Tech sector posts records with AI and sends workers home

eBay throws eight hundred people out the door while posting record profits. No crisis, no emergency, just a choice. Try writing that in a press release without making it look exactly like what it is.

The sector had been heading here for years, openly, unhurried, while you cashed your paycheck and assumed expertise was something you owned. It wasn’t. It was a lease agreement with no end date that you were never allowed to read. First the support staff, who never really counted anyway. Then the juniors, who should have seen it coming. Now the senior roles, the specialists, the people with twelve years of experience who just learned that twelve years of experience is a line item that gets written off the moment something cheaper comes along. Like you.

“Reskilling program.” Say it out loud. Notice how it sounds like something that works. It’s a press release with a timeline. There are fifty-year-olds being offered a webinar on prompt engineering, as if the industry that wrote them off is now doing them a favor by handling their retraining. Leadership says the pace is too fast to keep up with. Of course they say that. If the pace is too fast, the system failed, and the system has no name. Convenient, a system with no name.

Forty-five thousand people. Twenty percent officially attributed to AI, meaning the companies held the pen when the cause of death was filled in, and wrote “AI” because AI can’t be sued. AI sounds like tide. Like tectonic pressure. Like something geological that started before you were born and will continue after you’re gone. No boardroom. No decision. No executives.

Seattle, San Francisco, Sydney, Stockholm. Cities the sector spent years inflating with money that doubled rents, pushed out small businesses, and made local economies dependent on one industry that is now cutting its workforce in half and being rewarded with a higher share price. Pinterest dipped briefly after the announcement. The market found that unambitious.

Somewhere there’s a forty-three-year-old being told his approach is outdated. Not him. His approach. The distinction is legally relevant.