If you are white collar then it’s going to “disrupt” your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn’t at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI “optimization” has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn’t a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It’s a wasteland.
I’ve been told to “go back to school.” I’ll be 41 soon. I’m still paying off my computer science degree. It’s worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don’t care. They’ll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It’ll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
I think a lot of what we’re seeing is a combination of things coming together at once.
Firstly tech way overhired during covid. Between the money printer giving free cash to the banks, people staying home with little else to do but sit on the internet all day, and nil interest rates CEOs felt like fuckin’ geniuses with a capital J. Now people have largely gone back to their old habits and are spending less time and money on internet things.
Secondly interest rates have gone up. Tech tends to rely on losing money for a long time and using equity and debt to keep the company alive until they can go from red to black (if they can). That money becoming more expensive makes it harder for them to be unprofitable. Staffing is expensive, probably 50% or more of their overall costs. It’s the most obvious place to cut back.
Finally AI. I am not convinced it is LLMs that are replacing jobs. I believe it is the LLM hype and subsequent reallocation of resources that is costing jobs. If I have a team of people working on some thing that makes a little bit of money but it’s nothing to write home about and that team costs me $10 million a year but what omagad i need AI now or we’re going out of business! i might reallocate that $10 million by firing that team and hiring some expert I found on LinkedIn who worked for a cyrpto company 6 months ago.
All those things taken together I’m actually not that doomer about the situation. Yes the tech industry sucks right now but it’s not going to stay like this forever. What will really kill us all is climate change and AI is certainly not helping with that.