Tech Workers Face Evaporating Financial Security as AI Transforms Industry

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2026/07/19/the-biggest-winners-of-the-american-economy-fear-theyre-sinking-fast/

by nlpnerd • 3 days ago

46 35 3 days ago

adn.com

pir8life4me4• 3 days ago

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.

nlpnerd2• 3 days ago

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.

aurareturn2• 3 days ago

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

yieldcrv2• 3 days ago

Zuck has spent more than 8 billion on the metaverse

blitzar2• 3 days ago

By literal order of magnitude

pir8life4me4• 2 days ago

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

pjmlp• 3 days ago

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.

pir8life4me4• 3 days ago

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.

pjc50• 3 days ago

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.

vovavili• 2 days ago

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.

Daishiman• 2 days ago

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

owebmaster• 2 days ago

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.

consumer451• 2 days ago

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?

Havoc• 2 days ago

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

kotaKat• 3 days ago

"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?

NewCzech• 3 days ago

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.

blitzar2• 3 days ago

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

bumblehean• 2 days ago

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

branon• 3 days ago

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.

0xmattf• 2 days ago

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.

ElevenLathe3• 2 days ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 days ago

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.)

Suzuran• 2 days ago

CLOSED WONTFIX Working as intended

steve-atx-7600• 2 days ago

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

Tech Workers Face Evaporating Financial Security as AI Transforms Industry

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