Fears that artificial intelligence will steal all jobs from people have been hovering in the air for the past few years. For some, the intangible threat from AI remains a chimera, while for others it has become a real problem that must be faced. Thus, artificial intelligence has not simplified the work of today's heroes; instead, it has carved a hole in their pockets. We explain how this happened and why IT professionals are suffering because of the AI hype.

What will be discussed

How serious is the situation with IT layoffs due to AI worldwide?

Some people simply lose their jobs

Since October my salary has been cut by 50%

How serious is the situation with IT layoffs due to AI worldwide?

In May of this year, 8,000 Meta employees (or 10% of the company's workforce) were laid off because the company decided to focus on artificial intelligence work. Another 7,000 people were transferred to new AI‑related areas.

The employees who were laid off received severance pay for 16 weeks, plus an additional two paid weeks for each year of service at the company. However, the amount of these payouts is nowhere near the amount Meta intends to spend on developing its AI division: a minimum of $125 billion and a maximum of $145 billion.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly speaks about the intention to invest in artificial intelligence. According to him, AI is now the most important technology of our time:

• The companies

What about Belarus? Earlier we already told how vibe‑coding has affected our IT workers, seriously changing their manual labor. Now we spoke with Belarusians who found that artificial intelligence didn’t help with everyday tasks, but mixed up the cards and affected their salaries.

“Some just end up without a job”

As Matvey says, he would least like to be a junior now, someone who is just starting out in IT. According to the developer’s recollections, six or seven years ago companies were willing to deal with almost “zero” specialists, but now they are not.

“If we put it very roughly, the global approach to the job was: it’s easier to take someone fresh and train them to do what they need. Over time that changed to ‘better to look longer, but find someone who already knows a lot at the start.’ And now the question of hiring juniors is raised less and less — it’s easier to ‘add on’ to an already hired specialist with tools like Claude, Copilot and Cursor and not spend resources on another hire.”

Matvey says that AI has had the biggest impact on those working in outsourcing companies. This is because employers simply don’t want to pay for three developers working on a project when they can pay for the work of only two.

According to our reader, over the last year the number of developers in his company fell from 30 to 22. Mat

Our next hero is not a developer, but a tester. Mikhail (the hero’s name changed at the reader’s request) moved into testing in 2022. Before that, the young man worked in marketing and four years ago decided to change his profession to something “more promising”.

— I spent a long time doing marketing in the banking sector, where there were big demands, endless revisions, but little money. I wanted it to be the opposite.

Of course, I knew about IT and wanted to earn the money that was there. But I literally understood nothing about development. And not only did I not understand it, I also didn’t really want to get into it: it was boring.

At the same time, Mikhail calls himself particular about details and notes that he has always been good at noticing small nuances. After visiting a career counselor, the young man decided to enroll in testing courses — and that is how the story began.