Mike received his layoff notice like clockwork — calm, expected, inevitable. "AI is destroying software engineering as a discipline and the jobs it creates," he said with disappointment.
Meta cut 10% of its workforce in May 2026, approximately 8,000 people, as part of a strategic shift toward AI infrastructure. Mike was one of them — a software engineer who had felt fortunate to join three years ago, now disillusioned.
For tech workers in America, this year has been brutal. The industry is experiencing a wave of layoffs affecting nearly 120,000 tech workers over five months. Companies from Atlassian and Autodesk to Pinterest and LinkedIn are all trimming staff, with many citing AI as the reason — though critics question whether AI is truly the culprit or just a convenient excuse.
Research from University of Pittsburgh shows that the higher the proportion of AI-related positions in a company, the lower its overall employee growth rate — confirming AI is directly 'crowding out' demand for human labor. But many companies are recklessly using AI to replace workers, driven by short-term stock price gains.
"AI's job displacement problem stems from capital markets," one expert noted. "Large-scale AI replacement of humans will, in the long term, lead to massive unemployment, eventually causing consumer market contraction and economic crisis."
Mike had been trying to use AI to assist his work. "Learning AI tools is just the basic admission ticket. Being at the frontier is another matter — and that frontier is accelerating."