The Year Silicon Valley Bosses Reclaimed the Power

Compared to what came before, 2022 hit like an earthquake to the thousands of people who made their names and fortunes working in Silicon Valley—a shocking wake-up call that the party is ending, if not over, and that the industry’s bosses are in the process of overhauling the social contract in a way that best befits themselves. 

Over the preceding decade, a tech-friendly economic environment, stemming from the low interest rates meant to pull the country out from the financial crisis, had presented a clear opportunity to develop countless numbers of billion-dollar companies and stack life-changing amounts of wealth. It seemed, at times, as if the tech industry had been granted a blank check to fund dreams, providing Silicon Valley with the financial runway to think big for now and about profit later. 

With the preciousness of the moment clear, those in power began a battle to hire (and then keep) the workers they needed to make those 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. 

And so, when the good times began to end this year and the sector entered what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has labeled “a software recession,” first via a series of carefully leaked corporate messages and then through retrospectively inevitable layoffs, it was hard to see the shift as corporate belt-tightening alone. It was, and is, a matter also of reclaiming power—an admission, of sorts, that they had ceded too much ground during the boom times of the 2010s and wanted to pull the pendulum back in their favor. Publicly, the bosses often said it was their fault, that they had over-optimistically overhired under the wrongheaded assumption that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed the world, pushing it forever further online. 

“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said as he laid off 11,000 people last month. What went unstated in that message and elsewhere was that he had begun a cultural reset months earlier, around when his lower-rung henchmen began to write things like, “If a direct report is coasting or a low performer, they are not who we need; they are failing this company.” 

Meta got rid of the free laundry, dry cleaning, and Lyfts and reduced the food budget and wellness benefits, and others followed a similar blueprint. Google, for example, decided to only allow “business critical” trips and reduced swag budgets. The decisions led workers to question CEO Sundar Pichai, asking why Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was “nickel-and-diming employees.”

“I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” he said. “We shouldn’t always equate fun with money.” But it wasn’t only about tightened budgets. Alphabet also implemented a new system that required 6 percent of its workforce receive a negative performance review, much more than the 2 percent it previously required. 

Alphabet’s move was so similar to those of other companies that it started to look more like a playbook than anything else.  Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, told its own managers that they had to put at least 10 percent of staff on performance-improvement plans early in the summer, a first step toward layoffs, which it undertook in late August. Salesforce reportedly asked managers “to update a ranking of their bottom 10% of employees.” Netflix, for its part, shifted its hiring focus to younger (read: cheaper) workers and limited the amount of corporate merchandise it would hand out.  

Such moves proved to be a shock to employees, many of whom were so young that they had only ever experienced the good times. But the crackdown sometimes felt like it extended beyond that necessitated by a close, analytical look at the balance sheet. In some places, it crept over into wholly cultural issues, like when the libertarian CEO of the crypto exchange Kraken, Jesse Powell, openly expressed his displeasure with the accepted use of preferred pronouns to staff—“If you can identify as a sex, can you identify as a race or ethnicity?” he asked employees—and the CEO of Mailchimp similarly suggested in an email to some of his employees that announcing one’s preferred pronouns is “completely unnecessary” and “does more harm than good.” (Relatedly, both those CEOs have since stepped down from their jobs.)

At least according to some markers, the bosses are not OK. Like everyone else, they’re less happy and more stressed and anxious, with less work-life balance than they previously had. They don’t quite know where the economy is headed and are often sitting in meetings where they are preparing their company for the possibility of a recession. 

That uncertainty would be crazy-making for anyone. But the macroeconomic situation doesn’t quite explain what’s going on. It cannot explain, for example, why bosses remain so hellbent on getting employees back in the office when, by and large, they don’t see it as critical that they themselves do the same, according to recent surveys. That sort of discrepancy can only be explained by a renewed desire for control, of a piece with “bossism,” a term rejiggered earlier this year for the modern era by writer John Ganz to refer to bosses’ belief that they know best, or, as Ganz put it, that “the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good.”

“In short, 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,” Ganz wrote in April. “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 most public face of bossism this year has become the former richest man in the world. Unlike his compatriots, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and destroyer of Twitter, has openly taken joy in resetting the pendulum, saying, after he instituted an in-office mandate for Tesla this year, that an unwillingness to come in implied “phoning it in.” When he took the reins of Twitter this year, he soon after instituted a similar policy at Twitter, stripped away perks, and said those who continued to work there would need to be “extremely hardcore” and require “working long hours at high intensity,” such that only “exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

While Musk’s dictum was even more outwardly hostile than those of his contemporaries, it was nevertheless inline with the changing mindset among those in power. Many people openly applauded his tactics, however “inherently chaotic” they might be. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to describe Musk as “the bravest, most creative person on the planet” and others said he had “inspired” CEOs to not be “afraid” to enact the cultural changes they desire.

“Don’t underestimate @elonmusk,” wrote Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff while promoting an issue of Time magazine (which he co-owns) with Musk on the cover. The same month, Salesforce laid off hundreds of employees and instituted a quota system for its sales team that employees saw as filled with "unrealistic goals and difficult accounts.”

The next month, Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer reported that Benioff “told Salesforce & Slack employees he’s concerned they’re not being productive enough.” The company has also axed “wellbeing” days, starting in 2024. Even the bosses’ bosses have started to reclaim their power, as venture capitalists, after years of fighting to get into deals to fund unprofitable startups, reversed course and started to demand a clear path to profitability and less reckless spending from the founders they entrust with their clients’ money. 

“The world has shifted,” one such VC told me earlier this year.

These shifts have generally been positioned in the press as not so much decisions at all, but as necessary reactions to a changing world, something as inevitable and without a first mover as the weather. Whether a given move is a wise business decision or a pretext for the naked exercise of power for its own sake, though, the year in bossing amounts to a reminder of one thing: Those in power dislike ceding it to those below them, and, when the moment strikes, will do everything they can to reclaim it.