December 2025
https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/the-great-tech-industry-backlash-of-2026-is-coming/91277096
The Signal
Joe Procopio’s piece in Inc. Magazine tells the story of “Bob” — a 15-year tech CTO who just resigned without another job lined up.
Not because he failed. Because he succeeded at the wrong game.
Bob’s company is profitable. Growth is slow but stable. Yet the board demanded 30% headcount cuts anyway. Why? Better numbers for investors. Not strategy. Theatre.
Bob isn’t leaving tech. He’s leaving the tech industry.
There’s a difference.
The Pattern
Bob’s story isn’t unique. It’s a symptom of what Procopio calls “enshittification” — the systematic trading of innovation, creative freedom, and long-term vision for quantifiable productivity, OKR checklists, and quarterly profits at any cost.
The Great Tech Revolution of 2025 fizzled because techies don’t make good revolutionaries. They make good workarounds.
Side hustles. AI exploitation. Quiet quitting. Coffee badging.
None of it worked long-term.
What’s left? An army of disillusioned executives who’ve figured out that building really good solutions for a single type of customer beats building one solution for every customer on the planet.
Why This Matters for S/4HANA Transformations
Here’s what Bob’s board is about to do:
- Cut 30% of the people who understand the business
- Commit to a multi-million pound S/4HANA transformation
- Hire a Big Four consultancy to deliver “digital transformation”
- Discover — 18 months and £5M later — that nobody mapped the complexity they just fired
This is the pattern. Cuts first. Strategy later. Disaster guaranteed.
The surviving executives know this. They’ve watched it happen. They’re exhausted by it.
They don’t need another PowerPoint promising seamless migration.
They need proof that someone understands where it breaks before they sign.
The Timing
Procopio predicts 2026 as the year disillusioned executives act. Not react. Act.
Q1 budgets are being finalised now. December 16–31 is when decisions crystallise.
The executives making those decisions have spent 2025 watching transformation theatre. They’ve seen the layoffs. They’ve inherited the technical debt. They’ve sat through the vendor demos.
What they haven’t seen: someone willing to show them the problems before taking their money.
The Opportunity
“What if instead of building one solution for every customer, you build really good solutions for a single type?”
That’s the article’s conclusion. It’s also the entire premise of specialist consulting versus Big Four generalism.
The Bobs of the world aren’t anti-transformation. They’re anti-failure-by-design.
They want:
- Evidence over empathy
- Prototypes over PowerPoints
- Lessons learnt before the fact, not after
The 2026 backlash isn’t against technology.
It’s against pretending that spreadsheet optics equal strategic readiness.
Source
The Great Tech Industry Backlash of 2026 Is Coming — Joe Procopio, Inc. Magazine, December 2025
This analysis is part of the No Tie Generation perspective on S/4HANA transformation readiness.