This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 59-year-old Marc Kriguer, a software engineer who has been laid off multiple times. His employment history has been verified by Business Insider. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.
I fell in love with computers and writing programs when I was in fifth grade. I debugged somebody else’s code a month before turning 10.
People didn’t have personal computers in the late 1970s, and people didn’t talk about becoming a software engineer, but I knew then that I wanted to do something with computers.
I’ve been a software engineer for 28 years now, and in the last 18, I’ve lost my job four times.
My first layoff happened around 2008 at Sun Microsystems. Starting in 2002, there were layoffs nearly every year, and I survived the first few. However, eventually, my group was hit pretty hard, and Oracle acquired the company soon after.
I experienced three more layoffs after that. In 2019, I was one of the principal engineers laid off from a plagiarism-checker company. I was laid off again at the start of COVID by a different company because their revenues fell significantly in just one month.
Then two months ago, I found out that my position at Walmart Global Tech as a principal software engineer was being eliminated along with roughly 1,500 other people.
I don’t think AI is the reason for software engineer layoffs
AI has changed the job landscape in some ways, but I don’t think it’s causing more layoffs.
In the last couple of months of my job, Walmart started pushing everybody to start using an AI-powered tool to help write code. I was one of the few stragglers against that idea. I really felt that human-written code is better than AI-written code.
While I don’t think AI is the best at writing code, I think it can be helpful with evaluating code. We used a different tool that basically powered code reviews, and I thought it was well-made.
A whole lot of jobs now require AI experience, and I don’t have it, so I feel somewhat limited in what I can search for. Most of the jobs that I’m applying for either don’t involve AI or indicate that you’ll learn it on the job. They just want coding experience, and they know that AI is a skill that can be learned.
I feel like I don’t have to worry about not having direct experience working with AI yet, but I think two years from now all the jobs out there will be looking for AI.
Companies hire too quickly
In the last three years, the number of people affected by tech layoffs has gone up significantly.
I’m not sure what drove the reorganization and layoff at Walmart, but the common thread between the other layoffs I’ve experienced is cost-cutting.
Companies don’t have the revenue to support their costs, so they reduce the number of employees. I think if companies hired fewer people to begin with, they would be more stable. It’s kind of the nature of the way that venture capitalists finance these companies. They give them a whole bunch of money in one fell swoop, and the companies take on more than they can afford long-term.
I think part of the reason software engineers are targeted specifically is their higher income. When a company is trying to reduce costs, it may see that it would have to get rid of fewer people overall by cutting more software engineers. Or, it may have already built the product, and companies don’t think they need the engineers anymore.
The issue is that you do need engineers. Bugs will turn up, and you eventually need to revisit the code. You can’t just assume, “Okay, we finished our product, we’re done. We don’t need the engineers anymore.”
Even though I’ve lost my job several times, I’ve never looked for a job for more than five months. This time around, I’ve applied to maybe 40 jobs and interviewed with about 15 companies so far.
I really haven’t looked around to see what the market is for brand-new engineers, but I haven’t noticed a decrease in demand for software engineers in general. The role may not be growing in demand, but it also doesn’t seem to be shrinking.
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