There was a time when the employee perks in tech looked like a Wes Anderson fever dream: kombucha on tap, nap pods, yoga Wednesdays, and ping-pong tables.

Companies threw buzzwords like “employee experience” and “wellbeing culture” around like venture capital confetti.

But peel back the branding, and something darker emerges: the steady, deliberate murder of employee-centricity.

In today’s tech sector, burnout isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. And beneath the glossy facade of “workplace innovation”, the only metric that truly matters is the stock price.

Employee-centricity was always more marketing than mission. Shareholder primacy was always the law underneath.

When things get tight, culture dies first. We saw this during the pandemic. Companies that once waxed poetic about “employee empowerment” suddenly demanded unpaid overtime and weekend hustle under the guise of remote productivity. When the Zoom windows closed, so did the empathy.

And then came the layoffs. From Amazon to Meta, the last two years have been a bloodbath. More than 100,000 tech employees were laid off between 2022 and 2023. No company was immune, no role sacred. Engineers discovered they’d been axed only when their logins failed at 8:59am.

Amazon’s layoff announcement was paired with a 12% rise in stock price. Translation: Wall Street clapped while workers cried. These weren’t failing companies. They were thriving ones.

Millennials and Gen Z workers have internalised that career security is an illusion. They’ve watched their mentors get laid off despite stellar reviews and decades of service. The lesson? Don’t believe the hype. In a 2023 study, only 28% of tech workers believed their employer had their best interests at heart. The rest? Quiet quitting, résumé-padding, and prepping their exit.

Return-to-office mandates added insult to injury. Despite productivity gains under remote models, executives dragged workers back not for collaboration, but for control. Leaders missed seeing people in seats. It was ego, dressed as strategy.

If employee-centricity is dying, then diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has already been buried with no headstone. As soon as market pressure hit, DEI officers were first out the door. Budgets were “reassessed”. Speaking up about mental health or ethical AI became career suicide. Dissent was reframed as toxicity.

Cultural Darwinism

Younger professionals are more socially conscious, and they’re clashing with Boomer-era values still hardwired into corporate culture. The result is Cultural Darwinism: only the quietly compliant survive. But killing employee-centricity is bad business. Companies with high engagement see 21% greater profitability and 59% lower turnover. By commodifying workers, tech has made itself untrustworthy to the very talent it depends on.

Employee-centricity isn’t kombucha taps. It’s infrastructure: trust, transparency, fair pay, and psychological safety. Rebuilding it means transparent hiring and firing policies, actual DEI accountability, remote flexibility, meaningful mental-health support, and real career paths. None of it is conceptually hard. It’s just expensive.

If tech refuses to build for people, people will build without tech. That’s the future corporate nostalgia won’t survive.