A layoff was what inspired Julia, an executive at a well known tech company, to move to San Francisco in the first place more than a decade ago. Still, when she learned in mid-April that she was joining the hundreds of thousands of tech workers hit with recent layoffs, she was in shock.
“It took me two days to get out of bed,” said Julia, who asked to remain partially anonymous to speak about her employer. “I went through this deep debrief. I didn’t think that would happen. I did not see this coming.”
“I didn’t realize how much of my confidence and how much of my emotional wellbeing was tied to the fact that I had a routine,” she added. “I had a community. I had a job that I previously was told I was performing well at. It was very disorienting.”
Julia was given severance and encouraged to reapply to other roles at the company, but the firm’s plunging stock price and pressure from AI gives her little hope she will find a new position there.
While some in the industry, especially those with a post-exit financial cushion, view a layoff as a moment to take time off, Julia said she doesn’t have that luxury while pursuing a career in the age of AI. Competition for jobs is intense, and technological standards are changing rapidly. She threw herself into applying for new positions immediately and formed a group chat, dubbed “LinkedInferno,” with fellow women in the industry, where they bond over the shared challenges of suddenly being forced into a career reset.
“I just take one day at a time —sometimes it’s an hour at a time — but I can’t thinking too far out ahead because I can’t get myself into a panic,” Julia said.
The members of LinkedInferno aren’t alone in feeling the pressure: More than 108,000 tech workers have been laid off this year, including from blue-chip firms such as Cisco, LinkedIn, PayPal, Meta and Amazon, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi. Halfway into the year, cuts are already nearing last year’s total of 124,281 tech workers.
“There’s been little evidence that AI has actually been able to replace the work of the human employees let go,” Roger Lee, a tech entrepreneur and creator of Layoffs.fyi, told The Independent. “However, companies like Meta and Amazon are spending so much money on A.I. investments that they need to cut costs elsewhere. Layoffs are their answer to that, and these companies are hoping that A.I. can help increase productivity even as headcount shrinks.”
Tech job losses now appear to outpace those that followed the 2020 Covid pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis.
In the face of these historic challenges, tech workers in the Bay Area and beyond have turned to a variety of strategies, from forming community groups to applying for thousands of open roles. Some plan to leave the industry — or the country — altogether.
Jonathan Denno, who lives in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley, said he was let go earlier this year from his role as a software test analyst after more than a decade at Fidelity Information Services, a Fortune 500 fintech company. He suspects he was laid off because, in his opinion, the company “jumped the gun” on its AI investments and needed to cut costs.
Severance and unemployment held him over financially, and he took the time off to apply to scores of new jobs and double down on training, a practice known as upskilling.
“I would dedicate a certain amount of hours to job hunting,” added Denno. “But that was not even half the time. The other half of the time I would use for skill training and brushing up on what I was good at and learning things I didn’t know.”
To unwind, he met with a regular poker group.
“They were very, very concerned for me and very supportive,” he said. “You need to have these sorts of groups and cliques. I will also say, because I play poker, I kind of developed a habit to play at casinos a little more than I should. That was a good way to blow off steam but also not something I’d recommend to anyone.”
He came out about even from the casino, and he’s now working a contract role at Apple, so it seems his larger bet on training paid off.
Outside of the financial stress, some recently laid off Bay Area tech workers worry about the bigger-picture implications of where the tech industry is going.
Elbert Nguyen, 25, of Oakland was laid off for the first time in his career in April from his contract role as an engineering technician at AMD, a semiconductor firm at the heart of the AI race. He wasn’t given severance and aims to find another job within two months, though he lives with his parents and said he could ask for their support if things came to that.
He’s confident he can find another similar position — firms are embracing contractor roles to save money in the AI age, he said — but he’s more worried that the industry is going all-in on AI too fast. He worries they’re betting their future on the technology before fully considering its political, economic, and environmental risks. Many senior Silicon Valley employees receive stock as part of their compensation, so charging ahead as fast as possible and even creating an AI bubble could be in their self-interest, at least in the short term.
“It all comes at a cost,” he said. “I fear that it’s not being recognized or it’s being swept under the rug. We’re not hearing the impact of it from within the industry. I feel like the vast majority of people in the industry are in a similar position like me, where they have these qualms, or they have these concerns about the technology at large that they’re developing, its use, and its impact on society.”
One cost is to tech workers themselves, who face stiff competition and little leverage in a job market where companies can simultaneously have soaring stock prices and mass layoffs.
A Silicon Valley-based senior engineering manager, laid off in October after working on AI projects at a well-known IT firm, told The Independent he went through more than 50 rounds of near-miss interviews while applying to similar big-name firms including Meta, LinkedIn and Amazon, before deciding to accept a role at a start-up where he is earning less than a third of what he used to make at his prior role and while likely working more hours.
“It’s not the best outcome, but at the same time I’m also getting a chance, an opportunity, to work in A.I., close to the cutting edge and reskill myself,” he said.
The man, now in his late 30s, wonders how long he can stay in the tech industry altogether. Between the rapidly changing state of the art and the tech industry’s bias towards youth, he worries he may not be able to find another gig the next time he is back on the job market.
He’s considering returning to his native India and maybe retiring, living off the savings he accrued during boom times in a tech industry that no longer resembles the one he once knew.