New year, same issues – but now add the merciless growth of AI to that. It’s just as hard to get a job in technology as it was at the beginning of 2024, tech hiring pros tell Cybernews. A career is still possible, though – but you have to take care of upskilling yourself.
For years, skilled techies flocked to Silicon Valley companies, lured by promises of generous pay, a relatively light workload, and all sorts of perks such as free meals.
These days are over. Sure, it’s not news today – during 2022 and 2023, the US tech industry slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs, almost unanimously claiming they had overhired during the pandemic and were now simply correcting course. The setbacks are temporary, they said.
But the situation is just as dire today. Layoffs are continuing, and if you want to get hired, you have to apply to hundreds of positions to receive even a single offer, tech pros told Cybernews.
Besides, more companies are now deploying generative AI tools that can easily replace rank and file workers en masse. And indeed, software servicing and quality testing could be automated over the next few years.
However, might this all be simply natural and perfectly fine? Depending on how you read the available data, tech hiring could be very much alive because the sector is simply shedding its skin.
“The days of $300,000 salaries to A/B test button colors? They’re fading faster than your memory of the last free office kombucha keg. But let’s not mistake evolution for extinction,” Brian Fink, a prominent recruiter, recently wrote.
Reductions, layoffs, hundreds of interviews
“Things are pretty bad,” conceded Sam Wright, overseeing Operations $ Partnerships at Huntr, a company helping tech job seekers navigate the hiring process.
Wright told Cybernews that he’s met dozens of job seekers since the beginning of the year and has noticed that there are fewer openings and more layoffs.
“This isn’t just affecting junior roles but mid-level roles, too. I'm chatting with folks mid-career who have never had an issue finding a job, who are 4-6 months into their search, and who have only had a couple of interviews after hundreds of applications,” said Wright.
Jeff Le – who worked as deputy cabinet secretary to former California governor Jerry Brown and is now a VP of global government affairs and public policy at SecurityScorecard, a cybersecurity company – has firsthand experience and calls the market “brutal.”
“I was just looking for a tech public policy role last year, and the openings are much lower than last year – probably 75% less. There are so many reductions and layoffs that you have significant talent coming onto the job market all at the same time,” Le told Cybernews.
“There are little to no executive roles advertised. I see a handful of entry-level roles open but the mid-level and up it decreases significantly.”
It’s definitely quite ruthless. According to The Washington Post, when Meta fired around 3,000 people in February, even managers who were told they were performing “at or above” expectations during performance reviews were let go – as were new parents on maternity or paternity leave.
“Teams were given a quota on how much headcount to trim, if there were not enough low performers, performance ratings were then changed to low,” someone shared on Blind, an anonymous app for verified tech employees, before calling Meta “the cruelest tech company out there.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had earlier stated in a memo that the company aims to “raise the bar on performance” and remove underperformers more quickly.
But the “low performers” are now fighting back – on LinkedIn, they’re sticking up for themselves in public and calling out their former employer for misrepresenting their work.
Now, where’s that upskilling?
Who knows? Zuckerberg, who’s now publicly supportive of the MAGA agenda, might simply be trying to act the way Elon Musk behaved at Twitter after acquiring the platform (and renaming it to X). Musk fired around 80% of the company staff in a matter of weeks.
But it’s also obvious that all these vacant positions won’t be filled by humans. That’s because AI is no longer just a looming issue – it’s already advancing faster than workers can react, it seems.
It’s quite clear that some jobs, especially in entry-level IT services and data center operations, will be automated and aren’t coming back.
Besides, in March 2024, experts told The Wall Street Journal that newly jobless tech workers aren’t quickly finding new roles because of a mismatch between their skills, what they expect to be paid, and what the potential employer needs them to know.
Workers are being laid off as companies realize it’s either cheaper to replace expensive humans with automated work or more rational to look for someone who’s skilled in managing all these AI tools.
That’s, of course, why upskilling, reskilling, and cross-skilling are needed – after all, the half-life of technology skills is as short as 2.5 years, according to Harvard Business Review.
But the process isn’t simple and is slow. Workers are being laid off as companies realize it’s either cheaper to replace expensive humans with automated work or more rational to look for someone who’s skilled in managing all these AI tools.
“I have not seen much for reskilling or upskilling outside the pressure of maintaining salary control and emphasizing stronger management skills,” shrugs Le.
Wright agrees that there isn’t enough reskilling happening. He sees a skills gap as employers struggle to find candidates despite a record number of applications.
