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Why Tech Workers Are Ditching Big Cities for Boise

Why Tech Workers Are Ditching Big Cities for Boise

The past year has brought a reckoning in the tech job industry across the US, upending career trajectories for recent grads. When they chose majors like computer science four years ago, they expected to follow those before them into a lucrative market with perks at Big Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and others. But instead they’ve been met with hiring freezes and massive layoffs across the industry that have forced pivots. Those changes are bleeding into 2024. Twitch, Discord, Duolingo, Amazon, and Google all announced cuts last week. Some hopeful tech workers have spent countless hours applying to gigs without luck, and others are looking more to the government for tech work, seeking purposeful work and reliability.

There’s so much opportunity in Boise because the area’s nascent talent pool hasn’t caught up to meet the tech industry’s demands, says Nick Crabbs, partner and chief community officer at software company Vynyl and a native of Boise’s tech scene who previously helped lead Boise Startup Week. That has led to the in-migration, but the city’s unusually friendly nature and smaller industry also helps boost young careers, Crabbs says. “If you come to Boise, you can very quickly kind of accelerate yourself into career-advancing moves.”

In the wake of some 400,000 tech layoffs between 2022 and 2023, young people are looking for new types of work. More than 40 percent of job applications submitted by tech majors on Handshake went to internet and software companies in 2021, but that number fell to 25 percent by September 2023. In the same time, applications to government jobs doubled. Handshake also found that women in tech-related majors are more likely than men to submit applications to roles in finance, management, consulting, government, education, health care, and research companies, while men are more likely to apply to internet and software companies.

Some of the Boise boom will continue to be driven by Micron, which employs around 5,400 people in Boise. Its expansion is expected to create 17,000 jobs, with 2,000 of those directly at Micron, by 2030, says Scott Gatzemeier, the company’s corporate vice president of frontend US expansion. The company gave full-time jobs to nearly 200 of its interns last year, and plans to have some 370 more interns work at the company this year.

But there’s a startup and entrepreneurial culture driving growth, too. Boise today feels like Nashville or Austin two or three decades ago, says Clark Krause, executive director of the Boise Valley Economic Partnership, a regional business organization. A Boise chef won a James Beard award in 2023, the city has an annual music festival with dozens of artists, and there’s nearby skiing and hiking. A one-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $1,300 a month. “You can afford to have the lifestyle you dreamed about really easily here,” Krause says.

But as the tech industry simmers, the city is feeling the strain. “We’ve had all the benefits of growth, but also all the challenges of growth,” Krause says. Housing prices in Boise have jumped by more than 50 percent since 2019. The city is investing $340 million to make its downtown more walkable, and also announced plans to redevelop hundreds of affordable housing units last year. But it will need to build around 2,700 new housing units each year to keep up with demand, a 2021 analysis from the city found. Construction in Boise fell some 4,000 units behind that goal over a three-year period preceding the report.

Labor experts say the dust from tech layoffs is starting to settle. But Gen Z is focused on stability, says Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at Handshake. “When you’re thinking about stability, and then you see headlines about layoffs, that doesn’t read stability,” she says. The move to more affordable, non-coastal cities in the US is appealing for a generation that has watched millennials struggle under student loan debt and rising housing costs. “As long as housing continues to skyrocket in some of the major cities, some of these secondary cities that are a little bit smaller, a little bit more manageable, will continue to see a bit of an increase in the number of young professionals that are willing to go there.”

WIRED has teamed up with Jobbio to create WIRED Hired, a dedicated career marketplace for WIRED readers. Companies who want to advertise their jobs can visit WIRED Hired to post open roles, while anyone can search and apply for thousands of career opportunities. Jobbio is not involved with this story or any editorial content.

No, the Great Tech Layoffs of 2023 Aren’t Happening Again

No, the Great Tech Layoffs of 2023 Aren’t Happening Again

So far, 2024 is off to a start that looks a lot like 2023—with a week full of job cuts from tech companies.

Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contractors earlier this week, citing artificial intelligence as part of the reason. Twitch announced a cut of 500 people, and its parent company, Amazon, also made moves to lay off hundreds of employees across Prime Video and MGM Studios on Wednesday.

Google followed, also laying off hundreds of employees working on its Google Voice assistant, with additional reorganization affecting its hardware teams working on augmented reality, the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches, and the Nest thermostat. On Thursday, Discord said it would lay off 17 percent of its staff after hiring too quickly in recent years.

It’s a flurry of announcements that feels all too familiar, but experts say these layoffs don’t necessarily mean 2024 will prove as brutal as recent years. The job cuts are smaller than those made in late 2022 and 2023, when companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta laid off thousands of workers after years of rapid growth. And with a steady labor market in place, they don’t necessarily point to an ongoing slide in tech jobs, but instead to shifting priorities within companies.

The tech sector is looking healthy overall since consumer habits have stabilized after rapid changes during the Covid-19 pandemic, says Rachel Sederberg, senior economist with labor analytics firm Lightcast. Some of these latest cuts target specific departments and products, and may be just a part of doing business.

