Fired Later

Here is what applying for a job looks like now, for anyone who hasn't had to lately. You don't apply. You haven't written a cover letter in a year. An AI reads the posting, tailors your CV to it, puts your best side forward in a hundred and forty perfectly reasonable sentences, and submits. On the other end a second AI reads what the first one wrote, and rejects it. Two machines, talking to each other about you, reaching the same conclusion in under a second. You are not a candidate. You are the courier. It is the most efficient rejection pipeline ever built, and its headline feature is that it no longer requires anyone to be involved, including you.

If you think your experience makes you different — twenty years, three startups, that app with the four-star rating — try it. Please. Nothing is out there. What you spent ten or twenty or thirty years learning to do is, as of recently, a solved problem, and nobody pays a person to solve a solved problem. The web app ships itself. The iOS app ships itself. The one place that is hiring, the lab that solved it, is reading a stack of applications from people who have been studying this exact thing at Stanford for eight years, and from that stack it takes the one percent of the one percent. A fifty-year-old with a tier-B résumé and a decade of mobile apps is not rejected by that lab. He is not seen by it. Being rejected would have been a relationship.

Now do the survey everyone is quietly doing. Think through your network. You can name the layoffs; you have heard those stories all year, each one delivered in the slightly hushed voice reserved for diagnoses. Now name the hires. Someone you know, recently, getting a job. Take your time. The silence you are hearing is the statistic. It is not that the market is slow. It is that the thing you are listening for has stopped happening, and the stories about it stopping have not yet been written, because nobody writes a story about a sound that didn't come.

And here is the part the middle class cannot hear: this is not about the people it has already happened to. The midwit reads the above as news from a neighboring country. He is a staff engineer. He is in management. He has a review cycle and a 401(k) and a sincere, load-bearing assumption that 2027 will look like 2026, which is the single most expensive assumption available to a person right now, because the curve he is standing on does not do "like last year." It does doubling. The cuts started with juniors because juniors were cheapest to replace. They are not stopping there, because the thing that replaced the juniors did not stop learning. Senior, staff, manager, director — the same machine, a few quarters later. Nobody is safe. There is no safe. There is only the order of the queue, and the midwit has mistaken his place in the line for an exemption from it. Some people are fired now. Some people are fired later. "Later" is not a different outcome. It is the same outcome with a better seat.

So run it forward, because the people running it forward are not you. Ten, fifteen, twenty percent of the workforce who cannot find work, not because they are lazy, not because they didn't reskill, but because the work left. A government looks at that number and has a short menu. It can feed them: basic income, a monthly deposit in exchange for staying calm. It can not feed them, and then it will need somewhere to send twenty percent of its young men, and history has a well-worn suggestion about where. Or it can take the option it already knows how to run, because it has been running it for thirty years: fake jobs. Keep them busy. The meeting about the meeting, the dashboard nobody reads, the role whose entire function is to be occupied. The middle class will be kept — not for its output, which was already optional, but because an idle middle class is a political problem and a busy one is a line item. It will make less sense than it has ever made, and that is fine, because sense was never what the system was optimizing for. Calm was.

And there is a fourth, and it does not wait its turn. The fake jobs continue either way. An idle middle class is the problem the meetings were built to sedate, and the meetings will be kept after the last person in them can say what they are for. Under that, already running, is the option that never has to be funded. The state does not have to feed the surplus if the surplus agrees to shrink. It does not have to march them if they agree to leave. The program presents as care. A difficult boy, the one least likely to be hired, or paired, or needed next quarter, is walked into a clinic by a parent who believes she is saving him. Puberty stops. The body is edited. He is talked into becoming someone who cannot father a child, and the grandchildren are never in the room to object. Anything that stops the reproducing will do. Castration, filed under ethics, a consent form where the court order used to be, the recovery photographed, because the culture calls the edit liberation and calls doubt violence. This is not a moral judgment about the person on the table. It is an observation about the invoice. The state that would have owed him a stipend, or a rifle, owes him a pamphlet. And for everyone the clinic does not reach, the door already ajar: let them self-delete. Peacefully. Privately. No riot, no draft card, no bread line. The unemployment rate improves by subtraction, and nobody has to sign the form but the person leaving. Feed them, send them, busy them, or let them erase themselves. The first three cost money or blood. The fourth costs a curriculum, and the curriculum shipped years ago.

Which leaves one piece of practical advice, offered without optimism. Have enough. Savings, assets, something that does not need a hiring manager to exist. Enough for a couple of years, if you are lucky about where you are in the line. Enough for a couple of decades, if you are honest about it. Not because the end is near — it isn't near, that's the point — but because "later" is already on the calendar, and the only people who will be fine are the ones who stopped assuming the invite was for someone else.

The job is not coming back. Only the news that it isn't.