Comment by echelon

> they can afford to simply buy your software dependencies, or to offer one of your employees some retirement money in exchange for making a "mistake".

Orthogonal, but in similar spirits: the FAANG part of big tech paying less, doing massive layoffs, and putting enormous pressure on their remaining engineers might have this effect too in a less directly malicious way.

Big tech does layoffs, asks engineers to do "more". This creates a lot of mess, tech debt, difficult to maintain or SRE services. Difficult to migrate and undo, difficult to be nimble.

These same engineers can then leave for startups or more nimble pastures and eat the cake of the large enterprise struggling to KTLO or steer the ship of the given product area.