When Travis Kalanick resigned as C.E.O. of Uber last year, the company’s biggest worry wasn’t its valuation, or the corporate intrigues roiling the boardroom, or even the threat of multiple lawsuits.  The biggest worry, two executives told me at the time, was that Uber wouldn’t be able to attract exceptionally talented engineers—the coin of the realm in Silicon Valley. “ The company is a total mess, and no one wants to work for us,” one of the executives said during the handover from Kalanick to Dara Khosrowshahi. “ If we can’t hire any good engineers, we’re fucked.” 

In Silicon Valley, the logic goes, founders are the studio and network chiefs; the tech C.E.O.s are the producers; and the engineers are, at least in this equation, the stars.  As a result, the grievances of top engineers are not an idle concern.  They not only resonate up to the very top of the companies they work for, but they are also a harbinger of their posterity.  One highly sought-after Silicon Valley engineer with a long history of management experience recently recounted to me how they turned down a significant job offer at Facebook by an executive recruiter for the social network.  Just two years ago, this engineer would have been ecstatic at the chance to work for the most important social-media platform on the planet, one of the most valuable companies on Earth.  But now, amid scandals over fake news, Cambridge Analytica, hate speech, and censorship, working for Facebook is stigmatic for top engineering talent.  This engineer told me they weren’t convinced that C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg truly cared about fixing the problems that plague Facebook, and have become toxic for our public discourse and electoral politics.  As soon as Facebook’s stock resumed its normal ascent, this person said, the company would likely become complacent again—more concerned about its valuation than its enduring impact on the way we live now. 

This engineer’s lament is a microcosm of a larger trend sweeping across the Peninsula.  In Silicon Valley’s halcyon days, employees didn’t have any qualms about the ethics of the companies they were joining since many honestly believed that they were going to advance a corporation that was going to—yes—change the world.  The people who helped transform the Bay Area into the greatest wealth-generation machine in human history—and themselves into millionaires and billionaires in the process—are now turning their backs on the likes of hegemonic corporations who, in their own depictions, moved fast and broke things without an end in sight.  You don’t need a time machine to remember how excited engineers once were to work for these companies.  The competition for talent was always intense: tech giants have famously had to offer everything from millions in stock to free food, and unlimited vacation.  Some offered to freeze top talents’ eggs so that they could work vociferously through their most reproductive years.  There are stories of lore about Google paying engineers as much as $100 million. 

Since 2016, however, the national mood has changed.  The workers who populate the tech industry has evolved along with it.  I know engineers, designers, executives and vice presidents, public-relations employees, and even a couple of C.E.O.s who have since given up on the tech companies they once worked for.  Some have gone to smaller, more thoughtful start-ups, but many have abandoned the industry entirely, because they have come to terms with the increasingly unassailable narrative: something is fundamentally wrong with the companies that rule the world. 

The reasons for cynicism are legion.  The forces responsible for all that incredible wealth have also elevated a small circle of largely unaccountable technocrats with a skewed notion of the public good.  You don’t need to be a billionaire with a 10,000-foot view, like Elon Musk, to worry about how quickly technology has spread across the globe—or how easily it can be wielded for mischief.  Take a look at the complete lack of foresight regarding developments in artificial intelligence.  Or how a gang of twentysomething founders was able to create a mass-surveillance society because it was easier to get better ads by tracking people down to their emotional DNA.  Then there is the lack of humility regarding driverless cars that will one day save lives, but can also be turned into weapons in the meantime; or the ways in which mass automation will soon put millions out of work and create a permanent underclass; or how the same mass-media platforms that we all use to share photos of our pets and cappuccinos were manipulated by foreign powers and domestic doofuses to give us Donald Trump and Alex Jones.  It’s no wonder engineers don’t want to be a part of it all.