Dear Reader,

It is no secret that AI is changing everything for professional programmers. They were once regarded as rock stars – pampered and adored by tech companies. Six figures straight out of college (or even out of high school, if you were really good) was pretty much the ground floor for many companies, with salaries scaling up depending on the skills, the need, and the competition. And then there were the perks: free gourmet lunches, big parties, massages, signing bonuses…. The sports cars of the anointed ones filled up the freeways of the South Bay. San Francisco got too expensive for the people who lived there because the coders kept bidding up the price of housing.

Oh how swiftly things change. AI allowed tech companies to lay off more than 150,000 workers in 2024, and at this writing, we're already up to almost 100,000 for 2025 [1]. The sheer numbers are startling, but behind those numbers, the significant thing is that these layoffs moved the needle from scarcity to overabundance. In the past, big companies couldn't hire enough programmers, and that scarcity created the demand that led to those big salaries and perks. Now that so many out-of-work programmers are on the streets, the swagger and power of the journeyman coder is tanking – and salaries along with it. It is strange to think of programmers being something like the hapless Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, bidding down the price for picking fruit to a mere subsistence, but in terms of the market forces, the situation is not so different.

Commentator and firebrand Cory Doctorow posted an insightful article this month [2] in which he suggests it might be time for tech workers to unionize. Doctorow believes big tech moguls are always working to "shift as much as they can from users, workers, suppliers, and business customers to themselves," a process that he calls "enshittification." According to Doctorow, the demand for programmers, and their ability to walk away to another job, acted as a counter weight to the corporations' worst instincts. Now that that power is disappearing, work conditions, quality control, and almost everything else about the tech industry is bound to get worse. A union or other collective bargaining organization might be the best way to restrain the decay.

Keep in mind that, at least for the foreseeable future, Big Tech companies will still need some programmers, just not as many. Even the vibe coding techniques practiced with AI require some human involvement. So there is bound to be a shakeout, but when the smoke clears, companies will always need to have employees around who understand tech, and those employees might do better if they band together rather than trying to negotiate with the company alone.

Sometimes when I hear stories about tech workers getting replaced by AI, I'm reminded of another worker who faced the rising tide of automation: steel drivin' man John Henry, immortalized in the American folk song, who beat the steam drill in a race then keeled over and died afterwards. The song marks the turning point in the economy of the railroad industry, in which machines took over the roles once served by workers. Here we are 100 years later, and the railroads still employ a lot of humans, many of whom are glad to be unionized.

Joe Casad, Editor in Chief