Two ways to think about decline

“What happens when engineers stop thinking of their interests as fundamentally aligned with the companies’ owners and management, and develop their own class consciousness? Tech companies are not pursuing automation purely out of intellectual interest; they are trying to solve looming labor problems that can no longer be ignored.”

There's a lot of really great stuff in this piece of the decline of tech, but I'd argue that the labor issue is one of the reasons why we're seeing all the of the layoffs. Layoffs don't make sense financially, but they do put fear into the tech workers who remain and there is a distinct feeling that the bosses want to put these same workers in their place. Tech workers have had a lot of leverage for a long time and now the people at the top want to claw some of that back. Unionization would help workers to retain those things that are most important.