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Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Technology
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It’s so disingenuous and absurd to claim this is a AI problem. It’s an over saturation of qualified individuals in a field, problem. These companies and executives are just using AI as a cover story to hide the fact that the industry is not growing fast enough to employ the number of skilled professionals in the field. This was the point of the whole “learn to code” talking points. Executives and shareholders wanted an over-saturation in the field so as to push down wages and reduce the bargaining power of employees.
This situation kind of hammers home the importance of a robust social safety net, strong unions, minimum wages that keep up with inflation, and maintaining an affordable cost of living. There being a saturation in one job market should not doom people to poverty conditions. Even a job at chipotle should pay well enough to live comfortably on, and workers there should have enough bargaining power to ensure decent treatment.
Like, we need to act collectively to ensure stability and prosperity. There is no path that someone can take individually to ensure these things, no escape hatch to prosperity for “hard workers”. “Learning to code” and “Get a CS degree” seemed like a straight forward answer, but here we are.
AI was an excuse to fire people, in reality it doesnt generate profit for the company. by the time my older bro was laid off, he was in the 300k range of salary 165k is generously low and i would think it would be the max income if they would rehire,and i already suspected before the pandemic something will cause the companies to lay off the staff, and its usually the top earners and they would rather do it quickly. laid of in '23 and living off a severance package and not finding a job.
The other side is that the mass layoffs of the last year mean that there are plenty of experienced people to hire over new grads. I can't imagine any company right now taking on the cost and risk of training up entry level folks when they can hire a 10+ yr senior in that role who's been job hunting for 5 months, for the same or a little more than the entry level salary.
they will just go to h1b visas, and hire lower quality people, to barely maintain things.
From what I'm seeing and hearing in the tech space, I think the opposite is true. I think the current admin's war on non-white people is making companies really wary of hiring H1B holders (even European ones) and even green card holders.
A lot of companies are just halting hiring altogether for a bit, and the ones who are hiring are looking for local, laid-off tech workers at lower salaries, who have to take it because there's such a glut of them to compete with. Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn't mean an easier time for Americans to get hired, it means fewer overall Americans getting hired period (which the recent jobs reports prove to be the case).
Companies tend to hire visa'd workers when they are doing rapid business expansion, because that's when saving the 20-30% per-head adds up (e.g. if you're saving 20% per-head when hiring 100, you're saving yourself 20 salaries-worth, but if you're hiring 5, you're better off getting the most experienced ones who give you the best bang-for-your-buck). And no one is doing rapid business expansions in this economy.
Exactly right. Most of us older coders have been warning of this for years. It was not benevolence that Microsoft, Google, Amazon so gleefully pushed for more coders and coding boot camps. They wanted a flood of labor to bring down salaries. They knew this was going to happen, and I've been calling it out for years. This is exactly what they wanted.
i had a "preminition" right before the pandemic that were going to start massive layoffs of tech workers soon, simply because they are earning hundreds of thousands a year, and the c-suites/ceos arnt going to let that slide.
we had a way of life they couldn't stand. Average people doing normal work were able to afford normal lives while their company suffered under such heavy salaries. Anyone in tech should be planning now on their exit. I'm not afraid of AI, I'm afraid of executives pushing our salaries down to nothing.
I'm personally saving and investing everything I can with my tech salary now to plan for when I'm inevitably kicked to the curb, or they want to pay me minimum wage.