According to Inc, the dehumanizing shift in tech from “employees” to “workers” is a symptom of a deeper, decades-long rot. The analysis traces the problem back to the mid-2010s, when private equity money flooded tech with a rigid “5-year PE ROI IPO” growth formula. This strategy systematically replaced creative, experienced talent with process-oriented “workers,” a trend that the AI explosion starting in 2022 perfectly accelerated by automating standardized tasks and hiring. The outcome is a vicious cycle where companies, managed by checkbox processes and RTO-enforced production lines, face unprovoked errors and limited growth, all while blaming external crises for layoffs instead of their own flawed model.
The formula that killed creativity
Here’s the thing. The article nails a point a lot of us felt but couldn’t quite articulate. This wasn’t some sudden, post-pandemic evil. It was a slow, deliberate takeover. When private equity brought its playbook to Silicon Valley, it wasn’t just bringing money. It was bringing a whole different religion. Suddenly, the messy, creative, iterative magic of building tech had to fit into a spreadsheet. Agile became a cargo cult ritual. Lines of code became a KPI. And the CEO? Didn’t need to know tech anymore, just needed to know how to execute The Plan.
And that plan had no room for the experienced engineer who could see a novel solution. Or the product manager who understood human nuance. Why would it? The goal was a predictable, commoditized output to hit an IPO valuation. Creativity is unpredictable. It’s a risk. So it became a cost to be eliminated. I think that’s the real heart of it. We stopped building things for users and started building things for investors’ exit strategies.
AI, the ultimate checkbox tool
Now, enter stage left: generative AI. Talk about perfect timing. If your corporate goal is to remove creative variance, what’s better than a tool that literally generates average, pastiche versions of existing work? The article’s point about AI being the automation of an already-broken theory is brilliant. Companies already wanted “workers” to follow a process. AI just means you need fewer “workers” to babysit that process.
It gets worse. They applied the same logic to hiring. They automated the search for creative people with systems designed to filter them out! You end up with a talent pool of compliant process-followers, which makes the company even more dependent on rigid formulas. It’s a doom loop. And when a real crisis hits—not a spreadsheet miscalculation, but a genuine “never-been-tried” problem—this system has zero resilience. You can’t prompt-engineer your way out of a truly novel disaster.
Can we call them employees again?
So is it hopeless? The article, written by Joe Procopio, ends with a plea to start by changing the language back. Call them employees again. Acknowledge the human. It seems like a small thing, but words shape thinking. If you see a “worker,” you see a unit of production. If you see an “employee,” you see a person you’ve invested in, with institutional knowledge and unique value.
But let’s be real. Changing a word won’t reverse the financial incentives. The private equity machine is built on this disposability. The “new normal” of constant layoffs is a feature, not a bug, for that model. Fixing it means someone has to value long-term resilience over short-term extraction. And in a market that rewards the latter, that’s a tough sell. Maybe it starts with founders, or with investors who get burned one too many times by hollowed-out companies. Or maybe, as the article suggests, the whole machine just flies apart first.
Look, I’ve seen this caveman CEO the author mentions. We all have. They look at a brilliant, quirky tech company and see a list of inefficiencies to be optimized. They don’t understand that the brilliance was in the inefficiency. The solution isn’t another Band-Aid, another buzzword. It’s a fundamental rejection of the idea that tech is a commodity. But hey, until then, pass the borscht, comrade. The production line awaits.
