AI is hollowing out the middle class of software engineering

Ah, marvellous. Another week, another excuse for mass layoffs — and this time the corporate world has found a fig leaf so shiny you could check your tie in it. Northeast Times reports that 59 percent of US hiring managers now confess they emphasise AI when explaining hiring freezes or redundancies, because it "plays better with stakeholders" than the plainly less sexy truth: "we have run out of money". So the technology that's supposedly automating the middle class of software engineering is now also automating the corporate alibi. Lovely.

New York, bless its regulatory heart, actually built an AI disclosure box into mass layoff notices. Of more than 160 companies that filed such notices, exactly one — one! — ticked it. That is not a statistical blip; that is a checkbox-shaped black hole. The state can demand transparency till the cows come home, but if the only firm to own up is either a saint or a sucker, the resulting dataset is worth precisely nothing. Meanwhile the other 159 companies get to blame the machines while the CFO quietly shreds the headcount budget.

And this is how the middle class of software engineering gets hollowed out: not with a bang, but with a bullet-pointed slide deck claiming "AI-driven transformation". Hiring managers have learned that "the AI did it" is the twenty-first-century equivalent of "the dog ate my homework", except the dog is a chatbot and the homework is your career. The real hollowing-out is of honesty — and, given that 59 percent are openly admitting to the deception, they don't even seem to think they're doing anything wrong. One hopes the 159 silent companies will eventually find the disclosure box. Maybe they just can't see it through the haze of their own PowerPoint bullet points.