How to Become a Big Tech Exile
SMRTR summary
A veteran software engineer is calling himself an exile from Big Tech, and he's not mincing words.
After decades in the industry, he argues that tech follows a predictable cycle: companies embrace openness and decentralization to gain power, then abandon those values once they've locked everyone in. Think IBM mainframes, then Windows, now cloud computing and AI.
His critique of AI is pointed. He calls it "probabilistic computing" dressed up as intelligence, built on what he describes as stolen data, and designed to get people to outsource their thinking to tech oligarchs. When a colleague responds to a question with "Have you tried asking Co-Pilot?", he says, that's not innovation. That's intellectual surrender.
His reward for saying so out loud? Unemployability. Employers now want leetcode puzzles and AI fluency, not fundamentals.
He closes with a quip that, unlike some of his earlier ones, has only grown sharper with time: "If you don't understand a thing, you can't control a thing."
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Daily.dev.
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