Is the Tech Industry the Problem? Nope
February 4, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I read an essay enhanced with curse words on the Google stop list. Generally speaking, one hopes to have essays indexed by the Google. Why flip those bits and get down checked. I promise. This is related to my reaction to “The Tech Market is Fundamentally F-cked Up – AI is Just a Scapegoat.”
The main idea in the write up is that the “tech market” has some quite specific problems. I will highlight the main points and encourage you to read the original and quite spicy essay.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough. I wanted a happier image, but…
What is causing the problems the technology sector is allegedly encountering? The author of the cited article identifies these factors:
- Access to funding aka the “liquidity trap”
- The inventory problem where the inventory are employees
- Firing people to boost value
- The caste system; that is, the elite, the tolerable, and the rest
- Interview theater which I don’t understand but I am an 81 year old dinobaby and haven’t been interviewed in a half century. (I do have a wonderful anecdote which I will include after my signature at the end of this response to the cited article.)
- “The erosion of European safety.” This is another point I don’t understand. Dinobaby blindness in action I surmise.
What do these points mean in relation to the fundamentally impaired market for technology?
The author states:
As long as engineers are treated as speculative assets rather than human capital, the market will remain broken regardless of how good AI gets.
Then this concludes the author’s argument:
The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations. Until the industry relearns how to build with scarcity rather than excess, the “vicious cycle” of hire-and-dump will continue regardless of how good AI will get. So you aren’t being laid off because your performance was bad; you are being effectively “liquidated” like a bad stock trade that you sell with a loss.
The essay is about finding a job in the technology sector. The essay is not about technology per se, which is difficult to define without quite specific context in my opinion.
Observations:
- Technology remains a great unknown to many people. Therefore, when a company creates a technology, attracts customers who find value in the service, the people operating the company conclude they are geniuses. Geniuses are quirky creatures. High technology leaders have long manifested behaviors that many people assumed were part of making something useful, novel, or weird. As monopolies emerged, the quirkiness becomes normalized behavior for success. Others emulate the quirkiness. It is a short jump from Thomas Edison’s attitude to pretenders in electricity to Steve Jobs fruitarian diet and from that to Sundar Pichai’s red alert.
- The layoffs are a convenient way to dump expensive humans, free up cash, and use the resulting chaos to create a product or service that is new or a knock off with a twist. A current example is doomscrollers dumping TikTok for Upscrolled. What will Upscrollers encounter as the service grows, technology problems like those which the cited essay’s author writes about.
- The problem’s “causes” skirt around the border of a predictable behavior pattern: Make money, push decisions down to the tolerable employees, incentivize monetization methods. “New” in the sense of unique is not part of what earns an employee more money and a promotion at a Google- or Microsoft-type company in my opinion.
My view of the problems of the technology industry in general and AI in particular is that many of those engaged in big tech work have a tough time coming up with an innovation on the order of fire, the wheel, or Inconel 690. I have noticed that technology for decades has been engaged in incrementalism, me-too’ism, and funding special skunk works and hoping something useful comes out. The example I like to cite in my lectures is the idea that contact lenses can contain electronics. Seems new, but it’s more fun to talk about than wear, power, capture useful data like glucose information.
Any sector which allows unchecked power, wealth, and control produces problems. One would not confuse St Thomas Aquinas with Jay Gould. The “problem” is that internal ethical norms operate so that the “robber baron” benefits. The lack of meaningful regulatory controls means anything goes. In fact, this is a principle visible outside of technology at this time. The lack of control systems like unions in many sectors allows the “machine” to go rev to the max.
In my opinion, remediating these personal, social, and political factors will be difficult if not impossible quickly. I understand the frustration of the author of the cited article. The reality is that many people perceive themselves to be in the heady upper reaches of the life hierarchy. Coming to grips with the fact that an individual may be expendable is difficult. The mind does not want to accept one’s true place in the 21st century great chain of being. Suck it up.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2026
PS: My Interview Anecdote
I was working at a blue chip consulting firm. I was asked at a technical conference if I would like to talk about a project that seemed to match my interests. I said, “Sure.” I was bouncing around from major city to major city, and I was in Manhattan enough that squeezing in an extra mid week meeting was no problem. I showed up at the midtown office. This was a company that was in the consulting and technical services business. Somehow a company with which I was semi familiar had hired this outfit to do a large scale project in Silicon Valley. I met a couple of senior executives who were interested in hearing, “Yes, I can handle that type of engagement.” The interview after lunch was the one with the company psychologist. The idea was that this person’s evaluation was critical to this consulting firm’s hiring process. Remember, please, that I had worked for years at nuclear engineering consulting firm and was currently engaged as a special assistant to the president of a blue chip consulting firm. I was curious, so I was looking forward to this interview. Hopefully, the questions would be more penetrating than, “Can you run this project?”
I was taken to a bland office with some chairs and a card table.
I was looking out the window when a person maybe 45 or 50 years of age bustled in. He had a neutral expression and asked me to sit down in one of the living room type chairs near the window. He asked me questions on a clip board. I answered them and he seemed satisfied. He then said, “Would you be willing to take my block text?” I said, “Sure.” This psychologist then opened a cabinet and brought out a small box and proceeded to put squares on the card table. A cube has six sides and each side was red or white. Some cubes had sides with half red and half white either forming triangles or horizontal red and white faces.
I watched as he mixed up the cubes, probably a dozen or so. He then said, “Look at this picture. Arrange the cubes on the table to match the picture.” I moved the cubes and duplicated the image. He said, “Very good. Very fast.” Okay, the trick is to look at the provided diagram and then work one row at a time, concentrating on blocks from left to right. Finish a row. Do the next. Easy and fast.
He said, “Would you like to try a more complicated picture?” I said, “Sure.”
He went to the cabinet and retrieved a second box of cubes. He dumped them on the table. This time there were maybe 36 or 49 cubes. He showed me a picture considerably more complicated than the first image. I put the cubes on the table and duplicated the image he showed me.
He said, “That was fast.”
“I want you to duplicate a more complex image?” he said, becoming tense and a bit nasty. I said, “Okay, but I thought this was an interview and, if you don’t mind my saying, I am playing with blocks.”
He looked at me and said, “Smart guy, huh?” He went to the cabinet. He retrieved a very large box of red and white cubes. He dumped them on the card table. Its surface was essentially 80 percent covered by red and white cubes, some with triangles and some with horizontal red and white stripes. There must have been more than 150 blocks on the table. The shrink type guy was visibly flustered at my speed and seeming indifference to putting blocks in order. What kind of consulting firm was this? Obviously one who hired a second tier psychologist I believe.
He showed me a complicated abstract pattern like something Piet Mondrian might have created when in the grip of a frightening nightmare or after a night at the bar. He snapped, “Match the image.” I asked him if he would put the diagram on the table because I could not remember the image exactly. He said, “Okay.” I started putting blocks on the table. I finished several rows, picked up the diagram, and moved to another side of the table to start filling in the rows. He said, “You can’t move the diagram.” I just stayed where I was an rotated the card table leaving the diagram in its place.
He went crazy. He said, “You are breaking the rules.”
I said, “If one has to solve a problem, it seems to me that some ingenuity is required.” I completed the diagram. He was sitting in a chair, perspiring.
I asked, “Is the interview over?”
He said, “You are a problem.”
I said, “I understand. Please, don’t contact me. Good luck with your project.”
That was my last job interview. In retrospect, I feel sorry for the psychologist. I think he was crazy. He wanted watch a job candidate fail. I just moved the table. I never interacted with anyone from that firm again. 
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