An anxious moment
The phrase of the season in tech seems to be "belt tightening". Many places have lay-offs going on. The job market, while improving, is still far from where it used to be. People are being pushed hard and a lot of people seem to be on the verge of burn-out. Many crave a sabbatical but can't bring themselves to because of worries about whether they can find another in the job market.
A drumbeat in the mind
Unlike previous cyclical downturns, this time there is also the looming structural threat of automation by AI. It is hard to not feel anxious when very reasonable and important people casually comment on the possibility of an entire profession being wiped out by AI in a few years.
The technology itself has obviously made visible, rapid, and almost magical progress. Add in the frenetic media coverage and endless private conversations, and it starts to feel like an ominous drumbeat growing louder.
This isn’t a post about the likelihood of AI automating away jobs which I have no idea about anyway. But about the emotional repercussions of living under that threat.
It seems to me that humans have parts in our psychology which help maintain status quo and another part which fears risks to protect us from downsides. Furthermore, people seem to fall on a spectrum based on the relative strength of these parts.
At one extreme are status-quo defenders - AI is useless and irrelevant because it can't do XYZ. At another, we have the fear part raising a fire alarm - AI is going to make us all jobless in the next couple of years. These extremes aside, most people seem to hear at least the quiet voice of fear- "I can't comprehend where this is going but I sure feel uneasy".
Height of irony
This section might feel a tad off-topic but I can’t help commenting on the sad irony of the prospect of software engineers of all people getting automated. A lot of their work involves automating other people's work and until recently, a common prescription for people facing threat of automation was "learn to code". Coding was supposed to be the safety boat which folks drowning from technology-led joblessness could scramble on to. But AI with a wicked grin seems to have poked a hole in it.
Irony aside, as usual, there are accentuating factors which make things more complicated for the immigrant. The issue of visa restrictions and the difficulty they cause in a tight market have been well-discussed. However, I want to touch upon a couple of exacerbating elements that are less discussed.
Thin and young social networks
Even though the various internet job boards might make it seem otherwise, landing a job continues to depend quite a bit on who you know. Immigrants typically have thinner social networks compared to locals given that they have to build their network from the ground up in the new country. And we have discussed the challenges that immigrants face in building and maintaining social networks in a previous post.
Crucially, they don't inherit networks from earlier generations of family members. I believe this is perhaps as important if not more compared to financial inheritance. Contacts in the older generation are particularly helpful since they are more likely to be in positions of significantly more influence and hence much more useful in job searches.
An echo chamber of worries
Another issue is the result of lack of world-view diversity in social networks, especially among tech immigrants. Most people in these circles tend to work in tech and tend to have similar worries and aspirations.
This has many socio-cultural repercussions. One of them is the lack of alternative perspectives and also calibration when it comes to your worries. When all your friends talk about layoffs or AI, your worries amplify each other and could snowball.
If, on the other hand, your network includes, say, nurses, teachers, small business owners etc. and especially older people who may have seen their own ups and downs, you might be able to process your worries with a balanced perspective.
In this sense, how much one ends up worried about something turns out to be a social question. It reminds me of something the writer John Green says in his book, the Anthropocene Reviewed - he has anxiety issues and his brother is the calm one. Green mentions that when faced with any situation when growing up, he would look at this brother to calibrate what level of anxiety is appropriate. In the tech community, we are all worried about the same thing and so might feed off of each other without having access to alternative world views.
A monocrop
The thinness and the lack of diversity in social networks makes me feel like the tech immigrant community is a monocrop - highly productive when the going is smooth but potentially fragile when the sailing gets rough. And right now, whether or not a storm is actually coming, the clouds sure seem dark.