The Great Tech Industry Backlash of 2026 Is Coming

“Bob” has been a tech CTO for 15 years. He got so fed up with the direction of his company over the last few years, that he finally put in his resignation. His last day will be the last day of 2025. But unlike most job-hopping employees of Bob’s ilk – and against all the conventional wisdom of this horrible, awful, depressing tech job market – Bob doesn’t have his new opportunity lined up. Yet.

Bob is just the latest in a growing army of disillusioned tech employees, mostly castoffs from a tech world that has forsaken innovation, creative freedom, and long-term vision, trading that for quantifiable productivity, OKR progress checklists, and short-term quarterly profits at any cost. 

Bob sees a backlash coming and a collapse on the horizon. But he’s not leaving tech, he’s just joining the castoffs from a tech world that doesn’t make sense to him anymore. 

What the hell happened? And what does the Great Tech Employee Backlash mean for the tech industry in 2026?

We Need To Talk About Bob’s Decision Matrix

I’ve been having coffee with Bob monthly for the last couple years, and during our most recent get-together, right before Thanksgiving, he told me out-of-the-blue that he was quitting his job. And why.

“It wasn’t the layoffs themselves. It was what they represented. It was the last straw.”

A few days earlier, Bob had been told to make heavy cuts. It wasn’t the first time Bob had to let go of a percentage of his staff. It wasn’t even the second time. What drove Bob to the point of no return was the “how” and the “why” of this latest round of cuts. 

How to make the cuts? He was told to figure it out, but it was implied that the more money he could trim, the better it would be for the company. So find 30 percent headcount to let go, and it was hinted that he should return more than 30 percent to the 2026 budget. 

Why were they making the cuts? Well, this is where it gets sketchy.

Bob is in the executive suite, running over half the company. “We’re making money,” he said. “Our growth is slow but that’s a self-inflicted wound. When my CEO won’t give me concrete reasons for [the layoffs] and I’m not in the discussions with the board about it, all I can do is draw conclusions based on what I do know. That basically the board just wanted better numbers to report to the investors.”

Bob brought those conclusions to his CEO, and when they weren’t refuted, that sealed it for Bob. 

But Bob’s story lines up with a general trend I’ve seen starting at the end of 2024, accelerating through 2025, and I can speculate on how this manifests itself into opportunities in 2026. 

If you’re joining the army of tech castoffs and misfits, this might be the roadmap to follow into what’s next. 

Let’s start by figuring out how we got here.

The Great Tech Revolution of 2025 Fizzled Out Quickly

The tech industry split began at some point after the pandemic lockdowns. The money side of tech began hardline mandating RTO, turning product roles into checklist manifestos, demanding quantifiable productivity, and then cutting payroll to make room for FOMO investment in AI – either for real or as an excuse. 

As 2024 limped to a close, the pushback from tech employees grew louder, if not necessarily stronger, and the general consensus was that the Great Tech Revolution had begun.

But look, I’ve been doing tech for decades, as both labor and management. I’ve seen these Revolutions before. Techies just don’t make good revolutionaries, and when they do, they usually get into hacking, because hacking is much more profitable than being a squeaky cog in a giant machine.

I predicted the Revolution would die out. It did. Tech employees gave up their last, best chance at confrontation. Or more specifically, they did what they always do. They kept quiet and started coming up with a series of workarounds. 

Side Hustles Only Go So Far

Waves of secondary shit followed. 

The first wave of workarounds was, of course, AI related. Because if anyone could exploit this new, confusing, seemingly-magic but really just a breakthrough extension of existing tech, it would be the people who didn’t need to rely on vibes to code.

When the tech crowd jumped headfirst into AI, there were winners, and winners are still being made. But as it is with any major technical breakthrough, from the dawn of the internet through the rise of mobile to the fiasco that became of crypto, for every winner, there was an exponentially larger number of losers. 

And even as advancements in tech lowered the entry bar to start a side hustle and immediately start generating revenue – or even work multiple full time jobs covertly – that’s almost always a temporary fix. Either the AI-assisted career polygamist eventually gets caught, or the side-hustler realizes the Catch-22 that they need to go full-hustle to replace their income, which funds their hustle.

OK. Then let’s all quit and do the full-time hustle. 

One small problem. You’re still battling the specter of AI.

The Great Tech Backlash Is Not an AI Backlash

Don’t be fooled. AI is not going away. AI is not NFTs. AI is not a scam… despite the tremendous efforts of a handful of people to use AI to scam people.

Thus, all the money is still in AI. And it’s not going anywhere. 

Don’t get me wrong. There is a healthy AI skepticism as well, but that’s mostly being caused by the ineptitude of the rollout, a phenomenon we see with every major technical advancement. It’s a backlash all right, but not one that signals a shift to non-AI or anti-AI business. In fact, some of the best AI use cases are being created by the most talented tech people but will never be the impetus of an RTO, an OKR, or the kind of CAGR that leads to an IPO.

See, the problem isn’t with AI. The problem has been the enshitification of the tech industry itself, since long before we all came face to face with ChatGPT. And the folks backing the backlash aren’t going to eschew tech, just the tech industry.

The Green Shoots of Opportunity

In fact, for each shoe that dropped onto the heads of disgruntled and disenfranchised tech employees, there was a lesson and a guidepoint for what not to do.

The failed Great Tech Revolution made them realize they weren’t alone, and it wasn’t going to take much to get the help and support they would need from each other.

The side hustle lesson was two-fold. First, they learned that the platforms are out there to exploit for a quick start. Second, they learned it’s going to take 100 percent of their time and effort to get any traction. 

And the lack of an anti-AI groundswell was also a cloud with a silver lining. It became clear how many industries, sectors, startups, small businesses, hobbyists, creators, and consumers were getting steamrolled by the race to a megacap status. 

What if instead of trying to build one solution to serve every customer on the planet, you build a bunch of really good solutions for a single type of customer?

The castoffs from the tech industry like Bob have figured it out. And they’re no longer just keeping quiet and hoping they don’t get fired in the next round of arbitrary cuts. They’re proactively leaving the tech industry to work on something more than checklists and OKRs.

Bob doesn’t know what he’s doing next, but he knows where he’s going.

Please join my email list, a rebel alliance of over 15K professionals. It’s so much more than just a bunch of revolutionary, anti-AI side-hustlers. 

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