AI Didn't Take Your Job. The Expectation of AI Did.

The Middle is Being Hollowed Out

I’ve written a few pieces recently about the state of the technology industry, and I’m not the only one who thinks it looks pretty dire right now. Not for the industry itself, no. It’s doing fine. I’m talking about the people it’s leaving behind.

For those that are the middle technology innovators, we feel like we’re being told we don’t want nor need your skill set anymore. It hits close to home for me because it’s my way of life that’s being threatened. Companies — no industries — are discarding the people who helped build them to their current, insanely profitable position these companies enjoy, just because we’re not what they are looking for anymore.

They are now chasing the next tier of the employment pipeline. The grinders. The risk-takers. The people who had the luxury of time or circumstance to stay ahead of whatever was coming next.

The people who did their job, had a family and had a life outside of a screen, are getting cut. Abruptly. Left to figure out whether they keep pushing in tech or just walk away entirely.

I’m constantly wondering if my job will be obsolete tomorrow. Next week. Will I get laid off? What do I pivot to? Why didn’t the business who I invested a fair bit of my life into help me pivot with the technology they are using to let me go? Why is the industry leaders leaving me behind? Why couldn’t they assist and train me, or let me learn to fail in the new technology they are working on?

That might seem very selfish, “they don’t owe you anything” but why not?

They will gladly train overseas staff or pay to automate my position away when they are getting ready to cut costs again.

The K-Shape: Tech’s Growing Divide

Economists are constantly talking about the “K-shaped economy” as something that is just happening to our economy. For many in many industries, what was once a reliable, well-paid career path is becoming a questionable bet for a lot of people.

The entry points for a lot of graduates and mid-career people are disappearing. Companies don’t want dead weight. They want someone who learned on someone else’s time, and want their new employee hitting the ground running within a few weeks or months of being hired, or be cut as dead weight.

It’s not because that work is gone, its because the companies are trying to “or succeeded” in figuring out how to automate just enough of the work to hand the less complicated stuff to a lower-wage employee anywhere in the world who doesn’t need to understand the business, just act on the output of a computer screen.

The $100k+ job doesn’t vanish, it just gets hollowed out and redistributed downward, while the people who used to hold those jobs are left wondering where they will find something that pays comparably or if its a wild goose chase, trying to continue to pivot; if that job will still exist in 5 years because the industry has found a way to automate that portion of the job.

The middle will get squeezed to the bottom, the top keeps going up, either as a C-Suite or celebrity developers who “will change the current thinking” in technology, whether it’s a societal good thing or bad thing.

And the industry shrugs or lauds it as progress.

An Example: The Moon Landing Problem

Let’s look at an example. During the space program, there were hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of smart, talented rocket scientists and people who were inspired by space travel, NASA, landing on the moon and everything related to space.

Then in the 1970’s - 1980’s the space program started winding down, as the priority on space travel was no longer seen by society given the cost it had supposedly incurred (even though war is much more costlier than peaceful space travel, but I digress).

Those brilliant, talented, engineers who figured out how to get humans to the moon, scattered. They pivoted to other things. Some was interesting, but a lot of it was no longer focused on space innovation. Not that that is a bad thing, but the space industry was essentially gutted.

Now the world is interested in space again, decades later, the industry is having to re-learn enormous amounts of what we already knew, because we no longer trained and innovated at the scale we did during the height of the space race.

I believe we will see similar parallels with the direction of AI, but with much more ominous side effects, since many industries are preparing for the inevitable success of AI, rather than the societal successes AI could actually provide.

For example: Companies are laying off people on the expectation that AI will replace human workers, at the expense of quality, and real use cases.

They are being sold a dream.

And the industry is using it as another financial vehicle to drive insane profitability at the expense of literally everything.

Then when it becomes clear AI isn’t a singular, world-changing product that justifies the current level of investment, the investment dries up, and the cost structure won’t be able to support what was built around it. The money will pull back, and the people who got pushed out, those “small time innovators”, the ones that helped in small ways, won’t be waiting to come back. They will pivot and the industry will languish while they wait for a new generation of innovators and technologists to support whatever new model becomes vogue.