“Businesses make choices about what they want to focus on all the time, and sometimes they come as job cuts,” Sederberg says. Companies may continue to make these smaller, targeted cuts in coming months, but she says she doesn’t expect to see layoff “contagion” across tech companies or other industries.

This isn’t sweeping rightsizing, as tech firms did in 2022 and 2023, says Daniel Keum, associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. As companies look for ways to utilize and monetize automation and generative AI, “there’s rebalancing that’s taking place” with jobs and priorities, Keum says. Last year, generative-AI-related job posts increased quickly, even as the tech industry grappled with many job losses.

Google made changes throughout the second half of 2023 “to become more efficient and work better” and to realign with product priorities, company spokesperson Courtenay Mencini tells WIRED. “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead.” Some of Duolingo’s cuts came because a “contractor’s work was no longer needed due to changes in how we generate and share content,” says Sam Dalsimer, a company spokesperson, while others ended as projects concluded.

Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the tech industry, estimates that 4,500 jobs have been lost so far in 2024. Throughout 2022 and 2023, layoffs affected more than 400,000 roles.

Across the board, the job market is steady. The unemployment rate in the US was 3.7 percent in December. And tech job unemployment is lower, at just 2.3 percent, according to an analysis from CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. Still, some tech workers struggled to find new gigs in late 2023.

Although big tech firms have made large cuts, going against years of growth and stability, tech workers could find jobs in other sectors, like government, manufacturing, and agriculture. Some laid-off workers have chosen these paths, and others have approached layoffs as opportunities to found their own startups.

Forget Growth. Optimize for Resilience

Forget Growth. Optimize for Resilience

Fleming believed that growth has natural limits. Things grow to maturity—kids into adults, saplings into trees, startups into full-fledged companies—but growth beyond that point is, in his words, a “pathology” and an “affliction.” The bigger and more productive an economy gets, he argued, the more resources it needs to burn to maintain its own infrastructure. It becomes less and less efficient at keeping any one person clothed, fed, and sheltered. He called this the “intensification paradox”: The harder everyone works to make the GDP line point up, the harder everyone has to work to make the GDP line point up. Inevitably, Fleming believed, growth will turn to degrowth, intensification to deintensification. These are things to prepare for, plan for, and the way to do that is with the missing metric: resilience.

Fleming offers several definitions of resilience, the briefest of which is “the ability of a system to cope with shock.” He describes two kinds: preventive resilience, which helps you maintain an existing state in spite of shocks, and recovery-elastic resilience, which helps you adapt quickly to a new post-shock state. Growth won’t help you with resilience, Fleming argues. Only community will. He’s big on the “informal economy”—think Craigslist and Buy Nothing, not Amazon. People helping people.

So I began to imagine, in my hypocritical heart, an analytics platform that would measure resilience in those terms. As growth shot too high, notifications would fire off to your phone: Slow down! Stop selling! Instead of revenue, it would measure relationships formed, barters fulfilled, products loaned and reused. It would reflect all sorts of non-transactional activities that make a company resilient: Is the sales team doing enough yoga? Are the office dogs getting enough pets? In the analytics meeting, we would ask questions like “Is the product cheap enough for everyone?” I even tried to sketch out a resilience funnel, where the juice that drips down is people checking in on their neighbors. It was an interesting exercise, but what I ended up imagining was basically HR software for Burning Man, which, well, I’m not sure that’s the world I want to live in either. If you come up with a good resilience funnel, let me know. Such a product would perform very badly in the marketplace (assuming you could even measure that).

The fundamental problem is that the stuff that creates resilience won’t ever show up in the analytics. Let’s say you were building a chat app. If people chat more using your app, that’s good, right? That’s community! But the really good number, from a resilience perspective, is how often they put down the app and meet up in person to hash things out. Because that will lead to someone coming by the house with lasagna when someone else has Covid, or someone giving someone’s kid an old acoustic guitar from the attic in exchange for, I don’t know, a beehive. Whole Earth stuff. You know how it works.

All of this somewhat guilty running around led me back to the simplest answer: I can’t measure resilience. I mean, sure, I could wing a bunch of vague, abstract stats and make pronouncements. God knows I’ve done a lot of that before. But there’s no metric, really, that can capture it. Which means I have to talk to strangers, politely, about problems they’re trying to solve.

I hate this conclusion. I want to push out content and see lines move and make no more small talk. I want my freaking charts. That’s why I like tech. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, hard drive sizes, bandwidth, users, point releases, revenue. I love when the number goes up. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world where it doesn’t. Or rather it used to be.


This article appears in the November 2023 issue. Subscribe now.

OpenAI’s Boardroom Drama Could Mess Up Your Future

OpenAI’s Boardroom Drama Could Mess Up Your Future

In June I had a conversation with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI’s headquarters, as I reported out WIRED’s October cover story. Among the topics we discussed was the unusual structure of the company.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond human level—termed artificial general intelligence or AGI—in a safe way. The company discovered a promising path in large language models that generate strikingly fluid text, but developing and implementing those models required huge amounts of computing infrastructure and mountains of cash. This led OpenAI to create a commercial entity to draw outside investors, and it netted a major partner: Microsoft. Virtually everyone in the company worked for this new for-profit arm. But limits were placed on the company’s commercial life. The profit delivered to investors was to be capped—for the first backers at 100 times what they put in—after which OpenAI would revert to a pure nonprofit. The whole shebang was governed by the original nonprofit’s board, which answered only to the goals of the original mission and maybe God.

