For hard-hit tech workers, AI is a silver lining

Background actors expressed fears during last summer’s strike that AI technology would be used to replace their jobs. Their new contract secured rules to guard against that.

Data from Layoffs.fyi show that a growing number of layoffs have hit software developers, also known as coders, who — after decades of disrupting other industries and other workers’ jobs with their programs — find themselves victims.

In recent months, hundreds of coders and other IT specialists have been let go by tech giants Google, Meta and Apple, as well as many smaller industry-focused digital platforms and cloud services, including Toast (restaurants), Flexport (logistics) and Block (financial services).

Many of the layoffs have come in the Bay Area, putting a pause to two decades of growth at California’s computer-systems design firms and related services. Most of the cuts probably reflect a pullback after excessive pandemic-driven hiring, due in part to ecommerce and remote work.

But the correction may be ending soon, as new tech jobs come into view and workers adjust.

Ayanna Howard, a robotics expert and dean of the engineering college at Ohio State University, said it wasn’t long ago that coding was all the rage, and people were flocking to computer boot camps. She remembers how hard it once was for people to create a website. Now, with AI tools, you can build one within minutes by simply putting in blocks of information, she noted.

AI can also do coding on back-end servers, the side responsible for storing and organizing data, including security.

But Howard said not all is lost for even low-level coders.

“If you’re trained to learn, you can evolve,” she said, just as those who began by using Pascal and BASIC learned to program in Assembly and Python, used for many machine learning and AI solutions.

Others are emphasizing the inimitable human touch that AI could never replace. Since Alissa Marr was laid off last month from an early-stage AI startup, the product designer has mostly focused on building her business acumen and strategic problem-solving ability rather than just retooling her software skills.

“Those kinds of things are not something an AI can do,” said Marr, 39, who lives in Providence, R.I. “You need to have a human with expertise and knowledge about the customer and the business problem. There needs to be someone pulling the strings, because it can’t just be automated by AI and just go out as is.”

AI may ultimately lead to a smaller tech workforce, said Howard of Ohio State. But there will also be AI-augmented jobs, as well as new jobs. One position in high demand is prompt engineer, who designs prompts and other processes to get optimal performance from generative AI tools, whether text or images.

A company buying AI conversational programs such as ChatGPT (from OpenAI) or Gemini (from Google) will still need engineers to refine and customize the tools to replicate human-like dialogue suitable for its customers.

“We don’t necessarily know what it is that we need,” Howard said. “But they will come out, and when they do, it’ll be like, ‘Oh, guess what? It’s another field.’”

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