Shawn K, a software engineer with 20 years of experience, lost his job last year and has since been forced to live in a trailer on wheels, work as a delivery boy and sell things on eBay to make ends meet. He has applied for over 800 jobs but still hasn’t found a new one, and he blames AI for that.
Shawn K, a software engineer with 20 years of experience, lost his job last year and has since been forced to live in a trailer on wheels, work as a delivery boy and sell things on eBay to make ends meet. He has applied for over 800 jobs but still hasn’t found a new one, and he blames AI for that.
Sean told Fortune that despite his vast experience and a degree in computer science, he had fewer than 10 interviews out of the 800 applications he sent in. Some of those few interviews were not with a human, but with an artificial intelligence.
«I feel invisible. I feel like I’m being filtered out even before a person appears in the chain», — says the IT worker.
Previously, American Ken shared her negative experience of interviewing with an AI recruiter who started stuttering and scared the girl. However, an expert in communication and etiquette with AI, Emily DeJo, believes that such interviews will become more common as companies seek to streamline and automate the early stages of recruiting.
While fears that AI will start taking jobs away from humans have long existed, the 42-year-old programmer is confident that his experience is just the beginning of a «tidal wave of social and economic catastrophe». «The great displacement is already in full swing», — he recently wrote on his Substack.
Sean’s last job was at a metaspace company, a niche that was predicted to have a great future, but was partially overshadowed by the emergence of ChatGPT.
Sean Kay now lives in a small trailer on wheels in downtown New York City with no plans for a new tech job, struggling to make ends meet and earn a fraction of his former $150,000-a-year salary.
In between constantly searching for a new job, checking his empty inbox, and studying the latest news about artificial intelligence, he delivers orders through DoorDash and sells random household items on eBay, like an old laptop, for just a few hundred dollars.
Sean says he considered taking courses to get a technical certificate, or even a truck driver’s license, but both options were crossed off his list due to the high financial barrier to entry.
Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that more software jobs would soon be on the back burner. By September, he said, AI would be writing 90% of code; moreover, «in 12 months, we could be in a world where AI is writing almost all of the code,» he noted.
According to Layoffs.fyi, over 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2024, and in 2025, that number reached over 50,000.
«This will come to almost everyone in due time, and we are already too late to offer society any real solution to prevent the worst of these consequences. The discussion of replacing jobs with artificial intelligence in the mainstream is still seen as something that will come in the vague future, not as something that is already happening», — the IT expert warns.
Despite this, he does not lose hope, nor is he angry with the AI for replacing him, and still calls himself an «AI maximalist». «If the AI can really do a better job than me, I’m not going to sit here and be upset about it replacing me,» says Sean.
However, he is frustrated that companies are using AI to save money by laying off talented employees, instead of using their knowledge.
The programmer added that people are stuck in the «old business mindset,» which is that if 1 developer can do the work of 10, then the rest of the team is cut. In Sean’s opinion, in this case, it is better to create a team of 10 powerful developers, and «do 1,000 times more work than we did before».
