The tech-industry bloodbath and return of Bossism

Just when everyone assumed staff would need to be handled with kid gloves forever, FAANGsters started getting shown the door

Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

The pandemic marked the most pronounced shift in power from capital to labor in my (working) lifetime. The demise of unions had left labor mostly supplicant in the U.S. for a generation, but that’s changed with tight labor markets. That vibe is shifting. Elon Musk is being quietly cheered on by many bosses. I still regularly have Zoom calls with executives sitting in empty offices who aren’t happy about it. The era of zero-interest rates and the flood of pandemic stimulus created mini bubbles everywhere. The laser focus on growth is giving way to an emphasis on durability and efficiency.
Brian Morrissey,

The Rebooting

More than 90,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector have been let go so far in 2022 and over 150,000 globally — more than in 2021 and 2020 combined. Relative to the 5 million total U.S. jobs created in 2022, it’s a drop in the bucket, but the drop will swell in 2023… Overheard in every tech boardroom: “We can have the same great taste (massive reduction in headcount/costs) with fewer calories (revenue loss)… The average tech worker cost their employer at least $100,000 in salary plus benefits and dilution in 2022. Call it $150,000. Fewer humans means substantially more profit per share. Google and Meta, with 30% operating margins, can either fire 25,000 people each or increase their top-line revenue by $12.5 billion and register the same operating income. They, and hundreds of other tech firms, will choose a version of the former.
Scott Galloway, No Mercy, No Malice (on 30/12/22, shortly before Google, Meta and several other tech industry heavy hitters began the working year with large layoffs)

You may not have heard of Bossism, but you’ve almost certainly heard Bossist sentiments expressed in recent months.

The dictionary definition of ‘Bossism’ is “a system of political control centering about a single powerful figure (the boss) and a complex organisation of lesser figures (the machine) bound together by reciprocity in promoting financial and social self-interest”. (If you’re over 40, think Hazzard County’s Boss Hogg. If you’re under 40, imagine the kind of Rupert Murdochesque éminence grise who enters a smoke-filled back room and tells those assembled who the next prime minister or president will be.)  

But the form of Bossism that has launched a thousand thinkpieces isn’t about old-school Tammany Hall backroom boys. In a guest essay for the New York Times, Nadia Rawlinson, the erstwhile Chief People Officer at Slack, characterised Bossism thusly:

The layoffs are part of a new age of bossism, the notion that management has given up too much control and must wrest it back from employees. After two decades of fighting for talent, chief executives are using this period to adjust for years of management indulgence that left them with a generation of entitled workers… Executives across industries are leaning into their newfound bossism and ending pandemic-era work arrangements and incentives.

Rawlinson links to a Vice article by Maxwell Strachan, which puts things more colourfully:

“Those in power began a battle to hire (and then keep) the workers they needed to make those [entrepreneurial] dreams a reality. And so, they kowtowed to the people beneath them, raising salaries, promising future riches in the form of stock-based compensation and otherwise creating an environment that said their company was the place to be. Raucous parties, on-tap kombucha, free laundry, and the like became the norm, and the workers were told all but they could do no wrong. This was not a matter of kindness so much as competition, one undertaken never entirely comfortably by the bosses, who gave hints here and there that they were cultivating a coddled workforce that had begun to expect, not appreciate, the, say, in-office chefs and masseuses.” 

Strachan links to what I presume is the Ur-text of tech-industry Bossism, a Substack newsletter called

Unpopular Front

written by John Ganz and published in April, 2022.

Referencing the actions and public statements of individuals such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), Ganz noted:

 Something like a class-consciousness of the most reactionary section of the tech bourgeoisie now appears to be crystallizing… The ideology, stripped of all its mystifying decoration, is actually pretty simple and crude: it says “bosses on top”. This is the unifying thread that runs through Yarvin’s tedious peregrinations from radical libertarianism to monarchism: the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good. It is, to borrow a term from the history of apartheid, baasskap—boss-ism… it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional-managerial classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations.

The rise and fall of the mollycoddled worker
Exploring the wider neo-reactionary implications of Bossism, will have to wait for some future Musing. For now, let’s focus on what might be labelled ‘corporate Bossism’.

Corporate Bossism has been around since, well, the invention of agriculture. The supervisory class has an ancient and primal fear that if the workers get too cocky then anarchy will be loosed upon the world.

In 1919 some showbusiness types decided they were sick of being ripped off by ruthless movie producers and distributors. They formed United Artists, an actors’ co-operative headed up by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. At the time, a now-forgotten studio head famously spat, “the lunatics have taken over the asylum”.

The axe Bossists have been grinding to a stub in recent months isn’t so much that the lunatics have taken over the asylum – that is, non-C-suite employees have seized control of the means of production. It’s that mere wage slaves have been enjoying, somehow illicitly, the privileges only those who either own or oversee the means of production have rightful claim to.

I suspect what really grinds the gears of Anglosphere tech company owners and senior executives is having to give an equity stake in the business to (some) lower-level employees. But Rawlinson, Strachan and a gazillion other tech-industry commentators have devoted a lot of time to listing the perks tech companies have chosen to offer their workers over the last two decades and which they are now gleefully eliminating.

