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?
Massive sympathies comrade, that really honestly sucks. Not doubting you, but are you able to offer any more details?
As someone who works for a sizeable, multinational tech company, I’ve thus far witnessed absolutely zero disruption from AI to any teams anywhere in our company or my physical locality. There have been a couple attempts to replace services with AI, but they’ve been so unreliable that they’ve achieved nothing. Thus far its only been a tool akin to Google, requiring knowledgeable humans to use it, that occasionally helps code things up or parse data.
A large part of what I did was customer support for proprietary software. Over the years we’ve used systems to build a database of solutions to issues in our software. Now our company has an AI assistance helper using that database to assist customers. There are still live support agents to help when it comes to patient data plus our jobs had us doing a bunch of backend server and database management stuff. It didn’t eliminate all jobs in that department. It streamlined the labor enough to allow for layoffs. The other people on my team were all local and I was the only remote member. 15+ years at that company.
