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.”
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 🖕🏼