While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”

Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.