These include: free healthcare, free food and beverages (anyone fancy on-site kombucha bar, barista or sushi chef?), free childcare, generous parental leave, extravagant ‘campuses’, remote working arrangements, free laundry and dry cleaning, free shuttle buses, wellbeing programs, gym memberships, massages, unlimited vacation time, paid time off to volunteer at charities, games rooms, nap pods, time to work on passion projects and company functions featuring performances from Beyoncé. And perhaps most gallingly of all for the born-to-rule types, an at least nominally egalitarian workplace culture where workers were permitted to, and sometimes even encouraged to, question their supervisor’s decisions. (Deliberately or otherwise, the agile way of working that tech companies pioneered and then evangelised encourages a relatively democratic, non-hierarchical approach to completing tasks and projects.)   

The fine print
Given they generate so much resentment, not least among “the most reactionary section of the tech bourgeoisie”, it’s worth making a few points about the benefits offered to tech workers.

First, providing them doesn’t seem to have placed too onerous a financial burden on Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin or Larry Page, or the shareholders of Microsoft, Meta, Oracle or Google.

(If you can generate vast amounts of revenue with a comparatively small number of employees, which is the case for successful tech companies, there’s little upside and plenty of downside to nickel and diming your workers.)   

Second, it’s only a relatively small proportion of what are already small workforces that have access to the significant perks. If you’re a skilled software engineer who hangs around for a few years at Meta, you will probably amass a goodly amount of employee stock options. That’s not the case if you’re the guy running the kombucha bar. Sure, you might see Taylor Swift sing at your work Christmas party, but there won’t be any equity stake in the business for you.

Third, those who do get shares in the company could usually earn a significantly higher salary and possibly receive substantial annual bonuses if they worked at, say, a professional services firm. They are taking a considerable risk, so it’s reasonable enough that they receive a considerable reward if their gamble pays off. Even in the boom years between Tech Wreck 1.0 (2000-2002) and Tech Wreck 2.0 (mid-2022–present), joining a start-up was like volunteering to be a British bomber pilot in WWII. For every 1000 start-ups launched, maybe 50 survive. Of those that survive, maybe one or two grow into large companies.

But, let’s face it, none of that information fits neatly into the ‘greedy, entitled tech-industry employees are belatedly meeting their richly deserved fate’ narrative. Or the wider, ‘long-overindulged workers are finally getting a dose of reality’ narrative.

What happens if a day of reckoning doesn’t involve any reckoning?       
Cultural changes as much as economic ones seemed to be heralding the end of Bossism up until the share prices of tech companies started tanking. The Me Too movement was laser focused on workplace power differentials. In particular, male bosses exercising droit du seigneur over those women whose careers they could make or break.

In Australia, a flurry of CEOs who revelled in their reputations for being ‘abrasive’, ‘hard driving’ or ‘demanding’ were punted in 2022 after complaints from their minions. Some of these CEOs even publicly proclaimed, possibly sincerely, that they recognised that times had moved on and that it was no longer appropriate to scream abuse at subordinates whenever you felt like it.

Of course, this was before the tech sector took a dive and economic commentators started warning of a looming recession. I suspect many of those at the pointy end of org charts have been begrudgingly biting their tongue for the last three years. No doubt many bosses are secretly – or not so secretly – delighted at the prospect of being able to get back to belittling and humiliating their cowed and compliant direct reports at the earliest possible opportunity.   

But they may have to bite their tongues for a lot longer, possibly until they reach pension age. Yes, big-name tech companies in the US, Australia and many other countries are embarking on swingeing rounds of redundancies that frequently involve culling a tenth of their workforces. But there is a massive demand for digitally skilled workers from start-ups, mid-sized tech companies and businesses in general. (As the saying goes, every business is now a tech business, and all those tech businesses need tech-savvy staff.)

I spent a lot of time late last year talking to Australian tech industry heavy hitters. Without exception, they all told me there was a massive undersupply of tech workers in Australia. I suspect if I’d interviewed people involved in the North American, European or Asian tech industry, they would have told me the same thing.  

Even Rawlinson, in a piece titled “The Era of Happy Tech Workers is Over”, concedes that tech workers don’t seem particularly unhappy:

I recently spoke with a product marketing manager from Meta who was laid off. I assumed that she would be apprehensive about her job prospects; instead, armed with three months’ severance and decent savings, she remains optimistic. With nearly 79 per cent of software engineers and nearly 76 per cent of marketers who were laid off in tech finding jobs within three months, her optimism isn’t necessarily unfounded.

But what about all those non-tech-industry workers who don’t have scarily high IQs and impressive qualifications, I hear you ask. Granted, in the event of a severe economic downturn, they’re screwed. But in recent weeks, I’ve seen plenty of pundits walking back their predictions of imminent economic catastrophe. It’s currently looks like Australia is in for a soft landing, at least as far as unemployment rates go.

Given how frequently I’ve mentioned it previously, I won’t bang on here about how major economies are all facing serious demographic-decline challenges. But in a week when the CCP had to officially admit the Chinese population has gone into irreversible decline, I’m inclined to think Bossism doesn’t have much of a future in a world running out of workers. Even if it does experience a short-lived resurgence over the next couple of years.