Let's start calling our working conditions what they actually are: indentured servitude

The total break from "you're part of the work family" to "shut up and grind"

What is Strategic Pivotery?

Hi, I'm Meg. I've been consulting with startups as a fractional product marketing leader for many years, and started this 'stack to help burnt-out tech workers build $$$K+ consulting practices using the same GTM frameworks that scale unicorns.

I've scaled GTM and foundational messaging at Brex, Ashby, Jasper, Wand (among many) and have now built a thriving solo practice. I'm not a life coach helping people find balance; I'm a former startup operator teaching other operators how to monetize their hard-won expertise. I teach folks how to use the same tools they learned surviving startup life to build premium fractional businesses.

Want to launch your own fractional consultancy, get GTM help, or monetize your toxic startup experience? Book a strategy session or disrupt the status bro in as many colors as you can buy! :)

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How we normalize exclusive sweatshops

My main ambition for Strategic Pivotery is to identify and name the bullshit we have been wading through for decades. I love naming things, and my usage of tech worker indentured servitude to describe our modern day working conditions has hit a nerve and a (tragicomic) funny bone with my community.

I’m exploring this further because when I name something, when I say the thing no one else will say out loud, it becomes so much more powerful. Every time I’m speaking with a tech worker (fractional, full-time, in recovery from a layoff) and speak plainly about how degrading it feels to work for tech bros destroying our planet and insisting on a monoculture of profits over people, the conversation opens wide up. At the end of this post I’ve shared some of my favorite responses to my experience of being laid off during maternity leave.

It’s extremely worrying to me how draconian, how exploitative, how Dickensian our working culture has become. What do I mean by Dickensian conditions? If you haven’t read some of his seminal works (David Copperfield is my personal fave), here’s a quick overview:

Charles Dickens documented worker exploitation 170 years before Silicon Valley existed. His depictions of industrial dehumanization—children starving while producing wealth for others, workers reduced to interchangeable "Hands," and bootstrap mythology masking systematic abuse—map perfectly onto modern tech's toxic patterns. The same psychological manipulation that Dickens exposed in Victorian factories now operates through Slack notifications, productivity metrics, and Elon's "Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week."

Dickens showed how capitalism turned humans into disposable units while convincing them exploitation was opportunity. Workers died in factories while owners claimed they were providing "character-building experiences." Replace the factories with ping-pong tables and WeWorks and it’s the same architecture of exploitation disguised as benevolence.

Dickens's genius was showing that individual suffering results from systematic exploitation, not personal failing. His novels gave Victorian readers permission to see their trauma as political, not personal.

I’m no Dickens, but I want to give my readers, friends, and colleagues the same permission to view the trending “shut up and grind” hellscape as not only personally oppressive, but sustained by a crushing techno-capitalistic empire that punishes its workers for having basic human needs. The conditions Dickens exposed had already evolved from the indentured servitude system that ended barely 50 years before he was born (making it roughly 250 years before our time). We've somehow managed to resurrect both.

It would take me months, if not years, to articulate all the flavors of tech worker exploitation. Instead I’ll stick to how the marketing of tech jobs and startup culture is swinging from “make this company your home” to “don’t work here unless…”:

• Jobs —> Careers pages. Startups are dialing up their marketing spend on “employer branding,” abandoning the gauche term like “Jobs” to describe their life-changing “Career” opportunities

  • Example: Chatted with a former colleague from one of SV’s “unicorns” and they remarked that the execs are now marketing their company to applicants like it’s an exclusive sweatshop and are especially inspired by this “Don’t work at Anduril” video suggesting that real bros need to come into the office, avoid naps, and be anti-woke in order to change the world

  

  From a longtime friend, former colleague, and master wordsmith

• Jobs —> Your Entire Reason for Getting Up. A startup job these days replaces the distinct needs for friends, hobbies, and community-building

  • Example: Next Play (a purveyor of excellent fractional leads) featured a whole newsletter that unironically lauded a startup for their “ruthlessly intense” culture that was somehow balanced by also being “insanely generous and devoted to fun.” Some particularly unhinged quotes that come across as deeply tone-deaf for anyone who isn’t young, childless, or living in the Bay Area/NYC:

    • “We’re pursuing greatness, and greatness requires obsession.”

    • “We work from 8am to 8pm and play Smash from 9pm to 2am. We work for 10 hours, go to the gym (we give all of our employees a gym stipend), then work again until midnight. We work 6-day weeks at an office with an arcade, unlimited snacks, and cool people.”

    • “People that have strict boundaries between work and personal life, and are unwilling to compromise, are probably not a fit.”

    • “This is all because they are trying to build the perfect environment for high achievers. For people who really approach life with a growth mindset.”

