Walmart Global Tech laid off 1,500 employees, including principal software engineer Marc Kriguer. Kriguer, a 59-year-old engineer with 28 years in the industry, has faced four layoffs in 18 years, with previous cuts at Sun Microsystems, a plagiarism-checker company, and another firm affected by COVID revenue drops.
He says AI tools were pushed at Walmart before his role was cut, but he resisted relying on AI-generated code. He sees value in AI-assisted code reviews but believes human-written code still holds an edge.
“I really felt that human-written code is better than AI-written code.”
Kriger doesn’t think AI layoffs are a major cause yet. Most job listings he finds want coding experience first, with AI skills learnable on the job. Still, he expects AI expertise to be a must-have in two years.
“I feel like I don’t have to worry about not having direct experience working with AI yet, but I think two years from now all the jobs out there will be looking for AI.”
He blames layoffs on companies hiring too aggressively, getting funded heavily by venture capital, then cutting costs when money dries up. Engineers are often targeted because of their salaries or because products are considered finished.
“The common thread between the other layoffs I’ve experienced is cost-cutting… Companies don’t have the revenue to support their costs, so they reduce the number of employees.”
Despite multiple layoffs, Kriguer says demand for software engineers isn’t shrinking overall. He’s applied to 40 jobs and interviewed with 15 since losing his role.
“I really haven’t looked around to see what the market is for brand-new engineers, but I haven’t noticed a decrease in demand for software engineers in general.”
