This essay is based on a conversation with 59-year-old Marc Kriguer, a software engineer who has been fired multiple times. His history of employment 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 someone else's code a month before I turned 10.
In the late 1970s, people didn't have personal computers and people didn't talk about becoming software engineers, but they wanted to do something with the computer.
I have been a software engineer for 28 years and have lost my job four times at the past 18 years old.
My first layoff happened at Sun Microsystems around 2008. Since 2002, there have been layoffs almost every year, and I have survived the first few. But in the end, my group was hit quite hard and Oracle quickly acquired the company.
I then went through three more layoffs. In 2019, I was one of the leading engineers fired from the plagiarism checker company. He was fired again at the start of Covid by another company as revenue fell sharply in just a month.
Then two months ago, I discovered that my position at Walmart Global Tech as a leading software engineer was excluded along with around 1,500 others.
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I don't think AI is the reason for software engineer layoffs
AI has changed the landscape of work in several ways, but I don't think it's causing more layoffs.
In the last few months of my job, Walmart started to start using tools with AI-powered for everyone and help them write code. I was one of the few stragglers who opposed the idea. I really felt that human-written code is better than AI writing code.
I don't think AI is best for writing code, but I think it will help you evaluate the code. I basically used another tool that enhances code reviews, but I thought it was well made.
I don't have it, so I feel somewhat limited to what I can search for because a lot of work requires AI experience. Most of the jobs I apply to show that they don't involve AI or learn it at work. They just want coding experience and know that it's a skill that AI can learn.
I feel there's no need to worry about not having any direct experience with AI, but I think in two years, all the work there is looking for AI.
Companies hire too quickly
Over the past three years, the number of people affected by high-tech layoffs has increased significantly.
I don't know why I pushed for reorganization and layoffs in Walmart, but the common thread between the other layoffs I've experienced is cost savings.
Companies do not have revenue to support costs, thus reducing the number of employees. If a company hires fewer people in the first place, I think they are more stable. That's the nature of the way venture capitalists fund these companies. They give them a lot of money at once, and the companies take on more than they can afford in the long run.
I think part of the reason software engineers are targeted is specifically the higher income. If a company is trying to cut costs, you will see that by cutting more software engineers, you will need to remove less people overall. Or they may already be building a product and the company doesn't think they need engineers anymore.
The problem is that you need an engineer. A bug appears and you will need to revisit the code in the end. “Okay, I've finished the product. I'm done. No more engineers needed.”
Even if I lose my job several times, I have never looked for work for more than five months. This time I applied for probably 40 jobs and interviewed about 15 companies so far.
I'm not really looking around to see what the market is for new engineers, but I'm not aware of the decline in demand for software engineers in general. This role may not be in high demand, but it does not appear to be shrinking either.
