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Tech Layoffs and Reasonable Expectations for Good Jobs

By Evan Arnet
3 Feb 2025

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, opened the year by announcing likely layoffs for around 5% of its workforce. This continues a broader trend for the tech industry, which jettisoned over 150,000 workers in 2024 (and the year before that, and the year before that). How AI will affect the tech workforce is yet to become fully clear, but many may need to “reskill” to stay competitive.

Current layoffs and uncertainty in tech are an interesting follow-up to that pillar of 2010s career advice: “learn to code.” At one level, it was simple, practical advice. Tech jobs were ascendant, and coding was a great way to get into them. And to be clear, demand for tech workers is still relatively high despite layoffs and shifting priorities.

But the advice also speaks to a particular perspective on career success — one of individual responsibility. Its harsher corollary is that if you aren’t successful, it’s because you studied the wrong thing. “Learn to code” has even been used as a way to harass certain professions, such as journalists, when those fields were losing people. The implication is that such individuals have only themselves to blame for choosing a suboptimal career. However, as layoffs continue to rock the tech job market, it is worth revisiting this simple story.

What are reasonable expectations to secure “good” employment – that is, one that meets our material needs and provides basic dignity?

Without defining “reasonable expectations” directly, a few considerations may nonetheless help us think about it more clearly.

First, possible is not the same as reasonable. To give an extreme hypothetical, imagine a well-paying job that anyone can get as long as they are willing to stick their bare hand into a campfire for two minutes. Given the availability of this job, would it be reasonable to say that people are to blame if they lack a good job? That depends on whether you think this is a reasonable expectation — hopefully not. The comparable question is how much work (pain, suffering, discipline, etc.) is reasonable to expect from someone to achieve basic dignified work. Should college be a requirement? Should someone have to study something specific (like coding)? Is it reasonable to expect someone to work their way through college taking night classes just to get a good job? How much time researching the labor market should be expected? How much upskilling? Reskilling? Networking? Self-promoting?

Second, what someone should do to advance their personal goals, is not the same as what’s reasonable to expect from them. Imagine a high school freshman dealt a rough hand in life staring down a bleak future of continuous poverty. But they see a potential path to financial success. By avoiding distractions such as a social life, studying exceptionally hard, and self-teaching themselves at the public library on nights and weekends, they might be able to earn a scholarship to attend a nearby college where they can study something eminently practical like IT, nursing, or engineering. If this person wants to escape their lot, then this is the path that they need to trod. Moreover, it doesn’t matter how unfair they think it is. Poverty has indeed diminished their agency and their resources, but better they invest what agency and resources they do have into improving their situation, than blaming society and railing against the injustice of it all. But is this level of self-sacrifice and discipline to achieve basic stability a reasonable societal expectation for a child? For anyone? (16% of American children born into poverty successfully break out.)

Third, our assessments of reasonable societal expectations for the effort required to get a “good” job should depend on how important jobs are in a given society. If we think one of the justifications for forming a society is that it secures certain rights and protections, then an especially troublesome scenario is one in which good jobs are hard to get, especially for those coming from disadvantaged circumstances, yet the basic material ingredients of a satisfactory life — adequate pay, retirement support, health care — are all dependent on having a good job. This seems to be the reality in America: almost half of American full-time workers are earning below a living wage. Services like universal basic income or universal healthcare would shift the calculation drastically, as a job would no longer be a prerequisite for fundamentals such as shelter, food security, and healthcare.

There is no hard and fast rule here. As a society, we will have to navigate together what a “reasonable expectation” for a good job is. Nonetheless, as the present tumult of the tech sector reminds us, current expectations are set extremely high, and the penalties for failing to achieve success are steep.

Thus far, we have been considering “good” jobs in only the monetary sense. We can turn the “reasonable expectation” question on its head. What is reasonable to expect out of a job: job security, good pay, regular holidays, flexible hours, agency in the workplace, respectful treatment, freedom from workplace surveillance, stimulating work, more?  There is a tendency to dismiss this as mere entitlement. And assuredly, there are practical difficulties. Even if we resolve to demand less of job seekers, and more of jobs, there is no magic button that can be pressed that would give everyone what they need and want.

However, the world transforms all the time, especially in our fast-paced era. We have put a library in our pockets, and developed code that can generate detailed texts, videos, and images from a simple prompt. Is it so unreasonable for workers to expect more?

Evan Arnet received his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from Indiana University. His overarching philosophical interest is in institutions and how they shape and constrain human behavior. This is variously represented in writings on science, law, and labor. Read more about him at www.evanarnet.com
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