Introducing TechPuke: I Hate It Here for the Tech Industry

I’ve been in the tech industry for under a decade. I started out drinking the Kool-Aid as I dreamed about my 30 year plan to climb the corporate ladder, launch my own startup, and eventually become a venture capitalist.

Now? I think that plan sounds like a nightmare. Tech is great, at times, but I’ve also become increasingly disillusioned with the industry.

Here’s an incomplete list of my grievances, in no particular order:

• My employer, like countless (or countable) others, laid off 15% of our workforce in 2023, because obviously they scaled too fast during the pandemic and didn’t predict the market slowdown

• My employer, again like countless others, has reallocated (read: “ruthlessly prioritized”) a significant percentage of our engineering team to focus on building AI-related products, while remaining teams and products (you know, the ones that actually make the company money) are left understaffed and overwhelmed

• OpenAI closing in on a $6.5 billion fundraising round while…

  • not showing any sign of a path to profitability, or a reason to be valued at $150 billion

  • its CEO Sam Altman writes about this dystopian nightmare in which “[o]ur children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject” and “[i]f we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people” while throwing it on at the end that “this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years”

• Big Tech / AI companies want electric grids to be upgraded to support their usage in building AI products that their customers will pay for, while refusing to pay for the upgrades necessary

• Companies over-investing in AI while

  • pushing its employees to ship harder and faster

  • sacrificing product quality & under-investing in quality assurance

  • under-resourcing products that are actually utilized

• The continuing enshittification of the tech industry

• Almost every startup recruiting me in my emails and LinkedIn trying to sell me on their OpenAI wrapper that “disrupts [X] industry” or “is the [X] for [Y], powered by AI”

• Elon Musk is gross

• Ben Horowitz & Marc Anderseen donating to Donald Trump

• Crypto & crypto bros

While I originally intended for TechPuke to be a satire site (think: The Onion but focused on tech), I realized a few things

1. I’m not a good writer

2. I’m neither funny nor creative enough to sustainably write satirical posts

3. I’m genuinely disappointed about the state of tech to the point, and I want my voice to be heard directly

Thanks for reading. Here’s a glimpse of what you can hope to get as a subscriber to TechPuke.

P.S. While I hope to one day be confident enough to put my name behind my words, I’m still working in tech and I hope to keep it that way until my the work I enjoy (like this) can financially sustain me and my family. Besides, it’s also fun for me to feel like I’m getting the inside scoop of stupid decisions in tech.