Layoffs on TikTok
Just about everything on the web is on TikTok, and going viral there too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that people who’ve been laid off are there too, trying to figure out what it all means.
Part of me is cynical about this. You mean that as people, we’re so poorly defined without our jobs that our only resource is to grind out some content about it? But on the other side of the coin, making content is what human beings do. Other animals use tools, but do they make content? Apart from some birds, probably not.
My favorite TikTok layoff video is by Atif Memon, a cloud engineer who offers a clear-eyed appraisal of her situation:
@atif_kaloodi So true !! #cloudengineer #sysadmin #layoffs #microsoftlayoffs #googlelayoffs original sound - Atif Memon
“At the company offsite, we celebrated our company tripling its revenue in a year. A month later, we are so poor! Who robbed us?”
“Even if ChatGPT can take away our jobs, they’ll have to get in line behind geopolitics and pandemic and shareholders and investors. I lost my job because the investors of the company were not sure will become 400x in the coming year. ‘How will we go to Mars?’ Someone else lost their job because the investors thought ‘Hmm, if this other company can lay off 12k people and still work as usual, shouldn’t we also try?”
“Artificial intelligence can never overtake human paranoia and human curiosity. AI can only do what human beings have been doing. Only humans can do what no human has done before.”
A lot to chew on in four minutes.
Update: Apparently this is not native to TikTok, but was posted to YouTube by a comedian, Aiyyo Shraddha. It really is a perfect TikTok story! The video is a ripoff.
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