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“AI Replaced His $150K Tech Job—Now He’s Jobless, Rejected 800 Times, and Living in a Trailer”

Anil Kumar4 months ago4 months ago518 mins

AI obsolescence is “coming for basically everyone in due time,” says Shawn K, an engineer who went from earning $150k to being locked out of the workforce for over a year.

Tech layoffs are nothing new for Shawn K (his full legal last name is one letter).

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI will take over all coding jobs by next year — but an existential crisis is already plaguing some software engineers. One man who lost his job last year had to live in an RV trailer, DoorDashing and selling his household goods on eBay as his once $150,000 salary turned to dust.

The software engineer first lost his job after the 2008 financial crisis and then again during the pandemic, but on both occasions, he was back on his feet just a few months later.

However, when K was handed a pink slip last April, he immediately realized this time it was different: The AI revolution in the tech industry was happening right in front of him.

Despite two decades of experience and a computer science degree, he’s gotten fewer than 10 interviews out of the 800 applications he’s sent out. Worse, some of those interviews have been with an AI agent rather than a human.”

I feel very invisible,” K told Fortune. “I feel overlooked. I feel like I’m filtered out before the human even gets there.”

And while fears about AI replacing jobs have been around for years, the 42-year-old thinks his experience is just the beginning of a “wave of social and economic disaster.”

“Delivering Survival: How DoorDash Became His Only Option—And Ours Too”

K’s last job was working at a company focused on the metaverse — a field that was predicted to be the next big thing, but got partially overshadowed by the rise of ChatGPT.

Now living in a tiny RV trailer in Central New York, K, with no clue about a new tech job, has had to turn to creative strategies to make ends meet and try to recoup a fraction of his previous $150,000 salary.

In between constantly searching for new jobs, checking his empty email inbox, and researching the latest AI news, he delivers DoorDash orders like Buffalo Wild Wings to the local Holiday Inn and sells random household items like old laptops on eBay. All in all, it only adds up to a few hundred dollars.

He’s also considered going back to school for a tech certificate—or even to obtain his CDL trucking license—but both were scratched off his list due to their hefty financial barrier to entry.

K’s reality may surprise some, given that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently labeled software engineering as one of the fastest-growing fields, but stories like hers could soon become even more common.

Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that more software jobs would soon be lost. By September, he said AI would be writing 90% of the code; furthermore, “In 12 months, we could be in a world where AI will essentially be writing all the code,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2024, more than 150,000 tech workers will lose their jobs, and so far in 2025 that number has risen by more than 50,000, according to Layoffs.fyi.

“It’s coming to basically everyone at the appointed time, and we’re already too late to propose any real solutions to prevent the worst of these impacts on society,” K wrote. “Discussion of AI job replacement in the mainstream is still seen as something coming in some vague future, not something that’s already underway.

Losing his job isn’t the only issue

Despite being unemployed for over a year, K still hasn’t lost hope, nor is he angry at AI for replacing him and still calls himself an “AI maximalist.”

“If AI can actually legitimately do a better job than me, I won’t sit here and feel bad that it replaced me and doesn’t have the human touch,” K says.

What’s frustrating, he said, is that companies are using AI to save money by laying off talent — rather than harnessing its power and embracing cyborg workers.

“I think that’s the 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 cut the developer team, rather than saying, oh, well, we have a 10 developer team, let’s do 1,000 times the work we were doing before,” says K.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com