Photo: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Everyone in tech is worried about layoffs. Since the beginning of the year, Block (formerly Square) cut its workforce nearly in half, Oracle began laying off up to 30,000 people, Amazon announced yet another reduction in force, Snap laid off around 15 percent of its staff, and Pinterest announced plans to do about the same thing. Microsoft recently announced its first-ever voluntary buyouts, targeting longtime employees, which some are reading as a prelude to deep cuts.
Most of the firms are paring down workforces that grew enormously while interest rates were low. But all of them have at least something to do with AI. Some firms, like Oracle and Microsoft, are reallocating capital to massive investments in the technology. Block’s leadership says it believes it can now run its firm with far fewer people, while Snap, in a more urgent cost-cutting mode, signaled that automation may save money.
Job loss is the dominant fear as announcements pile up and employees absorb warnings about mass displacement from AI leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. But two recent changes at Meta highlight another question: What does all this mean for the people who are left?
The first, of course, is a layoff, which Meta characterized as part of a “continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” The firm has spent — often haphazardly — more than $70 billion developing AI so far, with plans to spend more in the coming year (in addition to spending a lot of its cash on AI and freeing up more through layoffs, the company has been selling tens of billions in bonds).
The second change came just before the layoffs and was reported first by Reuters:
Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” one memo said. “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” said another.
Just a few years ago in a healthier job market, installing screen-recording software on employee laptops would have been an enormous scandal for Meta and unthinkable for many of its employees, who were well compensated and in demand. Now, backed by the threat of more layoffs, their jobs are being both downgraded and assessed for possible automation
(employees are indeed quite angry about this). These are common conditions in many industries in which workers have less leverage; indeed, even at Meta, subcontractors hired to moderate content and label data have long dealt with constant surveillance and threats of job loss and automation. Meta’s new chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, comes from this world: His startup, Scale AI, oversaw a vast workforce of contractors who did the “grunt work” involved in AI training and deployment and specialized in collecting the sorts of data Meta is now gathering by monitoring its own employees.
It may be the case that collecting the mouse movements and keystrokes of thousands of Meta employees provides a real advantage in training AI models or designing agentic software. What’s certain is that Meta believes it’s in a position to dramatically renegotiate its relationship with its workforce. Into the early 2020s, jobs at big tech companies were extremely desirable, attracting qualified workers from across the economy and drawing ambitious young graduates away from jobs in finance, law, medicine, etc. Now, rather than providing a track to long-term job security in a futureproof industry, some of tech’s most visible leaders are eagerly making a new offer to their employees: the prospect of downward mobility, limited freedom, and de-skilling. They’re being told that they may be replaceable and that to find out if they are, they’ll have to try to train their replacements.
The destruction of the aspirational tech job is itself an aspirational project. We don’t yet know if cutting a workforce to the bone and rolling out a bunch of AI tools is a path to success for an established tech firm, and anyone who tells you it’s easy to guess what the workforce composition of a 2026 “technology” company will look like in 2029 is probably a little too confident in their forecasting skills. (It’s also worth nothing here that Meta, a successful social-media company that is struggling to catch up with newer AI labs, has tended to chase industry trends, not lead or correctly anticipate them, for the past decade.) For now, though, the message being sent to many workers in America’s most vibrant economic sector, a pillar of the economy’s success for the past 50 years, is loud, clear, and being heard: We might lay you off soon, and even if we don’t, your job isn’t what it used to be.
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