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“LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.”
Frequent Flyer
As the tech industry sees more and more layoffs in the age of AI, one desperate programmer has resorted to good old-fashioned flyering to get the job done — literally.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, former eBay marketing staffer Glenn Kugleman said that after he was said off, he resorted to throwing up hundreds of physical flyers in Manhattan.
“RECENTLY LAID OFF,” scream the 30-year-old’s flyers, which also included a QR code to his LinkedIn profile, screamed. “LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.”
Posted outside the headquarters of Facebook, Google, and other companies, the tech worker’s situation echoes that of many others who were once in high demand for high-paying jobs — and now feel like cold product.
“I thought that would make me stand out,” Kugelman said. “The job market now is definitely harder than it was a few years ago.”
Fascinatingly, it seems that the sheepish scheme worked — Kugleman told the WSJ that posted his last flyer in May of this year, when a head-hunter who found him on LinkedIn recruited him for a six-month contract gig that he hopes will become full-time.
Many Men
While things went well for that guy, the same can’t be said for the hundreds of thousands of other laid off tech workers who are doing things like selling their plasma to make ends meet as more and more companies try — and often fail — to replace their human staff with AI.
Indeed, in a tally from TechCrunch, August 2024 appeared to be the second-worst month of the year for tech layoffs after January, when more than 34,000 workers in the industry lost their jobs. Last month, that figure was still soaring at just over 26,000.
Chris Volz, a 47-year-old Bay Area industry veteran whose career stretches back to the late 1990s, told the WSJ that despite living through many a “boom-bust cycle,” things now feel “very, very different.”
While he used to be regularly contacted by recruiters for high-paying gigs in the past, Volz said that most of his work has “dried up.”
“I applied to, I want to say, about 120 different positions,” he told the newspaper, “and I got three call backs.”
Volz did ultimately land a job this past spring after being laid off last August, but he did so at a five percent pay cut that’s made making mortgage payments difficult.
While most established tech industry types made enough money in the past to theoretically have good nest eggs to coast on now, this downward spiral of firings in a sparse job market bode poorly — especially as younger generations keep paying way too much to learn to code with the promise of jobs that in many cases no longer exist.
More on the tech industry: AI Datacenters More Than 600 Percent Worse for Environment Than Tech Companies Claimed
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