Unemployment remains below 4% in the United States, but workers in the tech industry are still experiencing layoffs at rates greater than other professions.
According to an NBC News story, heading into 2024, tech remains one of the few soft spots in an otherwise strong labor market.
Brian Cheung quotes one tech worker:
“There was a time when working in tech seemed like the most stable career you could have,” said Ayomi Samaraweera, who was laid off as chief of staff at the content creator platform Jellysmack in December 2022. After about 10 years in the industry, she said, “tech does not seem safe and secure.”
There is one area in tech that is bucking this trend, however. Software and hardware engineers versed in AI are finding employers desperate to hire – or retain – their skills.
Gareth Vipers and Kimberley Kao from the Wall Street Journal report that Elon Musk has recently raised the salaries of Tesla’s AI engineers.
Tesla is raising compensation for its artificial intelligence engineers in a bid to ward off poaching from the likes of OpenAI, Chief Executive Elon Musk said.
Musk said his electric-vehicle company is boosting pay at a time when OpenAI has been “aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers,” in a series of posts on social-media platform X late Wednesday.
The competition for AI engineers “is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré reports that Meta has experienced a steady exodus of its top AI talent in recent months, leading CEO Mark Zuckerberg to send personally written recruiting e-mails to AI staffers at competitor Google. During March 2024, Meta AI experts Devi Parikh, Abhishek Das, and Erik Meijer all left the company to pursue other opportunities, creating a talent vacuum Zuckerberg is undoubtedly trying to fill.
Meijer, who served as Meta’s Director of Engineering, wrote on X that he’s “more bullish than ever about Meta with the company’s increased focus on AI,” but seemed to steer budding AI engineers away from larger companies.
“Given the incredible competitive pressure in the field, there is really no advantage to be inside a large corp if you want to build cool stuff on top of [Large Language Models],” Meijer wrote.
Yet, smaller companies may be at a disadvantage compared to the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Meta, as only a few companies can afford the massive cloud infrastructure necessary to work with the largest models, creating a scale disadvantage.
MIT Sloan Management Review described this scale disadvantage in a story last summer. Yannick Bammens and Paul Hünermun write:
Deep pockets, access to talent, and massive investments in computing infrastructure only partly explain why most major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have come from a select group of Big Tech companies that includes Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. What sets the tech giants apart from the many other businesses seeking to gain an edge from AI are the vast amounts of data they collect as platform operators.
Whether AI engineers choose to work for large or small companies, they can expect to find generous job offers. The Daily Mail reports that software engineers with specialized training in AI are seeing average wages $100,000 higher than their non-AI engineering peers. And depending on experience, those salaries can approach seven figures.
James Cirrone writes:
Tech companies are willing to pay top dollar – up to $1 million or more – to poach talented software engineers with experience in generative artificial intelligence.
Employees who know how to work with large language models and semiconductor chips – which is the technology undergirding popular apps like ChatGPT – are becoming a rarity in the job market, according to executives.
While engineers who have the skills to create systems like ChatGPT are in strongest demand, Business Insider reports that companies are also interested in hiring non-software developers who understand the technology and how to apply it across a range of industries.
Aaron Mok writes:
While many AI-related jobs posted on Indeed and LinkedIn are for software developers and machine learning engineers with advanced degrees, some don’t require a technical background. Organizations want to use AI tools in their workflows to boost productivity, save time, and make more money — but they also need workers who can link the very technical side and the business side.
“Companies are desperate to get people figuring out AI for their organizations,” J.T. O’Donnell, a career coach at Work It Daily, told Business Insider.
Business Insider identifies nine non-programming jobs in demand, including AI product managers, ethics specialists, sales engineers, business analysts, data annotators, prompt engineers, product designers, policy analysts, and sector specialists.
There continues to be much debate about whether AI will be a net job creator or job destroyer, but for those who understand how to implement AI systems or effectively utilize them, the job market looks bright.