Software engineer earning $150K loses job to AI, faces 800 rejections, now works DoorDash and lives in trailer
Tech layoffs are a familiar story for Shawn K, whose last name is just a single letter. The veteran software engineer has been through industry downturns before—first during the 2008 recession, then again amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But each time, he bounced back in a matter of months. That wasn’t the case after his most recent layoff in April. K quickly realized something fundamental had shifted: artificial intelligence was rapidly transforming the tech landscape, and this time, it wasn’t just a temporary bust.
Even with over 20 years of experience and a degree in computer science, K has managed to land fewer than 10 interviews out of the 800 job applications he’s submitted. Some of those interviews, to his surprise, weren’t even with real people. “I feel super invisible,” K tells Fortune. “I feel unseen. I feel like I’m filtered out before a human is even in the chain.” Although the fear that AI might eliminate jobs has circulated for years, K believes his situation is only the start of what he calls a looming “social and economic disaster tidal wave.” “The Great Displacement is already well underway,” he recently wrote on his Substack.
His previous role was at a company heavily invested in the metaverse—once hailed as the next frontier in tech—until generative AI, like ChatGPT, came along and shifted industry priorities overnight. Now, K resides in a modest RV parked in upstate New York, navigating a harsh new reality without any promising job leads. With no tech gig in sight, he’s had to rely on side hustles just to scrape together some income—nowhere close to the $150,000 salary he once earned.
Between checking his inbox for responses that never come and following the latest developments in AI, he’s delivering meals through DoorDash—like Buffalo Wild Wings runs to local hotels—and unloading odds and ends on eBay, including an old laptop. All of it adds up to a few hundred dollars at best. K explored the idea of getting a new credential—maybe a specialized tech certificate or even a commercial driver’s license—but both routes proved too expensive to pursue.
His story may be surprising to those who rely on federal data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics still ranks software engineering as one of the fastest-growing fields in the job market. Yet, K’s experience might be a sign of what’s ahead for many in the industry. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI would soon handle the majority of software development tasks. He told the Council on Foreign Relations that “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.” By the end of 2024, more than 150,000 tech employees were laid off. So far in 2025, that number has already surpassed 50,000, according to Layoffs.fyi.
“It’s coming for basically everyone in due time, and we are already overdue for proposing any real solution in society to heading off the worst of these effects,” K wrote. “The discussion of AI job replacement in the mainstream is still viewed as something coming in the vague future rather than something that’s already underway.” Still, unemployment hasn’t broken K’s spirit. He hasn’t grown bitter about AI’s rise, either. In fact, he still describes himself as an “AI maximalist.” “If AI really legitimately can do a better job than me, I’m not gonna sit here and feel bad about, oh, it replaced me and it doesn’t have the human touch,” K says.
What does bother him, though, is how businesses are using AI. To K, the problem isn’t the tech—it’s the mindset. “I think there’s this problem where people are stuck in the old world business mindset of, well, if I can do the same work that 10 developers were doing with one developer, let’s just cut the developer team instead of saying, oh, well, we’ve got a 10 developer team, let’s do 1,000x the work that we were doing before,” K says.
