech there is a relentless push to look ahead, but changing things for the sake of change is just as bad as being big for the sake of being big.

I’m starting this blog to go deeper into tech as an industry - to deconstruct it to better understand how it’s gone wrong, and to work to build up a kind of Tech Industry that has human values at the core.

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I believe that technology can be a force for good - that it can be built (and yes: scaled) to better human lives. Tech isn’t cool in it’s own right, nor is it cool because you can make lots of money with it. Tech is cool because of what you can do with it, and what it can help you to become. I believe that we need better role models, better companies, and that we need more to aspire to.

We need a Tech Industry that doesn’t bend the knee to money, and we definitely need a Tech industry that doesn’t bend the knee to autocracy. That’s the kind of Tech Industry I would be proud to work for again.