Once upon a time, working in tech was the place to be. Salaries were high, demand was booming, and careers felt secure.
Now though, that story is changing. While the tech sector added more than 260,000 jobs in 2022, last year it grew by a mere 700 jobs, and that number is expected to shrink even more in 2024.
And the force driving at least part of that change may not come as a surprise: artificial intelligence.
Belle Lin is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. She joined Marketplace’s Kristin Schwab to talk about what’s happening in the tech sector and how AI will continue to shake up the jobs market. A transcript of their conversation is below.
Kristin Schwab: So much has happened with tech, I feel like, in the last handful of years. Can you zoom out and give us some perspective on just how much that job market has ebbed and flowed?
Belle Lin: Sure. So the job market for technology workers grew immensely over the pandemic. So, things like Zoom and the cloud which enabled work from home. And so, to compensate for all that additional growth and business, a lot of these tech companies hired many, many more workers and and paid them really well. So, for a while, the kind of conventional knowledge in the tech industry was that if you had a job in the technology sector, you worked in IT, you were pretty much set and you were getting compensated pretty heavily for it. But a lot of that’s changing now, and very much driven by the fact that ChatGPT, which is the AI chatbot by OpenAI, was released in late 2022, to the public, and that really kind of like set off this AI firestorm and gold rush in which a lot of companies in the tech sector kind of woke up to the fact that if they weren’t investing in AI already, they should certainly be doing so. So that really led to this kind of like shifting of resources also from these traditional IT roles — maybe they’re in cloud and software — to kind of all things AI.
Schwab: Yeah, well, I’m wondering if with all the layoffs and cuts happening right now, combined with sort of that extreme hiring earlier and an overcorrection, do you see this as a blip in time? Or is something bigger happening in the industry?
Lin: It’s hard to say whether it’s just a blip in terms of shrinkage in IT and tech roles, because what we often see is that jobs in one area kind of end up shifting or morphing into another. So if maybe you are a data center operator, and you’re used to working in this kind of, like, windowless datacenter, maybe now you’re developing cloud applications. But what we know for sure is that AI is here. It’s not going away. Every company from the kind of like small mom-and-pop two- or three-person shop to the big enterprises are really trying to figure out how they can harness it. Because if they don’t, there’s a big fear that they’ll be left behind.
Schwab: So how reasonable is it then for companies to ask employees to adapt? I mean, how many new skills can these people learn?
Lin: You know, it’s a great question because what I’ve been hearing recently from some companies is that, while companies do want that high level AI talent, they’re also thinking that they can upscale or help rescale their existing staff. So there’s a lot of pressure on existing technology workers to learn how to, you know, train a large language model, if that’s what the necessary skill is, or how to prompt it or ask questions of ChatGPT. So I think that is the new reality, not just that they need to learn these skills, but, if they don’t, maybe companies will hire someone else who already does.
Schwab: Yeah, there was a line I found striking in your piece, it said, “Learn AI and don’t expect the same pay packages you were getting a few years ago.” Are these jobs just fundamentally changing? And how?
Lin: Yeah, that’s a big question in terms of the fundamental change that I don’t think the final verdict has been reached. Because even when we have AI-based tools for coding for software developers, for example, there’s a large swath of people who think that software developers will always be around but that it’ll be less of that kind of like grunt work of coding and then typing away in the computer late into the night, and more of kind of high level strategy of what should the software do and then the machines can do the coding for them.
Schwab: Have you talked to tech workers about how they’re feeling right now? Have they sort of caught up with the reality of what’s happening in their job market?
Lin: There’s very much a sense of skepticism from one camp and also from another camp a sense of cautious optimism. So when I talk about skepticism, that’s the group of, even software engineers who kind of felt like they had job security on lock, [who] do feel threatened by the rise of, like, AI coding assistance because they can actually spit out lines of code that can be put into production and use in products. On the other hand, the cautious optimism is this kind of idea that this is just the latest kind of change that the industry is going through and people will be fine as long as they adapt and learn new skills.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
