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.”
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.