Hundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don’t look as bright as they did a decade ago.
As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they’ve slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.
“At no point in my career have I ever been this pessimistic about the future of careers in tech,” said a tech employee, who has worked at big tech companies for decades and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “And that’s really sad because I love tech.”
Its an excuse to fire everyone and rehire in india or offer the job in north america for half what they used to pay
That’s where we’ve gotten, yes. The bottom line matters more than quality. Not that Indians are terrible coders, it’s just naked offshoring.
Yeah, indian people are as great a folk as any other people, but capitalism loves paying them less :/
When it comes to tech layoffs, the AI argument is almost complete BS. If they really wanted to increase productivity, they’d be purchasing agent subscriptions, not laying ppl off.
The layoffs are happening because it is too easy to outsource tech work to exploited workers in foreign countries. In the vast majority of these cases AI should be read as “Actually Indian” (with utmost respect to my Hindu-speaking colleagues, I have learned so much from you).
They are just exploiting the lack of international labor protections, there is nothing new.
They don’t care. The payoff is putting tech workers in a bind and when they’ll have to re-hire them they will do so at lesser salaries.
The payoff is for the executives.
My advice to literally everyone, is cut your output to zero. If you are at one of the AI vision shit shacks, play the game. Absolute garbage slop output. Call in sick lots. Take your vacation. And check the fuck out. Push buttons with no thought or foresight. If someone asks you to show them how you do your job, mislead them at every turn, and don’t show them how to actually do it. Pretend to. I have one of these AI consultants coming in next week to “help me” by having me show them all my tasks so they can “automate” some of my mundane tasks. I’m going to smile and show them 5% of what I actually need to do 🖕🏼
The only bet I see here is on large-scale financial decline. If they expected to see any kind of major productivity boosts in the future, they’d be hiring everyone they can.
That will maybe happen, but it’ll be at suppressed wages. That’s what happens every economic downturn, if you are at the top, you benefit. Everyone else gets another layer of prosperity chopped off underneath them. You’ll have precarious employment for a couple years and then gladly accept a job you wouldn’t even look at right now.
This feels like a repeat of gutting copy desks. “Sure, the quality will suffer, and we’ve opened ourselves up to lawsuits, but if legal expenses are even a fraction less than salary savings, it’s a net win.”
Exactly. It’s only ever a stark cost benefit analysis with the ghoul class. Also, payroll is really surprisingly costly.
