This Humanities Graduate Used to Suffer from Tech Envy. Not Anymore.

Techies are making their own jobs obsolete while my low-tech job might not be so easy to automate.

I used to suffer from “tech envy.”

For the past couple of years, I kept hearing stories that went “My friend works in the Bay Area and makes $20,000 a month.”

Stories like that always made my heart die a little. If only I had studied programming! Instead, I had chosen to study a “useless” subject in university — sociology. As much as I enjoyed the field, I knew it wasn’t going to pay the bills.

So, I sold out. I sold my soul to capitalism, and pursued a typical business career.

The reality of a non-tech degree

When I first started my career in achievement-hungry Singapore, I wasn’t on my way to making 20 grand a month. I wasn’t a techie. I was doing a “fluffy” job — marketing in the cosmetics industry. (Note: I’m still not earning anywhere close to that figure).

Yes, people will always want to buy lipstick and even men are getting into the beauty game — but the beauty industry is a mature one. And, not to mention, wages are not particularly high.

Worse still, I had decided to join a Japanese company in an effort to master the Japanese language.

Japanese companies were not — and still are not — known for their generous salaries, or their career opportunities. In fact, Japanese companies teach you to work a lot for very little, and you’re even encouraged to endure long working hours.

If you were the CEO, you might get to earn 1 million dollars a year. Yes, Japanese CEOs are paid very little compared to their American counterparts. But I am a foreigner in a Japanese company. I don’t expect to be able to rise to the top job.

In any case, I have no intention or ambition to gun for the top executive position. It’s a struggle for quiet thinkers to rise to the top in the corporate world.

Cruelly and weirdly enough, the MBTI personality test kept typing me as INTP. Websites that promised to unravel the secrets of my personality all kept repeating that my type was suited to be a software engineer.

I never really found programming interesting enough to hold my attention. To be sure, I tried in vain to take introductory courses a few times, but I always lost interest quickly.

I was more interested in understanding how society fit together than how code fit together.

Low barriers: Anyone can do marketing!

But marketing — that’s different! Anyone can do marketing. I’m not even that good at it.

Run some ads, do some social media, engage some influencers, and do some SEO — voila! — that’s marketing, right?

Marketing, as most people understand it today, today usually means performance or promotional marketing.

You know —digital ads, SEO, conversions, optimization, marketing funnels, A/B testing, and so on. (Another clue that techies have sought to quantify what used to be a fuzzy field). There’s nothing wrong with these tactics — they are tools, but they are not the essence of marketing.

And these areas of marketing are likely easier to automate with AI than the more human part of marketing.

At its core, as defined by the guru of modern management guru Peter Drucker, marketing is about creating a customer. And customers, as far as I can tell, are people — not androids.

Despite — or maybe because of — my lack of technical coding ability, I became bewitched by tech. I was desperate to break into the tech industry. “Enough of hearing stories of software engineers getting paid,” I had thought to myself.

I, like everyone else, wanted desperately to get paid.

Tech was where the real money was.

Being in tech looks good until everyone gets laid off

In 2022, tech layoffs became plastered all over my LinkedIn feed.

People getting axed two weeks into their new tech jobs. Offer letters rescinded. Googlers getting locked out of their e-mail 20 minutes after receiving the boot.

It was a strange time, and it wasn’t just happening in America — oh no.

Back in my home country of Singapore, things weren’t very different. A Chinese software engineer had relocated to Singapore at his own expense to start working at an e-commerce company only to find to his utter shock that his offer had been revoked.

People in the tech industry were losing their jobs — left, right, and center. It didn’t matter if you were an engineer, recruiter, or marketer. If you were working at Google, Meta, Amazon, or some other big tech company, you were potentially on the chopping board.

And it’s not ending yet.

And tech workers continue to be fired in 2023; according to Crunchbase, over 147,000 tech employees have already lost their jobs this year.

For better or worse, most Japanese companies do not fire you, unless you seriously screw up or commit some kind of corporate crime. The result is a rather stable job.

The same cannot be said for foreign companies operating in Japan — let alone tech companies operating in Japan.

Funnily enough, at the end of 2021 and the earlier part of 2022, I had some recruiters call me for jobs at these large tech companies. In the end, my experience was not a good fit, but in hindsight, I think it was a blessing in disguise.

Will tech workers get replaced by AI?

This year, I heard from industry insiders that the tech layoffs affected even foreign tech companies operating in Japan.

I had dodged a massive bullet! The likes of me? I would have been number one on the HR guillotine.

Replaced by AI? Perhaps. The biggest hype of 2023 has got to be generative AI — ChatGPT and its various competitors and adjacent algorithms.

Like mushrooms sprouting after a rain, Generative AI was nowhere, and overnight it was everywhere. In an instant, the world changed, and I daresay, the techies that I had envied became more like regular folk.

You can instruct ChatGPT to spew out code. You might think that AI isn’t likely to replace programmers anytime soon — but my ex-software engineer friend tried it and was blown away.

“Wow, ChatGPT gives you code. Engineers are screwed. They’ve sown the seeds of their own destruction,” he proclaimed in, almost channeling Karl Marx’s declaration that the capitalists would bring about capitalism’s self-destruction. At least he was smart enough to switch to a non-developer role.

Don’t just take him for it. Software engineer also Adam Hughes suggests that “ChatGPT Will Replace All Programmers”.

Still don’t believe it? Researchers at OpenAI — the very same company that created ChatGPT — have found that programming is at a very high risk of being automated. After all, ChatGPT itself was trained on massive lines of computer code.

So now would be a very good time to ask ourselves: What will we be left with when AI automates everything away? And more metaphysically, are we taking something fundamental away from people the more we ask a machine to do work that should be left to people?

The end of tech envy

For now, we can put aside philosophical questions to address practical, real-world concerns.

As Brandeis Marshall puts it, we should be asking what AI cannot do.

As for me, I think my job is still safe from the AI apocalypse. My job description as a product marketer in the consumer packaged goods industry?: “Own the strategy and drive the business. Create the strategic product roadmap and vision. Work with the teams that create the products. Develop creative assets and the 360-degree campaign. Lead cross-functionally and get buy-in to execute and get to market.”

Sounds like a load of bunk. That is precisely the point. My job involves the following tasks that are resistant to digital automation:

• Working on complex projects. Projects that are ill-defined and have no clear operational manual. My brain will find a way, and if I don’t have an answer, I can talk to the people who do. This brings me to the next point.
• Working with people. Working across cultures. Understanding the context of culture. Figuring out what makes people tick and why they tick the way they do. Managing different stakeholders. Talking to people and connecting emotionally. Yes, even a cerebral person can do that — don’t limit yourself if you are one.
• Working in the real world, with things that are designed to be used by people. With things that cannot be digitized, and things that require physical finesse and having a body.

AI can’t do any of that. Not yet.

In the post-AI world, my non-tech job is safer.

If you’re like me, a non-techie in a digital world, take heart. We’re going to make it. We’ll survive by embracing all the fuzzy skills that make us human. Don’t envy the techies anymore. Your time to shine is here.

The author is an editor of Japonica, a Japan-focused publication, but also writes more generally about culture and society. Discover his most-read stories here.