Tech Workers Face Evaporating Financial Security as AI Transforms Industry | Hacker News Reader

Tech Workers Face Evaporating Financial Security as AI Transforms Industry

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46 pointsnlpnerd35 comments

Big company layoffs are probably more aligned with offshoring than AI, but they'll never admit it.

Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?

Last time I checked AI isn't killing jobs if the other news is to be believed.

OP here, and I agree it's probably not AI directly and more of dealing with the post Covid overhiring, and CAPEX for AI investments.

Enterprise adoption is definitely not happening as fast as the AI proponents (startups, frontier labs, big tech) would like people to believe (probably the reason why frontier labs are going the FDE/consulting path). So it's unlikely that the impact on productivity is enough to produce the alleged impact.

It's a combination of Covid over hiring, CapEx for AI hardware, AND you don't need as many software developers anymore per product.

I doubt very much that COVID over-hiring has any relevance today.

COVID is now ancient history and there have already been several years of big layoffs when every time I hear the attempt of explaining them through COVID over-hiring.

That may have been right a couple of years ago, but since then every company that had over-hired must have already disposed of the surplus.

The mad rush and overhiring didn't stop immediately after Covid. I know of cases where experienced software engineers were getting picked up by big tech with huge increments as late as end of 2023.

My impression is that the current trend for layoffs only really began around early 2025. For reference, the layoffs during the dotcom bubble I was told took around 2 years to plateau

So then why aren't bad decision making execs being let go?

If they can't forecast demand or headcount they should be replaced by confident sounding AI.

We’re going to be well into the Diamond Age before people stop attributing layoffs to ‘Covid overhiring.’

Big tech employee counts are still nearly 2x higher now than 2019.

In 2019 I bet they were more than 2x what they were in 2012.

And big tech market cap is 5x what it was in 2019, yes. I’m not hearing wild overhiring in these numbers, quite the opposite.

Zuck has spent more than 8 billion on the metaverse

By literal order of magnitude

How much? I think I got 8 bill from AI so ....

It certainly is killing jobs in agency work, plenty of stuff that used to be done by content teams like translations or image assets, now are 100% AI generated.

Also delivery teams have been decreased, as now there is more that can be done with less folks.

Which started with move to cloud, focus on SaaS ready made products instead of custom development, serverless instead of microservices, low code/no code tooling, and now AI agents for SaaS product integrations.

This is the usual meme only happens when it comes to me kind of thing.

The lady in the article was a $500k/yr exec, not an illustrator.

Neither was her husband iirc.

Layoffs are usually across teams not "illustrators and translators".

AI isn't killing jobs.

Offshoring is passé. If you want to give out a set of written instructions, get back something which literally meets the spec but is otherwise inadequate, and babysit overseeing trying to get the results you actually wanted, you can feed it to an LLM for a lot less a lot quicker.

Offshore engineers tend to require just as much micromanagement and perfect clarification as an LLM, so if anything I would expect the demand for offshore engineers to fall much faster than for local talent.

Bad offshore engineering teams may need that. The other teams that work as you should you just don't hear about.

I find it more similar to LLM use and prompting style, I’ve taken many teams that Product Managers and non technical founders considered to be bad, and spoke a more universal programming and system architecture language with clearer scope and continuity of tasks to unlock their capabilities

That's quite the interesting assumption. As an "offshore" engineer, I have worked with hundreds of US engineers and none of them were significantly more competent than me if they were. No micromanagement required.

> Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?

I believe that was an investment into controlling the next platform, so what happened on iOS with could never happen to them again.

What's far crazier and more applicable to the current balance sheet is the $14.3B acqui-hire of Alexandr Wang. But, what do I know?

Or my personal favorite - offshore teams being confidently wrong after having asked AI

"Tech workers"?

"a salary of more than $500,000 in her most recent position, as a mid-tier executive at Meta"

I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside as an overpaid executive.

How many actual tech workers (the ones making under $100k, lol) are facing even harder financial security than the first-world-problems of some Facebook exec who could afford two nannies?

One of the things that surprised me in Silicon Valley is that my colleagues who were making $500K-$1M a year levered up their lives and saved surprisingly little. Multiple houses, $200K cars, nannies, very expensive vacations, you name it.

People are yet to realise that the "tech bro" genome isn't different from the "finance bro" genome.

Many people across all income levels are really bad at dealing with personal finances and long-term financial planning.

My thoughts were along this line too. Being laid off is unfortunate, but being laid off after making $500k/yr for a mid-level managerial position is a karmic self-correction.

The opening sentence of the article even tacitly admits this - "Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery" - the operative word here is "lottery" and I am not altogether surprised the type of person to coast on Facebook money for decades found themselves hard up after it got cut off.

>I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside

Seriously. It boggles my mind how people can earn this much money, yet face difficulties when they lose their job. I guess they're people who didn't grow up poor and/or are too hungry for material things.

There's very little I want or need in this world; if I were making $500k, I'd be able to somewhat retire within 2-3 years.

Americans' political education has been deliberately hobbled. An educated person (let alone a journalist) in most of the rest of the developed world (and lots of the developing world) would know instinctively not to call an executive a "worker".

That said, I believe there probably are workers (in the sense of having the same class interests as other workers rather than the owners, like an executive does) in the Bay Area that earn these kinds of numbers. Again, this is something that a proper political education would make very clear, but anything that smacks of a materialist or class-based analysis is now completely verboten at most levels of the education system because it is considered "Marxism," an enemy ideology.

The class division you're inferring just doesn't exist within Silicon Valley tech companies. Mid-level executives are overwhelmingly people who started as what you'd consider a worker and grew into that role. (There is something of a class divide between Silicon Valley companies, although not one that aligns well with typical Marxist analysis.)

Being promoted to management doesn't make you not management, if I'm understanding what you're saying. That's how most (middle) managers are minted in every industry I'm aware of: promoting line workers. That doesn't mean those newly-promoted managers have the same class interests as the people they manage. I work in tech but only in big firms and never in the Bay Area, so perhaps there is some nuance I'm missing?

Marxist class analysis was developed for situations where that wasn't the case. The clearest example in the US would be trucking (and it's not a coincidence that trucking has one of the highest unionization rates): the people directing where trucks should go have often never driven one themselves, and the people driving the trucks rarely expect that if they drive well for a few years they'll be promoted out of a driving position.

My understanding is that outside the US this dynamic is more common in a variety of industries.

Yeah I mean Marx himself lived in a world where the aristocracy was still a going concern. Still, management is fundamentally aligned with ownership. If anything, the dynamic you're citing (line workers being promoted into the lower rungs of management) means that line workers themselves have incentive to align themselves with ownership (as a way of auditioning for the job of doing that for money, as management). It definitely doesn't make the managers less aligned with ownership. There are good reasons management can't join a union.

Again, this is basic political education everywhere else in the world. This is what other countries' schoolchildren are learning while ours are learning why it was actually good and necessary to nuke Japan, how "manifest destiny" is also ultimately good and moral, and how the Civil War was mainly about something abstract called "states' rights".

CLOSED WONTFIX Working as intended

“…who had worked on well-being and safety issues for Meta” Never saw that one coming.

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