Shawn Kay once earned $150,000 a year as a senior software engineer in upstate New York. He specialized in building systems for companies working on the metaverse, one of the most hyped sectors in recent years. With two decades of experience and a degree in computer science, Kay seemed well positioned to thrive in the evolving tech economy.
But in April 2024, he was laid off from his job. His employer had turned to artificial intelligence tools that could automate large parts of his role. That decision upended his life, sending him into a long and fruitless job search that left him living in a trailer and delivering meals for DoorDash.
800 Applications, 10 Interviews
After losing his job, Kay began applying to every relevant position he could find. Over the following months, he submitted more than 800 applications, a process he described as exhausting and demoralizing. He received fewer than ten interview invitations, and some of those were with automated systems instead of human interviewers.
“I feel super invisible,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “I feel unseen. I feel like I’m filtered out before a human is even in the chain.” Despite his credentials, Kay found himself shut out of a tech labor market that had shifted dramatically in the year since his layoff.
His experience reflects a broader trend. In 2024, more than 150,000 tech workers in the United States lost their jobs, according to the layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. That number has already surpassed 50,000 in 2025. Industry observers note that many companies, after rapid hiring during the pandemic, have overcorrected by slashing headcount and offloading work to lower-cost solutions—including AI tools and overseas contractors.
From High Tech to Gig Work
Without a steady income, Kay moved into a small trailer parked in central New York. He now spends his days juggling job applications, checking his inbox for responses, and picking up deliveries for apps like DoorDash. He has also turned to eBay, selling used household items to bring in whatever income he can.
At most, these activities add up to a few hundred dollars a month, a sharp contrast to the lifestyle he once maintained. He has considered enrolling in certificate programs to retrain, or even getting a commercial driver’s license to enter the trucking industry, but both options were set aside due to their high upfront costs.
Still, Kay has not lost his interest in technology or in artificial intelligence. He describes himself as an “AI maximalist,” and says he does not blame the technology itself for his situation. Instead, he points to the decisions made by executives and hiring managers.
“I think there’s this problem where people are stuck in the old world business mindset of, well, if I can do the same work that 10 developers were doing with one developer, let’s just cut the developer team,” he said. “Instead of saying, oh, well, we’ve got a 10-developer team, let’s do 1,000x the work that we were doing before.”
New Tools, Fewer Humans
While Kay’s story has gained attention, the dynamics he describes are not unique. Industry leaders like Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, have predicted that artificial intelligence systems will be generating 90 percent of software code by September 2025. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Amodei went further, saying that “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.”
That forecast comes despite data showing that many AI-generated programs still require extensive human correction. A 2023 developer survey found that 59 percent of engineers reported frequent errors when deploying AI-assisted code.
Still, the pressure to reduce costs and boost efficiency is leading companies to rely on AI and to outsource more technical tasks to workers abroad. For many firms, the option to pay a team of lower-wage developers in another country instead of a single six-figure engineer in the U.S. has become increasingly attractive.
A Shifting Labor Market
Kay has lived through tech downturns before—after the 2008 financial crisis, and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, he managed to find new jobs within a few months. This time, he said, the shift feels different.
In posts on his Substack blog, he has called it “The Great Displacement,” warning that many workers will be caught off guard. “The discussion of AI job replacement in the mainstream is still viewed as something coming in the vague future rather than something that’s already underway,” he wrote.
Now 42, Kay continues to apply for jobs and monitor AI developments closely. He hopes to find a way back into the industry that shaped his career, but he says the window may already be closing for others like him. “It’s coming for basically everyone in due time,” he wrote, “and we are already overdue for proposing any real solution in society to heading off the worst of these effects.”
