Turns Out They Didn’t Really Want You To Bring Your Whole Self To Work

from the incentives-are-everything dept

For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about “values” and “belonging” and “bringing your whole self to work.” If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats.

Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the tech industry’s sudden, conspicuous rightward lurch. His argument is refreshingly blunt: this isn’t about ideology. It never was. It’s about leverage.

There are many theories about Silicon Valley’s swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump’s re-election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.

Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.

This tracks with everything we’ve observed about how these companies actually operate. The notion that tech CEOs underwent some kind of ideological awakening—either leftward in 2020 or rightward in 2024—always gave them way too much credit for having coherent beliefs about anything other than what would help them with Wall Street in the long run.

What actually happened? This is where my undergrad degree in labor relations actually comes in handy: because, as Aaron notes: labor economics happened. When you’re in a vicious war for talent and engineers have infinite options, you do whatever it takes to keep them happy. And if that means mental health stipends and letting employees “bring their whole selves to work,” then that’s what you do. Not because you believe in it. Because replacing a top engineer costs a fortune.

Big tech companies and growing start-ups are in constant, vicious competition with one another to hire and retain the best employees, especially in product and engineering roles. When these companies are in hypergrowth mode, and particularly when the job market is tight, hiring top talent can be nothing short of a matter of survival. And they are fishing in a largely progressive pond: Political donation data shows tech employees are predominantly Democratic-leaning.

The late 2010s and early 2020s were a particularly intense period in the industry’s war for talent. Hiring exploded. Meta nearly doubled to 86,000 employees in 2022 from approximately 45,000 three years earlier. Amazon added over 400,000 employees in 2020 alone. As Silicon Valley recruiting teams relentlessly poached one another’s people, tech labor had infinite choices and all the leverage.

So what did companies do when a generous compensation package was no longer enough to win over candidates? They instead sold a sense of belonging. Amid fierce competition, many companies realized that encouraging workers to bring their perspectives and passions to the office could increase their loyalty and their willingness to work hard. That, in turn, served the real financial objective: higher job acceptance rates, lower employee attrition and faster growth.

So when tech companies said all those nice things about diversity and belonging and employee voice, it was merely a calculated business decision to attract and retain workers in a brutally competitive labor market. The “whole self” culture wasn’t a political movement. It was, as Zamost puts it, “a labor-market artifact where talent war conditions made employee empowerment economically rational.”

And then the market shifted.

Growth slowed. Interest rates rose. Suddenly companies didn’t need to compete for labor at any cost. And the moment that leverage flipped back to management, all those “values” evaporated faster than you can say “return to office mandate.”

It’s worth asking whether many tech companies’ professed values were ever real. We’ve seen leaders who built their reputations on defying authority become foot soldiers for the administration. The same elasticity informs their rollback of the culture they once championed.

Four years ago, Marc Benioff, the Salesforce boss, said, “Office mandates are never going to work.” He now works from home in Hawaii much of the time while most of his employees are required to be in-office three to five days a week. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would donate $10 million to groups working on racial justice. Last year he rolled back Meta’s D.E.I. programs. Did his values change? Or did the power dynamics?

The answer, obviously, is the power dynamics. And this isn’t a particularly controversial thing to say. The thing that gets lost in all the discourse about tech’s “MAGA turn” is how utterly banal the explanation actually is. It’s got nothing to do with ideology. These are business actors responding to incentives. When employees had leverage, executives catered to them. When executives got leverage back, they stopped.

Zamost makes an important point that may get buried by the rest of the article though: the response to all this from tech workers hasn’t been outrage. It’s been detachment. And that’s going to boomerang back on these tech leaders.

This about-face will prove counterproductive over the long term. In my conversations with tech employees, the result hasn’t been anger at hypocrisy so much as detachment — a loss of tribal loyalty (fewer T-shirts emblazoned with tech company logos), and a clearer understanding of the limits of corporate idealism.

This is the part that should worry these executives. They’ve revealed the game. They’ve shown that all the talk about values and culture and belonging was contingent on market conditions. And employees noticed. They’re not mad—they’re just not going to forget.

And, yes, the cynical among you will say “come on, no one ever believed these companies were serious” and perhaps that’s true. But there was a time when Silicon Valley employees really liked where they were working and really felt like, as a team, they were achieving stuff.

That’s gone.

Labor markets are cyclical. At some point, these companies will need to compete for talent again. And when they do, they’re going to discover that the employees they’re trying to recruit remember what happened. They remember that the “values” disappeared the moment they became inconvenient. They remember which executives lined up behind Trump. They remember the layoffs and the return-to-office mandates and the sudden silence when it actually mattered.

The recent reassertion of managerial prerogative was only possible in an economic environment where top executives could flex their muscles like a boss. It won’t last forever. When labor is scarce again, many of these companies will rediscover the values they abandoned. The question is whether employees will forget just as quickly.

The optimistic read is that employees won’t forget. That this period will serve as a permanent reminder that corporate values are, at best, marketing. That the next generation of tech workers will enter these companies with clear eyes about what the relationship actually is: transactional.

The pessimistic read is that Zamost is right to pose it as a question. Because companies have been pulling this bait-and-switch for decades, and workers keep falling for it. Maybe the cycle just repeats.

Either way, the lesson isn’t really about politics. It’s about understanding what these companies actually are. They’re not movements. They’re not communities. They’re not families. They’re businesses that will say whatever they need to say to achieve their business objectives. And right now, the (somewhat short-sighted) business objective is staying in the good graces of an administration that has made clear it rewards loyalty and punishes dissent.

So no, they didn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The “whole self” thing was just the price of admission in a seller’s market. Now that it’s a buyer’s market, they’d prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code.

The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they’re building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.

Filed Under: hiring, labor economics, politics, retention, silicon valley, values