“I have heard of hiring managers who have had a failed search despite hundreds of applicants. They just are not finding who they are looking for because skill needs have changed,” Wright told Cybernews.
More than four in five IT decision-makers are concerned about having enough talent to meet their needs, a Revature report recently said. AI and machine learning are among the key categories they hope to fill, mainly through upskilling and reskilling existing employees.
In fact, the consulting firm Korn Ferry has predicted that the skills shortage might leave as many as 85 million unfilled tech-related jobs globally by 2030. Already this January, unemployment among IT positions increased to 2.9%, up from 2% the previous month.
A time of opportunity?
Then again, upskilling or reskilling the worker already employed with the company is probably the cheapest and most effective option. That would help explain the complexities of the tech sector today.
Do tech companies need that many positions? Probably not. Do they need to pay an average worker $100,000? Maybe, but they have to be really good at their job. In short, the industry is a lot more careful than just a few years ago – but that doesn’t mean opportunities are gone forever.
John Hurley, a chief revenue officer at Optiv, a US cybersecurity firm, told Cybernews that his company sees the current period as “an exciting time to be in cyber technology, a time of opportunity.”
To Hurley, AI and automation mean possibilities to enhance productivity and help people make better decisions.
“Those who know how to pivot, how to adapt, will find that AI and automation are not a hindrance to their job security, but complementary. Remember, the role of technology – in any form – is not to remain stagnant but to evolve through innovation. As AI and automation evolve, we too must do the same,” said Hurley.
Dr. Kyle Elliott, a tech career coach and mental health expert, is also calm. He’s sure that AI, while replacing some jobs, will also create a wave of new roles.
“Importantly, you cannot expect your employer to provide you with all the skills needed to be competitive in today’s job market. You must seek out additional education and training outside of your workplace if you want to continue making your resume enticing in this evolving landscape,” said Elliott.
Finally, Jason Wingate, the CEO of Emerald Ocean, a Canadian IT consultancy, told Cybernews that turbulence has always been a feature of the tech market.
For instance, before ATMs were introduced in the 1970s, there were concerns that bank tellers would lose their jobs. They did, but the rise of ATMs made it cheaper for banks to open up more branches, which meant more teller jobs.
“The rise of PCs in the 80s, e-commerce in the late 1990s, mobile app development, cloud computing – all had their ‘machines will steal our jobs’ moments, but all they did was either create new opportunities or create new industries that led to economic growth and job creation,” said Wingate.
Where there’s a problem, there’s a job
Indeed, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, around 92 million jobs will be lost by 2030. However, 170 million new jobs will be created, resulting in a net gain of 78 million positions.
One can, of course, raise doubts about the quality of these jobs and worry about human agency, be it the technology industry or any other sector of the economy.
For instance, Nicholas Carr wrote a decade ago: “Every day, we are reminded of the superiority of computers. What we forget is that our machines are built by our own hands. If computers had the ability to be amazed, they’d be amazed by us.”
One can also look worryingly at the Donald Trump administration's alleged plans to replace thousands of federal workers with machines. Bruce Schneier, a renowned US technologist, recently told Cybernews that this was “totally cyber utopianism.”
If that happens, and the techies close to Trump tell America that the operation was a success, private companies are sure to follow the government’s lead.
“Every day, we are reminded of the superiority of computers. What we forget is that our machines are built by our own hands. If computers had the ability to be amazed, they’d be amazed by us.”
Nicholas Carr.
However, Daniele Viappiani, an economist who worked on AI policy for the UK and Argentinian governments before moving into venture capital, believes that AI will create a flurry of new, quality professions in the coming years, both in tech and elsewhere.
“One of the most important findings of economics is that there isn’t a fixed number of jobs in an economy. This is called the lump of labor fallacy: the misconception that there is a finite amount of work to be done within an economy when in reality new needs breed new jobs all the time,” Viappiani told Cybernews.
“Who would have predicted the creation of jobs such as social media manager or UX designer? If we have problems, we have jobs. The labor market is a system that allocates jobs to problems. We are not running out of problems, so we won’t run out of jobs. AI merely frees up resources to spend on different issues.”
Obviously, what we’re seeing now in the tech jobs market are adjustments to the changing reality. But because technological change usually unfolds gradually, both businesses and society will have time to adapt, the expert thinks.
“If AI is the next electricity, a general-purpose technology that transforms everything, we should expect a wave of new opportunities and job titles, many of which we cannot even imagine yet. None of this happens automatically. It depends on human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and sometimes smart policy,” said Viappiani.
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