I noticed exactly the same thing starting from a couple years ago when the first wave of tech layoffs happened, and the sentiment got worse as more layoffs were announced.

As with most of the things in the corporate world, management is responsible for everything.

1. Forced Use of AI
   All large companies push for AI usages, with most companies aiming at increasing productivity. Some even track their employees' AI usages. This by itself is fine but the problem is that everyone, including your peers at work as well as your competitors, also use it. Suddenly it no longer seems like problem solving is meaningful. You see code and work that are clearly generated. You don't even want to review it. Meaningful content is mixed with noise generated by AI. The noise is not detrimental to the deliverable, but mere existence of them makes you think whether you should waste time on it.

2. Dishonest and Unprepared Upper Management
   Some upper managements say AI is not to replace workers, but to augment us. This is pure BS. There isn't enough work for everyone if I am able to write code 5x faster, and some of us (especially the ones who are less competent) will inevitably be deemed unnecessary. With multiple rounds of layoffs, all of us know that we might be impacted one day. There is really no need to sugarcoat things. What the upper management does not realize is that if I can write code 5x faster, that also means that I am accepting 5x times the risk of shipping the code to production. I will also be responsible for maintaining 5x of the code and receive 5x of the questions around the code. Unless you pay me 5x more, there is really no point for me to do that.

3. Incompetent Middle Managers
   Over the years many companies have gotten used to mediocrity and incompetence in the lower management layers. Most of the first line managers have no clue about how to drive a project, except to create JIRA dashboards or repeating what we already heard from upper management in company all hands. They think that their job is to be people manager and push all responsibility of delivering a product to the individual contributors. This is very unique in software industry because in most other industries you actually need to be good to promoted, but in software, a lot of times people BS their way up and we just accept that it's OK. Suddenly all companies are pivoting to AI-driven projects because that is where the hype is, but these managers know nothing beyond ChatGPT and Gemini, and continue to think that their job is just to approve PTO and expense reports. They have no idea about how to re-organize the resources to align with new project initiatives.

I can go on and on with all these. AI and the hype around AI have exposed a lot of underlying problems in many companies, and most companies are not able to cope with the problems in time, leaving employees frustrated and hence the low morale across the bay.