AI's Impact on Tech Jobs: From Six-Figure Salaries to Precarious Living

Laid Off Metaverse Engineer Says He Is DoorDashing and Living in a Trailer

A software engineer has revealed that, while he once made six figures at a metaverse company, his recent layoff means he's been thrust into a life of relative precarity, which involves DoorDashing, selling stuff on eBay, and living in a trailer. Shawn K's layoff some twelve months ago (his legal name is "K") has landed him in a situation that, a few years ago, would've seemed relatively unheard of for a seasoned software engineer. However, in the age of AI, Shawn worries that his situation may become more normative, as tech companies race to replace their workers with algorithms. In an email to Gizmodo, Shawn provided more details about his layoff, which appears to have been at a company called Virbela, which is owned by eXp Realty. Virbela says it offers metaverse solutions for remote work through the creation of "engaging virtual spaces that replicate real-world dynamics and social interactions." Shawn said that, in the months prior to his termination, his work at the company became increasingly AI-based. "Different orgs move at different rates with technology, and within our company, we were very forward-thinking and early-adopting with AI," he said. "In the first year that ChatGPT was released, the average developer on the team was seeing productivity increase of 3x-10x with ai assistance," he said, adding that it "reached a point where it became inevitably clear that it was no longer going to be 'business as usual'." "On my team, we made a hard pivot to have nearly every developer on the team focus on integrating AI features into the existing software product," Shawn revealed. He added that, not long afterward, during a "frenzied peak" of AI enthusiasm, the company "let go a portion of the developers across all the teams in the company, including on my team." He added: "I couldn't really estimate on the percentage of the dev staff laid off, but it was all around the same time across multiple teams." It's unclear whether the specific catalyst for Shawn's termination was AI or not. Gizmodo reached out to Virbela for more information. That said, if that's the case, it wouldn't be unheard of. Over the past two years, tech companies have gone through historic rounds of layoffs, as many of those firms have pivoted towards automation. Multiple reports show that software workers at companies like Panasonic and Microsoft are losing their jobs, as companies seek tools that can automate code-writing. Shawn has been writing about his unfortunate "displacement" by automation on his personal Substack, ShawnfromPortland, which details his struggles since getting laid off. He says that he makes less than $200 a day through food deliveries and that he has also resorted to selling random personal items on eBay. Shawn's situation is complicated, as he also owns multiple properties. He says, however, that owning property doesn't necessarily make him wealthy. His mother, who is disabled, lives on one of the properties and has nowhere else to go. The other properties, which were bought when things were going well for Shawn, pose financial difficulties were he to attempt to sell them right now, he says. He currently lives in a small trailer on one of the properties in upstate New York. "I’m now in the trailer because something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years," Shawn writes. "Something that caused myself and a large portion of the talented dev teams [to be] let go at a time when our company and parent corp were doing great." That "something" would appear to be what Shawn has referred to as the "great displacement," an economy that is trending further and further towards automation and away from human labor. AI also seems to be screwing Shawn when it comes to the job hunt, as he suspects his resume is being vetted by algorithms that sift for AI-related buzzwords. "In this last year, I interviewed with close to 10 companies, getting as far as a 4th round interview twice and several second and third rounds, but not getting any offers," the out-of-work engineer says. "I suspect my resume is filtered out of consideration by some half-baked AI 'candidate finder service' because my resume doesn’t mention enough hyper-specific bleeding-edge AI terms." Shawn has also been forced to study AI so as to be more competitive in the current software market. "I have spent 2 to 5 hours per day in the last year consuming AI news, papers, and podcasts, and constantly thinking and reflecting on the latest AI trends," Shawn reveals. "I have built about 10 small 100% AI-generated codebases in the last year as personal learning exercises, and any time there is free access to any new AI tool, I go out of my way to try it out." Still, Shawn seems to be firing applications off into the abyss, and says that he's nearing his 900th application, with no signs of a job offer. "This article isn’t for sympathy or to make me feel better by making excuses," he writes. "I’m sharing my real-life story of how I went from a highly valued technologist to basically nothing in the course of a year or two with the rise of AI." In an email, Shawn also shared that the job hunt in the software industry has never felt so grim. He noted that he's "been in the game for a long time, and the vibes have never been the way they are now." Ominously, he added: "I don’t think my story is unique, I think I am at the early side of the bell curve of the coming social and economic disaster tidal wave that is already underway and began with knowledge workers and creatives. It’s coming for basically everyone in due time."

A Software Engineer Who Was Replaced by AI Was Forced to Live in a Trailer After Getting Rejected from 800 Jobs

Though even the best AI models struggle to solve the majority of coding problems, that didn't stop one man's penny-pinching employers from replacing him with the tech anyway. Shawn Kay was a software engineer of 20 years who went from earning $150,000 in upstate New York to living out of a trailer, after he says his former boss outsourced his job to AI. As Fortune reports, he now does odd jobs to make ends meet, like gig work on meal delivery apps, and flipping his stuff on eBay. To make matters worse, Kay's been spat out into a noxious job market for highly trained tech workers. Out of 800 job applications he's placed since losing his income, he's only received ten interviews. As if to add insult to injury, a handful of those, he says, have been with AI. "I feel super invisible. I feel unseen. I feel like I'm filtered out before a human is even in the chain," Kay told Fortune. At 42 years old, the engineer has been around long enough to prove his mettle. He's survived hiring downturns before, like the 2008 global financial crisis, and the brief recession brought about by the pandemic. This time, something's different. Though AI makes a great boogeyman -- a narrative which, coincidentally, helps AI tycoons convince lawmakers to let the industry regulate itself -- there are other factors at play in the tech job market. During the pandemic, tech companies became more profitable than they had been in years. Fueled by a society that quickly became dependent on tech and software companies to keep things afloat, the sector grew substantially throughout the public health crisis, triggering an industry-wide hiring spree. But as COVID-19 abated, many of those same companies found they had over-hired. Soon, waves of layoffs began rocking tech workers, coinciding with a flood of fresh STEM graduates entering the scene. That brought about a chaotic job market, where work is hard to find, and job quality is only getting worse. AI certainly didn't help things. Many tech moguls bought into promises that the buzzy new tech is going to "revolutionize work" -- despite plenty of evidence that it's far from ready. It also irreparably damaged the job search; those seeking work like Kay now have to stand out amidst a sea of AI spam to have their resumes even read by a human. So, where are all the high-value tech jobs going? The answer, it seems, is to the bottom. While error-prone AI isn't ready to go it alone, it is ready to increase the productivity of untrained workers. A growing body of scholarship on AI and labor suggests that AI isn't simply taking over -- it's enabling tech corporations to outsource high-paying jobs in the West to low-wage workers in the global south. This shift in tech job quality could be a part of the reason why we see AI having an effect on the tech labor market, despite the fact that 59 percent of developers experience consistent deployment errors when using AI to code. Why pay one worker in the US $150,000 a year, plus benefits, to sort through junk AI code when you could outsource a dozen workers in the Philippines for the same cost? The dystopian tale that AI is making us obsolete is bad enough, but it's nothing compared to the reality: AI isn't taking over the tech industry; it's turning it into a sweatshop.