Tech Layoffs and the Future

For years now, we've heard about the importance of young people getting coding skills—that the jobs of the future would be all about coding. If you learned coding, you would have a good job in the future. Everyone has heard this message, and it really permeated society. There are even coding camps for kids, to start them young so they can get an advantage over the other future coders.

But this was always a lie—and the massive tech layoffs of the last year show that there is no future in this. There was never going to be a real future where the mass of people could work as highly paid computer coders. It never made any sense. For one thing, if everyone does something, then that devalues that skill. The reason being a coder was seen as a desirable job was because not that many people could do it. If everyone does it, then it isn’t a valuable skill anymore. But the more important reason is that, by its nature, technology jobs will require fewer human workers as time goes on. Most of the computer code that they are writing can write itself better than any human can. The massive leaps in artificial intelligence, that the coders themselves are creating, are putting them out of a job.

The layoff numbers are pretty shocking, and I don’t see it going back to how it used to be. Twitter has cut 50% of its workforce. Facebook (“Meta”) has cut 13% of its staff. Salesforce has cut 10%. Amazon is cutting 18,000 jobs, the most in its history. 150,000 tech jobs were eliminated in 2022—and given how awful the economic outlook appears for 2023, that number will probably just increase this year.

There is going to be a whole class of people who have no skills other than writing computer code. They are very good at sitting by themselves and writing code that makes computers do things. But there isn’t that much demand for that anymore, and there isn’t going to be. The tech sector was such an endless source of cash for so many years, that they thought that this endlessness would extend also to tech workers. But this was not the case.

The pandemic accelerated all of this fake overvaluation of the tech sector. Everyone was trapped inside, so life became very digital for a while. Amazon saw record profits, and so did Salesforce and other tech companies. But that was not permanent.

One of the most interesting tech failures has been Netflix. Even during the pandemic it started to lose value, which surprised most people, because with everyone trapped inside, it was reasonable to suppose that streaming video would get even more popular. But that’s not what happened. As people had more time on their hands and were stuck inside, it seems like they actually fully watched Netflix for the first time, rather than sort of half-watching it distractedly. With nothing else going on, they could focus on Netflix’s content—and what they saw, they didn’t like. It was all fake—they produced content that was thrown together as quickly as possible, because they knew that people would only sort of be half-watching it, so the quality didn’t really matter. The lighting was bad, the writing was bad, it was all just content thrown together as cheaply and quickly as possible so it could get into the Netflix library.

The pandemic slowed everything down, and that revealed how fake the whole economy and society had become. Tech workers as the future of mass employment was fake—Netflix as the future of arts and culture was fake.

But the problem is, everyone is too exhausted and destroyed to make the effort to create a real economy and society now. Even as we see that the old one has been revealed to be fake and inadequate, there isn’t enough spirit to replace it.