    • “They also do a bunch of activities together. One popular one is they have a Saturday run club and also several intramural teams. They’re also in the process of installing a Sauna and cold plunge in their office.”

• Jobs —> Ego Factories. Every employee needs to be an entrepreneur bordering on genius now, which means we are so f*cked

  • Example: A founder of a startup I recently worked for published this manic job description manifesto requiring candidates to have an IQ higher than 140 (I think that might be illegal?!) and the ability to replace teams of 20 with their own mind (really channeling Dwight Schrute there)

There are millions more examples of broligarchs and their emulators normalizing work spaces as members-only sweatshops and encouraging obsessive (bordering on anti social) behavior by offering us the privilege of building someone else’s wealth while sacrificing our mental health, family time, and basic human dignity.

Sometimes I think “would I let my own kid work in this environment?” If the answer is no, that’s my guide for opting out of that environment. What’s scary is how tough it is to find a human place to work in tech today.

As a PMM, I marvel at the audacious but effective messaging; startups frame tech work as not transactional, but transcendent. It's not exploitation—it's opportunity. You're not being overworked—you're being challenged. You're not replaceable—you're elite…. until you’re not and lose your income, healthcare benefits, access to unlimited snacks, and - for many people - their entire identity, too.

It’s time to start punching holes into this messaging:

Your burnout isn't a character flaw. Your need for work-life balance isn't weakness. Your desire for job security and fair compensation isn't entitlement. We are trapped in working conditions where we aren’t just overworked - we're economically and psychologically trapped in a system designed to extract maximum value while offering minimal real security.

The great tech bait-and-switch

Here's what happened, and it's so predictable it's almost boring: tech companies spent years building their brands around being the cool, different, innovative alternative to stuffy corporate America. Free food! Open work plans! Unlimited vacation! (That no one actually takes because of the toxic workism culture, but hey, it's unlimited!)

They attracted millions of smart, motivated people who genuinely wanted to build cool stuff, meet other smart people, and maybe change the world a little. Then, once they had us all hooked on the kool-aid of “move fast and break things” and “you can retire and buy an island,” they switched to adopting the 996 model, creating their own Year of Efficiency, and remotely surveilling our every key stroke. The repositioning of these measures as necessary optimization efforts is such artful gaslighting it belongs in the PMM Messaging Hall of Fame.

Rachel Grey's story from the recent NYT piece “So Long to Tech’s Dream Job” perfectly captures this arc. She started at Google in 2007 when it was still a "utopia of perks" with steak and shrimp in the cafeterias and transparent company information sharing. By the time she quit after 18 years, the Christmas bonus had shrunk, transparency was gone, and she lamented that "the level of fear has gone way up."

Every tech CEO now parrots a new phrase “This is a business” and those four words cover every mass layoff, every mandate to return to the office, every slash in DEI programs. They spent years convincing us that work was akin to the close-knit chaos of a family and that our efforts generated our purpose and identity. But actually, we're just a business, so shut up and grind.

Don’t let them gaslight you on this

The fear economy = indentured servitude

What struck me most about the Times article and my own conversations with tech workers is the undercurrent of fear, not outrage. Folks are experiencing such deep fear that it’s preventing them from challenging these working conditions. Question why a working mom needs to spend two of her precious productive hours commuting, and you’re a woke libtard snowflake who needs to get aligned with the business.

This is the same fear dynamic playing out in democracies worldwide of course… speak up and become the target. After all, we just watched billionaire tech CEOs with infinite “fuck you money” prostrate themselves before Trump the second it served their interests. If people with that kind of wealth won't stand up for basic democratic principles, how can we expect workers clinging to healthcare and work visas to opt out of a system that’s clearly broken?

The fear is more diffuse than simple job insecurity (though that’s real), but existential fear about losing their worth, their status, their single family house and Tesla, the promised future of financial independence.

Liz Fong-Jones, a former Googler quoted in the NYT piece, nailed it: "we're all afraid enough to go along with training our own replacements." The AI threat is real, but the psychological manipulation is worse. Companies are using the specter of automation to make people accept increasingly terrible working conditions.

If you look closely at these promises and the state of our world, nothing adds up. In reality, we are operating under the ~250 year old system of indentured servitude. In case you don’t remember from high school history class, this was a labor system that peaked before the savage merger of the Victorian Era + Industrial Revolution. People traded years of their freedom for passage to America or to pay off debts. They couldn't leave their employer, had no control over their working conditions, and were essentially property until their contract expired.

