Another obvious cause I don’t see anyone mentioning: tech simply created a lot less value in the last decade than in any previous decade. Pretty much every one of the big hyped up technologies that was going to be the future of everything turned out to be a bust: IoT, drones, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and on and on. Even the ones that got some traction like ride sharing really were just castles of smoke floated on giant clouds of dumb middle eastern and Asian venture capital money looking for a greater fool. Most of the changes in web development tech have made software slower and more bureaucratic to make in order to support large FAANG-style software orgs.

There was absolutely nothing remotely on the scale of the smartphone, social media, the web, the personal computer, etc from previous decades in terms of actually creating real value for users.

Today’s tech industry deserves to shrink.