5 Ways to Escape Tech Job Enshittification in 2025
Feeling the squeeze of tech job enshittification? Discover 5 actionable strategies to reclaim your career autonomy, find meaningful work, and escape the corporate grind in 2025.
Alex Donovan
Former FAANG engineer turned tech career strategist, helping professionals navigate the new tech landscape.
Remember the golden era of tech jobs? Not too long ago, working for a major tech company felt like winning the career lottery. Catered lunches, lavish perks, sky-high compensation, and a palpable sense of working on the future were the norm. It was a playground for the ambitious, a place where innovation was the primary currency. But lately, the vibe has shifted. The playground feels more like a factory, and the currency has changed.
Layoffs are rampant, perks are disappearing, and the pressure to do more with less has become the new mantra. That sense of psychological safety and creative freedom is being replaced by performance improvement plans, return-to-office mandates, and a general feeling of being a cog in a machine optimized for shareholder value above all else. This phenomenon has a name, coined by Cory Doctorow: enshittification. It’s the process where platforms decay as they prioritize profits over users. Today, we’re seeing its corporate cousin: the enshittification of the tech job itself.
But you are not powerless. The landscape may be changing, but your ability to navigate it is your greatest asset. It’s time to think strategically, not just about your next role, but about the very nature of your career. Here are five concrete ways to escape the grind and build a more resilient, fulfilling tech career in 2025 and beyond.
1. The “Boring” Tech Pivot: Find Stability in Unsexy Industries
The siren song of FAANG and hyper-growth startups is fading. While they once offered the most exciting opportunities, they are also the most susceptible to market whims and investor pressure. The antidote? Pivot to “boring” tech.
Why It Works
Industries like insurance, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and government have massive, complex problems that technology is just beginning to solve in earnest. These sectors offer something increasingly rare in consumer tech: stability. They aren’t chasing quarterly user growth; they’re building foundational systems that need to be reliable for decades. The work is often mission-critical, the pay is competitive (especially when you factor in work-life balance), and the corporate culture is less prone to sudden, dramatic shifts.
How to Do It
- Identify a Sector: What interests you outside of pure tech? Healthcare, sustainable energy, finance?
- Learn the Domain: You’re not just a coder; you’re a problem solver. Understanding the specific challenges and regulations of an industry makes you infinitely more valuable than someone who just knows a framework.
- Target Established Companies: Look for non-tech companies with growing internal tech departments or established B2B tech firms serving these industries. They value longevity and deep expertise.
2. Mastering the Niche: Become an Indispensable Expert
In an era of commoditization, the generalist is the first to become replaceable. The enshittified company seeks to replace a $200k senior engineer with two $80k junior engineers. Your defense is to cultivate skills that are so specific and in-demand that you can’t be easily swapped out.
Why It Works
Deep expertise in a narrow field—like WASM performance tuning, specific cloud security compliance (e.g., FedRAMP), large-scale database migration, or applied AI in medical imaging—makes you a linchpin. You become the go-to person for a critical business function. This leverage translates into job security, higher compensation, and more autonomy. When the company knows that losing you would set a project back 18 months, they are far less likely to subject you to the worst aspects of the corporate squeeze.
How to Do It
- Look for Gaps: What complex problems does your current team or company consistently struggle with? What emerging tech lacks a deep pool of experts?
- Go Deep: Don’t just learn the basics. Aim to become one of the top 10% in your chosen niche. This means reading academic papers, contributing to open-source projects, and taking on the hardest problems.
- Build a Public Profile: Write blog posts, speak at meetups, or answer questions on Stack Overflow. A public reputation as an expert brings opportunities to you.
3. The Indie Hacker Route: Build Your Own Escape Hatch
If you’re tired of playing someone else’s game, why not create your own? The indie hacker or solopreneur path involves building and running your own small-scale software business, content platform, or consultancy. It’s the ultimate escape from corporate oversight, but it comes with its own set of challenges.
Why It Works
This path offers complete autonomy. You decide what to build, who to sell to, and when to work. You escape re-orgs, pointless meetings, and performance reviews. The direct link between your effort and your reward is incredibly motivating. Even if it remains a side project, a profitable micro-SaaS or newsletter provides a “freedom fund” that gives you immense leverage in your day job.
| Aspect | Corporate Tech Job | Indie Hacker / Solopreneur |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy | Low to Medium (Dependent on role/company) | Total |
| Risk | Medium (Layoffs, project cancellations) | Very High (No guaranteed income) |
| Reward | Capped (Salary + bonus/stock) | Uncapped (Directly tied to success) |
| Skills Used | Primarily technical + soft skills | Technical, Marketing, Sales, Support, Finance |
How to Do It
- Start Small: Don't try to build the next Facebook. Solve a tiny, painful problem for a niche audience.
- Build in Public: Share your journey on social media or a blog. This builds an audience and a support network before you even launch.
- Focus on Distribution: The best product with no marketing will fail. Learn about SEO, content marketing, and community building from day one.
4. Joining the Zebra Herd: Prioritize Purpose Over Hyper-Growth
The tech world has long been obsessed with “unicorns”—startups valued at over $1 billion, often at the cost of profitability and sustainability. The alternative is the “zebra.” Zebra companies are profitable, sustainable, and aim to improve society. They prioritize mutualism and collaboration over a winner-take-all mentality.
Why It Works
Zebra companies are, by their very nature, resistant to enshittification. Their business model is not based on exploiting users or employees for the sake of hyper-growth. They often have healthier cultures, better work-life balance, and a clear, motivating mission. Working for a zebra means your labor contributes to a cause you believe in, not just to making a line on a graph go up and to the right for a few venture capitalists.
How to Do It
- Look for B-Corps: Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.
- Follow the Mission: Find organizations working on problems you care about, whether it’s climate change, education, or open-source software.
- Vet Their Funding: Are they bootstrapped, or do they have investors who share their long-term vision? The source of their money often dictates their behavior.
5. Strategic “Coasting” and Upskilling
This final strategy is a pragmatic one. Sometimes, the best move is to stay put, but change your mindset. Instead of buying into the hustle culture and striving for the next promotion within a decaying system, you can choose to “quietly quit” the rat race—not your job. This is strategic coasting.
Why It Works
You meet expectations at your 9-to-5 job, but you stop going “above and beyond” for diminishing returns. You reclaim your evenings and weekends. This frees up your most valuable resource: your mental and creative energy. You then reinvest that energy into things that build your personal enterprise: learning a new technology for a future pivot, building a side project (see Way #3), or simply recharging to avoid burnout. It’s a defensive strategy that allows you to build strength while still collecting a paycheck.
How to Do It
- Define “Good Enough”: Understand what is required to be seen as a solid, reliable contributor, and do just that. No more, no less.
- Set Firm Boundaries: Log off at 5 PM. Don’t check email on weekends. Mute Slack notifications after hours. Protect your time and energy ruthlessly.
- Create a Learning Plan: Be intentional with your newfound free time. Set a goal, whether it’s a certification in a niche skill, building a small app from scratch, or learning a new language.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Your Agency
The enshittification of tech jobs is a systemic issue, but your response can be personal and powerful.
The tech industry is undergoing a painful but necessary correction. The era of infinite growth and endless perks is over. But this doesn’t mean the end of good careers in tech. It means the nature of a “good career” is changing.
Whether you pivot to a more stable industry, become an indispensable niche expert, build your own business, join a mission-driven company, or strategically coast while you upskill, the power lies in your choice. The key is to stop playing a game that is no longer designed for you to win and start designing a game of your own. Your career is too important to be a casualty of someone else's bottom line.