Did the Cult of the Tech Job trick you too?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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There was what I would say is kind of a magic beans jobs narrative that the tech industry campaigned on. Computer science is interesting and important, but it came with this promise of learn to code and you'll be rich and powerful. You'll be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
And that was part of what we believed culturally. I've been laid off a few times in my life. Once in 2013 from a motorcycle dealership that in retrospect was totally correct to let me go. Then again, in 2020, when I was in production for a video series for a company that shuttered without telling us. And I remember that for a long time, there was a common refrain that some people parroted to newly unemployed folks like myself as soon as they could. Learn to code. I heard these words all the time, like there was an idea that getting a coding job in tech was your one-way ticket out of desperation and into the good life. And this wasn't just true for people already in the workforce. STEM education became a priority for both K-12 and colleges.
But today, learn to code holds almost no weight. The tech industry is hemorrhaging jobs. According to one estimate, there have been over 700,000 tech workers laid off since 2022.
What led to the decline of tech job security?
And according to the Federal Reserve's data released last year, the unemployment rate for computer science grads was double that of art history majors in 2023. But this all has me thinking, how did we get here? And if a cushy position in tech isn't the quote unquote good job anymore, what is? I'm joined by Raya Jetta, tech culture reporter for the San Francisco Standard. Thanks for having us. And Natasha Singer, technology reporter for the New York Times and author of the upcoming book, Coding Kids, Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools. Thanks so much for having us. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
We got to talk about what's going on with tech jobs. There have been a lot of layoffs in the past few years. Tech companies are getting leaner and leaner. What's behind these layoffs? Like, is it AI or is it something else?
It is AI, but it's also a bunch of other things. It might be helpful to look back on tech hiring over the past decade to contextualize this moment. So through much of the 2010s, interest rates were low and venture capitalists who fund tech companies when they're still private were spraying money at these companies in the hopes that by them going public, they would generate bigger tones. And in this environment, there was loads of hiring. And then the pandemic happened, which brought big changes to e-commerce and social media. There was even more hiring. And so if we're looking at this moment, back to your question, I chalk it up to pandemic over-hiring, economic pressures like higher interest rates and economic uncertainty.
And then, of course, the elephant in the room is AI. It seems like there's a big reshuffling going on.
You know, it's not just... that there are new AI tools that can do some human tasks that tech companies are encouraging employees to use. It's that big companies like Microsoft and Google are shifting their priorities to build more and more of these huge data centers, which they're pouring billions of dollars into and moving teams to focus on AI products. And so it's also that there's much more spending on AI, which may mean there's going to be less spending on human capital. And then on top of that, Stanford recently did a study called Canaries in the Coal Mine, looking at the jobs that were most vulnerable to being replaced by AI or reduced by AI. And the top two were call center workers and software engineers.
Wow.
Part of what we wanted to talk about here was the culture story of this.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:35
2
What led to the decline of tech job security?
1:35–5:56
3
Why was 'learn to code' once considered a golden ticket?
5:56–8:46
4
How have layoffs impacted the perception of tech jobs?
8:46–15:22
5
What factors contributed to the recent tech layoffs?
15:22–15:39