A software engineer has revealed that, while he once made six figures at a metaverse company, his recent layoff means he’s been thrust into a life of relative precarity, which involves DoorDashing, selling stuff on eBay, and living in a trailer.
Shawn K’s layoff some twelve months ago (his legal name is “K”) has landed him in a situation that, a few years ago, would’ve seemed relatively unheard of for a seasoned software engineer. However, in the age of AI, Shawn worries that his situation may become more normative, as tech companies race to replace their workers with algorithms.
In an email to Gizmodo, Shawn provided more details about his layoff, which appears to have been at a company called Virbela, which is owned by eXp Realty. Virbela says it offers metaverse solutions for remote work through the creation of “engaging virtual spaces that replicate real-world dynamics and social interactions.” Shawn said that, in the months prior to his termination, his work at the company became increasingly AI-based.
“Different orgs move at different rates with technology, and within our company, we were very forward-thinking and early-adopting with AI,” he said. “In the first year that ChatGPT was released, the average developer on the team was seeing productivity increase of 3x-10x with ai assistance,” he said, adding that it “reached a point where it became inevitably clear that it was no longer going to be ‘business as usual’.”
“On my team, we made a hard pivot to have nearly every developer on the team focus on integrating AI features into the existing software product,” Shawn revealed. He added that, not long afterward, during a “frenzied peak” of AI enthusiasm, the company “let go a portion of the developers across all the teams in the company, including on my team.” He added: “I couldn’t really estimate on the percentage of the dev staff laid off, but it was all around the same time across multiple teams.”
It’s unclear whether the specific catalyst for Shawn’s termination was AI or not. Gizmodo reached out to Virbela for more information. That said, if that’s the case, it wouldn’t be unheard of. Over the past two years, tech companies have gone through historic rounds of layoffs, as many of those firms have pivoted towards automation. Multiple reports show that software workers at companies like Panasonic and Microsoft are losing their jobs, as companies seek tools that can automate code-writing.
Shawn has been writing about his unfortunate “displacement” by automation on his personal Substack, ShawnfromPortland, which details his struggles since getting laid off. He says that he makes less than $200 a day through food deliveries and that he has also resorted to selling random personal items on eBay.
Shawn’s situation is complicated, as he also owns multiple properties. He says, however, that owning property doesn’t necessarily make him wealthy. His mother, who is disabled, lives on one of the properties and has nowhere else to go. The other properties, which were bought when things were going well for Shawn, pose financial difficulties were he to attempt to sell them right now, he says. He currently lives in a small trailer on one of the properties in upstate New York.
“I’m now in the trailer because something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years,” Shawn writes. “Something that caused myself and a large portion of the talented dev teams [to be] let go at a time when our company and parent corp were doing great.” That “something” would appear to be what Shawn has referred to as the “great displacement,” an economy that is trending further and further towards automation and away from human labor.
AI also seems to be screwing Shawn when it comes to the job hunt, as he suspects his resume is being vetted by algorithms that sift for AI-related buzzwords. “In this last year, I interviewed with close to 10 companies, getting as far as a 4th round interview twice and several second and third rounds, but not getting any offers,” the out-of-work engineer says. “I suspect my resume is filtered out of consideration by some half-baked AI ‘candidate finder service’ because my resume doesn’t mention enough hyper-specific bleeding-edge AI terms.”
Shawn has also been forced to study AI so as to be more competitive in the current software market. “I have spent 2 to 5 hours per day in the last year consuming AI news, papers, and podcasts, and constantly thinking and reflecting on the latest AI trends,” Shawn reveals. “I have built about 10 small 100% AI-generated codebases in the last year as personal learning exercises, and any time there is free access to any new AI tool, I go out of my way to try it out.”
Still, Shawn seems to be firing applications off into the abyss, and says that he’s nearing his 900th application, with no signs of a job offer. “This article isn’t for sympathy or to make me feel better by making excuses,” he writes. “I’m sharing my real-life story of how I went from a highly valued technologist to basically nothing in the course of a year or two with the rise of AI.”
In an email, Shawn also shared that the job hunt in the software industry has never felt so grim. He noted that he’s “been in the game for a long time, and the vibes have never been the way they are now.”
Ominously, he added: “I don’t think my story is unique, I think I am at the early side of the bell curve of the coming social and economic disaster tidal wave that is already underway and began with knowledge workers and creatives. It’s coming for basically everyone in due time.”