And now we have tech worker indentured servitude: we sign away years of our lives for wealth via the cult of "opportunity," trapped by our need for healthcare and visas, our allegiance to vesting schedules, and 30-year mortgages we can't afford. Meanwhile companies extract maximum value, but our equity vaporizes during the next "strategic pivot" under the guise of "efficiency." The only difference from historical indenture? We're gaslit into thinking we're the lucky ones - and there's no guaranteed freedom at the end.

Do you know how indentured servitude went out of fashion? Not because people finally recognized it as inhumane, but because capitalists found more efficient ways to extract labor (slavery, sharecropping, company towns/scrip, convict leasing). The Victorian factories Dickens documented were the next evolution. And here we are again, 250 years later, with the same extraction model wearing a hoodie instead of a top hat.

Modern tech's exploitation model is fundamentally unsustainable. You can't continue to build great products (or a company culture) with people who are terrified, exhausted, and marginalized. The companies doubling down on this approach aren’t going to lose their best people to AI… but to alternative modes of working, organizing, and living that combat workism:

The opt-out alternatives

Here's what I want everyone reading this to understand: if we are in a position to do so, we need to challenge and opt out of these working conditions, and that can take unlimited forms. The fear economy extends far beyond our laptops; it's how power maintains itself everywhere. From the workplace to the ballot box, we're all too terrified to demand basic humanity.

And if tech workers - some of the most privileged, educated people in society - are too scared (or greedy?!) to push back, what hope do the rest of us have?

Victorian factory owners eventually faced regulation, labor organizing, and social reform movements. The NYT article mentions several people who left big tech for different reasons, some taking time off entirely, other starting their own companies (hopefully they learned some lessons?!), others are going fractional. They all stopped accepting the premise that their worth was determined by their willingness to be "all in" for companies that saw them as completely disposable.

I've been fractional for seven years now, and here's the strategic advantage most people miss: when your work is explicitly transactional, you can't be gaslit about it. No one's trying to convince me that debugging their go-to-market messaging is my purpose or that working weekends makes me a "culture carrier." I do good work, I get paid well for it, and then I log off and live my actual life.

If you're reading this and thinking "yes, but I need my job," I hear you. The market is brutal right now, and not everyone can just walk away (which makes us… indentured servants). But here are some small steps toward reclaiming your sanity:

Start setting boundaries that stick. Block off time on your calendar for school pickup, exercise, or literally anything that isn't work. Make it recurring. When someone tries to schedule over it, simply say "I'm not available then." No is a complete sentence!

Question the urgency culture. That "urgent" Slack message at 8 PM? Ask yourself: will anyone literally die if I respond to this tomorrow morning? (Spoiler: they won't, unless you work in emergency medicine, in which case you probably aren't reading a fractional work newsletter and also deserve a raise.)

Calculate the real cost of "growth opportunities." When your manager offers you that "stretch assignment" that's basically three people's jobs, do the math. What's your effective hourly rate when you're working 60+ hour weeks? Is the "learning experience" worth making less than minimum wage?

Build your exit strategy. Even if you're not ready to leave, start building the skills and network you'd need to go fractional, to open that bookstore you’ve always wanted to, to create a second, third, or eighth act. Share your expertise freely. Build relationships outside of your current “work family” because you may all get mass divorced soon enough.

Advocate, advocate, advocate! Support organizations and institutions agitating for workers’ rights, for creating unions for tech workers, for affordable health care measures.

Disrupt the status bro, but make it fashion!

The companies pushing these conditions are betting on your fear, your conditioning, and your belief that you don't have other options. But you do. Step one: stop accepting that this is just "how tech works" or that it's only your specific tech bro boss who's the problem.

You can’t make this shit up

It’s not just you — here are some of my readers’ responses to my story of being laid off while on maternity leave, which effectively launched my fractional career.

They are opting out, come join us!

My response: Toxic positivity is a very specific strain of Silicon Valley culture where tech workers feel like they have to congratulate everyone on everything being amazing all the time, expending so much energy into being champions of their company … when it’s all burning down in the background 😝

Kristel is going back to grad school in clinical psych. Girl, do we need her.

If I could like Vessela’s comment 100 times, I would.

Vibe-guruing is my new favorite phrase thanks to Jessi.

What’s so interesting about resets is they are cyclical - they need to happen more than we think…

It’s depressing how these stories are so common once we all start talking about this. Similar to miscarriages and menopause … no one talks about them, half the world is going through that shit.

And if you need a fire lit under your butt to get started, read:

Be braver than the billionaires

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🧢 Disrupt the status bro (but make it fashion)

My online friends said “put that on a t shirt,” but I started with hats.

☎️ Tell me!
What's the most Dickensian working condition you've encountered in tech? I'm collecting stories for potential future posts (and frankly, I just love a good "can you believe this actually happened" tale).