Out of Office

I was in the dining room at our South Boston location of Shy Bird—an all day rotisserie, bar, and cafe in Boston—last month when I noticed a group of three young women with laptops open. They had the stickers of a publicly traded tech firm on their laptops, a sure sign of tech employees. I was familiar with the company, so I stopped over to introduce myself.

They were all on LinkedIn. Turns out they’d all recently been laid off.

One of them asked if we were hiring servers.

I've been thinking about that interaction a lot as I see the barrage of articles about the challenges young people, especially recent college graduates, face in their job search. The narrative is the same in all of these articles: AI is replacing entry-level roles in much of the white-collar world and young people are taking the brunt of it. 

It's been a big few weeks for AI doomer-ing. Matt Shumer, an AI founder and investor, published a viral piece telling friends and family that nothing done on a computer is safe. Then Citrini Research published a thought exercise modeling what happens when all of this compounds: an economy that produces more and employs fewer, "Ghost GDP" that never circulates through human hands. Jack Dorsey cut Block's workforce by 4,000 jobs, nearly half of the company, saying (though it’s disputed) AI made the people unnecessary, not because the business was struggling. “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” he told shareholders. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, similarly predicted that within 12–18 months, AI will fully automate most professional tasks in fields like law, accounting, project management, and marketing.

Emily Sundberg, who writes the newsletter Feed Me, surveyed members of the Class of 2026 about their job searches. A student at Emerson described the landscape as "tumbleweeds rolling around everywhere in a post-apocalyptic wasteland." Three separate respondents used the same word to describe the process of looking for work: Sisyphean.