Where does that leave the industry? Re-learning things it already knew, built by people who were already here and got discarded because the industry wanted to “move fast and break things” with no regard for how difficult it is to scale and provide service.

Three Things Getting Worse Disguised as Progress

There are a few threads in all this that keep coming back to me, and I think they are related.

Narrowing the Builders

The first is narrowing the builders. Good ideas challenge the status quo. Not become the status quo. Most purist innovators are not driven by profitability, they are driven by solving a problem for themselves, or a group they serve.

When an industry of a small amount of producers are looking at big problems to solve, they try to broaden their scope to capture as much of the market share as they can.

But diversity of ideas allow the tech industry as a whole to sprawl and allow problem-solving with a wide range of people, problems, and solutions. When you shrink the innovator pool down to the people who grind the hardest and take the most risks, you don’t get better ideas. You get the same ideas, faster, from fewer people. The gatekeepers don’t get weaker, they get stronger as they push the sole thing they are putting money into as a winner-takes-all race.

Lack of Quality

The second is quality, and this one genuinely frustrates me.

I think technology has gotten worse over the last five years, not better.

It has gotten so much more complicated in ways that don’t serve anyone except the people building it. Things that used to be simple now have dozens of steps attached to it, many of which are so poorly designed and buggy that it genuinely frustrates even the most patient well educated technologists. Workflows that should be seamlessly integrated get siloed inside one company’s stack because the goal isn’t interoperability. It’s lock-in, winter takes all.

The answer the industry keeps landing on is “just talk to an LLM about it” but then in the same sentence “check all answers for accuracy”.

AI LLM in its current form is one of the most inefficient interfaces we’ve ever invented for what most people actually need to do.

What most people need NOW is a better, more connected system that works without needing a computer science degree to navigate and set up. Instead we got more walls, more complexity, and now a blank chat window that used to be a well-designed UI to complete the three steps we needed to do for most of our workflows.

The Excessive Pace

Look, I enjoy the speed technology moves. Not 10 years ago, we had some pretty basic tech in comparison to what we have now.

But the pace recently has gotten so quick, if you even think about stepping away to take a breath you will come back to find out the new standard requires five years of experience on a tool that launched a year ago. The constant expectation to keep up with re-tooled processes or products isn’t sustainable, but questioning it out loud makes you sound like someone who can’t or doesn’t want to keep up.

The Limbo

So here I am.

I’ve watched engineers with twenty-plus years of experience, people who are flat-out better than me, get pushed aside because they’d built deep expertise in one area that got suddenly disrupted in a single move.

I’m trying to figure out what that means for me.

The catch-22 I keep looking at is if I get out to take a breather, I fall behind. The industry moves, I don’t and the re-entry point either won’t exist or requires me to pretend I have the experience I don’t.

If I stay and keep griding I burn out and eventually leave anyway, and the industry loses someone who still has something to offer, but is disenfranchised with the direction it’s chosen to go.

Both roads lead to the same place.

I have one foot in and one foot out. Not because I don’t care, but because I’ve seen what happens to the people who were all in and still got cut just before they thought they were going to make it.

The Open Question

I’m not going to wrap this up with a plan or a decision. Frankly, I don’t have one.

That’s kind of the point.

The industry needs people who’ve been around, who understand how things work, who can do more than consume AI outputs and act on them. But the industry is not acting like it needs those people right now. It’s acting like they’re a line item to optimize away because they already have a plan.

Maybe that changes. Maybe the AI investment thesis doesn’t pan out the way the projections say it will and companies realize they burned through institutional knowledge they can’t easily replace. Maybe the people left behind find something adjacent enough to stay in orbit and come back when it makes sense.

Or maybe we end up exactly where the space program left us. Brilliant people scattered into other things. A gap in the knowledge base nobody noticed until they needed it, and an industry spending years re-learning what it already knew at one point.

I genuinely don’t know which way it goes. But I think it’s worth asking out loud, even if nobody building this thing want’s to hear it.