Senior engineers with an annual salary of one million are also defeated by AI: sending out 800 resumes only to be met with silence, delivering food for a living, and living in a trailer...

The Fortune article exposes the plight of a senior software engineer after losing his job, reveals the wave of "big layoffs" triggered by AI, and reminds us to reflect on the challenges and solutions of the future of work. (Synopsis: ChatGPT catches 18 fraud cases in New Taipei City!) Civil servants of the Audit Department used the APP to chase 2 million verdicts) (Background supplement: young people use ChatGPT as a life strategy!) Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: Over 35 years old can't keep up at all) When the prediction that AI will replace human jobs is no longer a distant future, what will hard-working workers do? An article in Fortune this week chronicles the story of Shawn K, a two-decade veteran software engineer who once earned $150,000 a year and lived on a camper trailer after more than a year of unemployment. It reveals the cruel reality of career changes in the AI era, and also rings the alarm that the "big layoff" has quietly started. The Dilemma of Senior Engineers: AI Rings the Alarm Bells of Unemployment In April 2024, Shawn K, 42, lost his $150,000-a-year job as a software engineer. This is not his first job unemployed, having weathered the challenges of the 2008 financial crisis and pandemic, but this time he is in a very different situation. He strongly feels the revolutionary impact of AI on the tech industry, which has left the experienced and computer science degree professional struggling in the job market. According to him, during more than a year of unemployment, he submitted about 800 job applications but received fewer than 10 interviews, some of which were even conducted by AI agents rather than real people. He was deeply frustrated by this, saying that he was "super invisible", "unseen" and often "filtered out before the real person was screened". To make ends meet, he was forced to switch to delivering to DoorDash and become a seller on eBay, earning hundreds of dollars in total. He currently lives in a small RV camper trailer in central New York State. He considered going back to school to get a tech license or a truck driver's license (CDL), but eventually gave up due to financial pressures. Source: Fortune The employment impact under the wave of AI in the technology industry Shawn K's dilemma is actually a microcosm of the transformation of the technology industry under the impact of AI. The rapid progress of artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, in coding is profoundly changing the landscape of software development. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that by 2025 AI will be able to write almost all code, and by 2026, humans may be living in a world where all AI code is written. Although the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) used to rank software engineers as one of the fastest-growing professions, the situation has now diverged from the optimistic outlook of official data. According to Layoffs.fyi's data tracking, the tech industry has seen a wave of layoffs in recent years, with more than 150,000 tech employees losing their jobs in 2024 and more than 50,000 so far in 2025. This trend not only reflects the adjustment of the industrial structure, but also highlights the catalytic role played by AI in it. Shawn K believes that the AI-driven "The Great Displacement" has already unfolded and could be a disastrous wave for society and the economy. He posted on his Substack platform warning that this wave of AI-induced job losses will "affect almost everyone in due course." The Double Edge of AI: Reflections on Potential and Enterprise Applications But despite experiencing firsthand the pain of job loss caused by AI, Shawn K's attitude towards AI technology itself is quite complex, and he even calls himself "the biggest speaker of AI." He once said: "If AI can really do better than me, I won't sit here and feel sorry for it to replace me." However, he was sharply critical of the way AI is applied in the current enterprise. He believes that many companies are laying off employees just to save costs and not really realize the potential of AI to improve overall efficiency or facilitate human-robot collaboration. He argues that companies should think about how AI can empower existing teams to do a thousandfold more work, rather than simply downsizing. This view echoes the widely discussed concept of Cyborg employee (cyborg workers), which emphasizes that man and machine should be partners in collaboration rather than a substitute for each other. Facing the Unknown: The Challenges of the AI Era and the Story of Dealing with Shawn K provides a vivid and sobering case for our AI era. This is not only a warning to software engineers, but also a wake-up call for all professionals: in today's rapidly evolving technology, continuous learning and adaptation to new skills is essential, and even seasoned veterans are not immune to the torrent of change. As Shawn K says, now is the time to embrace this change, explore ways to address it, think deeply about how to redefine the value of work in the age of AI, and find solutions to this unprecedented challenge, rather than waiting for the "wave" to drown it out. Related reports Microsoft and OpenAI cooperation hit the rocks? Wall Street Journal: The rift between the two sides widened, and the "Golden AI Alliance" drifted apart: . OpenAI is KYC? Upload ID documents and personal mug shots to use the gpt-image-1 freshman graph model API OpenAI: We "want to buy Chrome" if Google is forced to sell, give users a truly AI-centric search experience "Senior engineers with an annual salary of one million are also defeated by AI: invest 800 resumes to deliver takeaways and live in trailers..." This article was first published in BlockTempo's "Dynamic Trend - The Most Influential Blockchain News Media".