Workers at Google, TikTok, Adobe, Dropbox, CrowdStrike, and other tech firms recount how managers used AI to justify firing them, speed up their work, and more
“What will AI mean for jobs?” may be the single most-asked question about the technology category that dominates Silicon Valley, pop culture, and our politics. Bluesky: @midimyers.com , @larsonlee , @bcmerchant , @bcmerchant , @jasonkoebler , @amyalexca , @badfutures.com , @rgarner , and @bcmerchant . X: @rustybrick Forums: Hacker News and r/BetterOffline Bluesky: @midimyers.com : “I feel like I'm hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I'm actually doing all my own work” www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is- ... Larson Lee / @larsonlee : This is fascinating. Bosses all across the tech industry are forcing employees to use AI for anything and everything, even when it makes their jobs harder and their outputs worse. When this bubble finally pops a lot of companies are going down, and we'll get years of terrible software as a souvenir. Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : In Silicon Valley, AI is being used to speed up work, justify department-wide layoffs, and generate code that is going unchecked into some of the world's largest and most important codebases. — Junior coders rely on AI to pump out code, and managers are using it to cut jobs and push out competitors. Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : This is the first installment of my ‘AI Killed My Job’ project. I decided to start with the tech industry, as that's where AI is being built, and often most eagerly adopting the tech. — We've seen the headlines about layoffs, the AI-first strategies, and so on—but what's happening on the ground? [image] Jason Koebler / @jasonkoebler : This is a critical piece of journalism from @bcmerchant.bsky.social — a dozen tech workers in their own words explain how their bosses replaced them with AI, or how they were made to train the AI that replaced them, and what could or is already going wrong — www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is- ... @amyalexca : Whew 😬 “Being forced to use AI has turned a job I liked into something I dread. As someone with a journalism background, it feels insulting to use AI instead of creating quality blog posts about education policy.” — A marketing team-member at an EdTech co. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is- ... Christopher Rice / @badfutures.com : There's gonna be sooooo much software and database engineering work needed in the next few years because of the slop and bad code/tech debt being produced by AI. I hope the high quality CS folks who retain the skills to do the job charge out the ass for it. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is- ... Russell Garner / @rgarner : The best jobs I ever had, someone trusted me and wanted me to do a thing. The worst jobs I ever had, the trust was limited/conditional. And now we've got managers *mandating* that ICs use LLMs. That's the very opposite of trust. — The endgame of any of this is nothing good. — Join a union. Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : What impact is AI having on jobs in the tech industry? I've been collecting stories from tech workers—from engineers at giants like Google to content mods at TikTok to coders at small startups—to find out. — Here, in their words, is how AI is transforming, degrading, and yes, replacing their jobs. X: Barry Schwartz / @rustybrick : they built the AI that is replacing them? Forums: Hacker News : AI Killed My Job: Tech Workers r/BetterOffline : How AI is killing jobs in the tech industry
Context & Ripple Effects
This broadens the labor impact seen in Duolingo's AI-first shift, where AI adoption was already associated with creative-work attrition, hiring cuts, and weaker freelance demand. Here, workers describe the mechanism inside major tech employers: management mandates, accelerated output expectations, and AI-based rationales for reducing staff.
It also extends an earlier workplace pattern in which a call-center employee worried that AI assistance was training her replacement. The accounts matter because they place that concern across software, security, cloud-storage, design, and social-platform workplaces rather than a single customer-service role.
First-order effects
- Employees at the named firms face immediate pressure to incorporate AI into daily work, including where workers say it worsens the quality of their output or changes how their performance is judged.
- Workers report that AI has been used to support individual firings and broader layoffs, while some were required to help train systems later used to replace their roles.
Second-order effects
- Mandated acceleration can move more AI-generated code into important codebases with less review, increasing quality and safety scrutiny for engineering teams and the companies deploying the software.
- As AI becomes a management tool for setting output expectations, workers and teams may have less leverage to reject automation that reallocates work or eliminates roles.
Third-order effects
- If these practices spread, AI adoption may become less a discretionary productivity tool and more a mechanism for reorganizing white-collar labor around smaller teams, standardized workflows, and automated output.
- The reported replacement dynamic could sharpen demands for worker consultation, disclosure, and protections around training data and automation decisions, though the accounts alone do not establish how employers or regulators will respond.
The trend: This is one data point in AI industrialization: firms are embedding generative tools into work processes while using the resulting productivity narrative to reshape staffing.