Fewer Perks, More Work. Tech Jobs Aren’t What They Used to Be
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, May 2nd. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. For a long time, tech jobs were the envy of many American workers. Their high pay, generous benefits, and built-in at-work luxuries lured many to the sector. But times are changing. And as we'll find out in today's show, the pace of that change is rapid, and it's steering those once-lux jobs into more mundane territory.

But first, looking for a new job can be a frustrating experience for almost anyone. It's become especially so, though, for people in the tech industry. That's because job titles are getting more varied, opaque, and overlapping than ever before. And in some cases, they're already obsolete. Case in point, prompt engineer, a job that our reporter Isabel Busquets has been writing about for WSJ's CIO Journal. Isabel, tell us first what this particular job actually is. Prompter.

Prompt engineering, it was a job title that emerged around two years ago. And the idea of a prompt engineer is that large language models are a little finicky about delivering the right output, the right information that you might want. So people have had to develop this skill that's essentially prompting. So you want to ask the model in a way where it's going to understand what you want and deliver the best answers.

And it became a really hot job. But now it's not. Why? At the time, utilizing and getting the most out of AI models was the most important thing that businesses could do. There were a lot of job postings for this at the time. The salaries listed were up to $200,000.

But as time has gone on, we didn't see a lot of people actually get hired into that role. And that's for a few reasons, one of them being the fact that the models themselves got a lot better at intuiting user intent. Basically, they gained the ability to ask follow-up questions if they didn't understand, and they just got more intuitive at understanding what people wanted to get out of them. So it reduced the need for having the exact right prompt.

And then companies have been a little tight around hiring in the last couple years. And what they realized as well is that they wanted everyone in the organization to be interacting with AI models. So they developed these training programs. They would train everyone in the organization on how to prompt. And that also reduced the need for a designated prompt engineer role. And you're

Reporting shows that this issue around prompt engineers is actually indicative of wider trends in the tech industry. Job titles and roles have become ever-changing and complicated and confusing for

Why is that? It's so crazy how fast the technology is developing that it's creating jobs and also destroying those jobs in the span of less than two years. But as companies use AI, they need people with different skills. They need people with AI skills in particular, but that can mean a lot of different things.

So a lot of companies have sort of created new job titles to signify that. But since the technology is developing so fast, there hasn't really been an industry consensus around what these new jobs should be titled. Phrases like AI or machine learning or.

computer vision in some cases. Sometimes they're titled with data or data analytics because that's also really closely linked with the idea of AI. So if you're a job seeker, it can be kind of confusing to figure out, you know, I want to search for a job. Well, what job do I want to search for? You need to search for like four different search terms to get the exact same result. Yeah, sometimes 40. The

The chief economist at LinkedIn was telling me that she's seen some essentially very similar roles titled up to 40 different ways. So it's a complex landscape for sure. That was Isabel Busquets, a reporter for the WSJ's CIO Journal. Coming up, what to do when the midday ping pong sessions come to an end and the free specialty snacks pantry closes. We'll talk about how the tech sector, which once bucked traditional office culture, is now feeling more buttoned up. That's after the break. ♪

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Untouchable. That is how a veteran of meta described what it felt like working in tech. That is, until just a few years ago. Now, longtime tech employees say management is focusing more on delivering financial results that Wall Street investors expect. And that has turned Silicon Valley's mantra to move fast and break things into a more muted heads down, keep quiet mantra.

WSJ tech reporter Catherine Bindley has been exploring this culture change. So, Katie, basically, tech jobs, once the envy of office workers everywhere, are just starting to look like every other job?

According to some workers, yes. That came up pretty consistently in interviews, especially with people who had been working for some of the large tech companies for a long time. Just the culture shifts, the differences in what's expected of them, really. It used to be like this, and now it's like that. And yeah, it's like working anywhere else. And let's talk about this and that, because when I think of a tech job, I think of

what's become, I think, a very cliched version of it, like ping pong tables in the afternoon and free fancy snacks for everybody in the office. But there are some deeper ways that things are shifting, too. Just tell us about those. Yeah, so these changes have been very slow building. It's not one day everyone woke up and their work environments and their jobs were completely different. So what's different than just, OK, the ping pong tables or the snacks that's really meaningful is the way that

they're doing work, I guess you could say. So they're starting to experience things or have in recent years been experiencing things like job creep, for example. So maybe your coworker gets laid off and a company is then shifting that person's responsibilities onto you, but you might not be getting a promotion or a raise or anything like that. So you're just accumulating more work, working longer hours without some of the recognition that you would typically associate with that work.

One worker said the company refers to it as agility, which is a euphemism for you are now expected to do a bunch of things that you didn't previously have to do that are not maybe in your job description. And

And this was a particular issue at Amazon Web Services, as you described it in your story with a particular product manager who talked about how when people left jobs, they just weren't backfilling them. Just talk us through some of the changes that have been happening there. Yeah. So the company did say that they are still backfilling roles. But this particular worker said that the unit that he is working within is taking on more customers. You can presume that they're busier, but the unit that he's in, they're not backfilling roles. Right.

And then the other thing he noted, which was interesting as far as impacts of prioritizing AI, is that there are these important but rather mundane business functions that still need to be taken care of. And his experience has been that you're not always able to get the support you need or get those functions taken care of because there are –

so many people prioritizing AI or AI-related tasks, products, et cetera. And so he wrote code for the first time in 10 years because there's a team that normally would have done that for him, but they were not available to help him. So that was kind of another example of just like job creep and the impact of doing more with less.

And there was also a woman there who noted that she saw a pop-up on her screen about keystroke tracking. Can you talk about that too? She got a pop-up that said your screen is being viewed. And then another employee actually found software on his work computer. And when he looked into it, it said that it could track keystrokes, monitor websites, and also take screenshots. Amazon did say that these types of programs are to protect sensitive and proprietary information and that they are not to monitor employees.

And Katie, based on all these conversations that you've been having with employees across the tech industry, is it just the way that companies grow up that this is what happens, that all the fun things fall away and then serious matters take precedent? Are the glory days, as one worker described them, over for big tech?

Tech specifically, there may have been a perception that the glory days could last forever because of the way the cultures were built. We were talking about perks earlier. For a long time, I mean, it was very standard for workers to push back on policies they didn't agree with and for leaders to really listen and in some cases make business decisions based on leadership.

whether or not their workers were in favor of things or not. There were a lot of examples from that from a while back, and that's slowly been changing for certainly a while now. They just had very different cultures that weren't common in other industries. But when the supply and demand changes and the labor market changes and the workers no longer have the leverage and the power, you do see that.

And what have the companies themselves or their bosses said about this cultural shift that they're seeing? Yeah, I mean, we've been hearing this for a while now. Essentially, ever since there was all this overhiring during the pandemic, then we had a downturn. And then following that, it really became just a much more kind of cautious, cost-conscious situation.

environment in tech. And the leaders are not, it's not like they're telling workers one thing and doing another now. They're telling workers exactly what's up, which is, yeah, you need to be efficient. You need to be more productive. And I guess it's take it or leave it mentality. Either you are on board and you want to keep working here or you don't.

That was WSJ Tech reporter Katie Bindley. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Victoria Craig. Additional support this week from Katie Dayton and Melanie Roy. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Sinsley are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.