Sutskever did not appreciate it when I joked that the bizarre org chart that mapped out this relationship looked like something a future GPT might come up with when prompted to design a tax dodge. “We are the only company in the world which has a capped profit structure,” he admonished me. “Here is the reason it makes sense: If you believe, like we do, that if we succeed really well, then these GPUs are going to take my job and your job and everyone’s jobs, it seems nice if that company would not make truly unlimited amounts of returns.” In the meantime, to make sure that the profit-seeking part of the company doesn’t shirk its commitment to making sure that the AI doesn’t get out of control, there’s that board, keeping an eye on things.

This would-be guardian of humanity is the same board that fired Sam Altman last Friday, saying that it no longer had confidence in the CEO because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” No examples of that alleged behavior were provided, and almost no one at the company knew about the firing until just before it was publicly announced. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other investors got no advance notice. The four directors, representing a majority of the six-person board, also kicked OpenAI president and chairman Greg Brockman off the board. Brockman quickly resigned.

After speaking to someone familiar with the board’s thinking, it appears to me that in firing Altman the directors believed they were executing their mission of making sure the company develops powerful AI safely—as was its sole reason for existing. Increasing profits or ChatGPT usage, maintaining workplace comity, and keeping Microsoft and other investors happy were not of their concern. In the view of directors Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley—and Sutskever—Altman didn’t deal straight with them. Bottom line: The board no longer trusted Altman to pursue OpenAI’s mission. If the board can’t trust the CEO, how can it protect or even monitor progress on the mission?

I can’t say whether Altman’s conduct truly endangered OpenAI’s mission, but I do know this: The board seems to have missed the possibility that a poorly explained execution of a beloved and charismatic leader might harm that mission. The directors appear to have thought that they would give Altman his walking papers and unfussily slot in a replacement. Instead, the consequences were immediate and volcanic. Altman, already something of a cult hero, became even revered in this new narrative. He did little or nothing to dissuade the outcry that followed. To the board, Altman’s effort to reclaim his post, and the employee revolt of the past few days, is kind of a vindication that it was right to dismiss him. Clever Sam is still up to something! Meanwhile, all of Silicon Valley blew up, tarnishing OpenAI’s status, maybe permanently.

Altman’s fingerprints do not appear on the open letter released yesterday and signed by more than 95 percent of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees that says the directors are “incapable of overseeing OpenAI.” It says that if the board members don’t reinstate Altman and resign, the workers who signed may quit and join a new advanced AI research division at Microsoft, formed by Altman and Brockman. This threat did not seem to dent the resolve of the directors, who apparently felt like they were being asked to negotiate with terrorists. Presumably one director feels differently—Sutskever, who now says he regrets his actions. His signature appears on the you-quit-or-we’ll-quit letter. Having apparently deleted his distrust of Altman, the two have been sending love notes to each other on X, the platform owned by another fellow OpenAI cofounder, now estranged from the project.

Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare

Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare

Kari Groszewska, a senior at Vanderbilt University studying computer science and economics, says she attended the conference and arrived at the expo hall 15 minutes early one day, only to see that a line to speak with companies was already several hours long. The vibe, Groszewska says, had shifted from the year before. She felt discouraged—particularly because she does not yet have a job offer for when she graduates next year.

“I have done ‘everything right’ studying computer science,” she says, including following advice to work on personal projects, pursue internships, and join clubs. Groszewska says she is “disheartened” by the state of the job market she will soon enter.

Other unemployed people are already feeling the pressure. Nia McSwain has been looking to make a transition into tech from the hospitality industry for the past month, with hopes of becoming a project manager. She says she spends her days sending out job applications from morning to night and estimates that she has applied for about 40 roles each day. “It’s been a little rough,” says McSwain, who lives in Florida. “I’m trying to break into it.”

Full stack engineer Philip John Basile finished a contract in May and has been looking to land another one since August. In the past month, he estimates he’s had about three interviews a day and gotten close to a role in a few companies, but he hasn’t been picked yet.

Basile, who lives in the suburbs of New York City, says he has focused on networking by chatting with people on LinkedIn and Discord. Many of the recruiters he knew from previous positions are also out of a job, and he’s had to build new relationships.

Basile says he’s also spent his free time studying AI tools, and he keeps tweaking his resume, cutting it from 10 pages to two, then beefing it up to 24. “There’s a lot of jobs out there, but there’s a lot of people looking for work,” he says. So he wants to “try to be as unique as possible. If you’re competing with 1,000 other people, you have to try to stand out.”

The layoffs have been particularly stressful for foreign workers in the US, who have been left scrambling for sponsorship to stay in the country after losing jobs. But data shows that many were able to find new jobs after being laid off.