When Tech Workers Pretend the Wave Isn’t About to Hit Them

There’s a strange delusion spreading through the tech world right now. Call it optimism, call it denial, call it career-enhancing self-delusion—but whatever it is, it’s costing people their jobs.

HP’s plan to eliminate up to 6,000 roles by 2028 is just the latest case study in a trend that’s becoming impossible to ignore: tech workers are being replaced by the very tools they helped build, and astonishingly, many of them are acting like it isn’t happening.

It’s as if the house is on fire, but the engineers inside are calmly updating the bug tracker.

HP Is Not an Outlier—It’s a Warning

HP’s “AI transformation” strategy is essentially a blueprint for the next decade of corporate decision-making: automate everything you can, and remove the humans who inconveniently request salaries, healthcare, and PTO.

Customer support? Automated. Internal ops? Automated. Low-level engineering workflows? You know what’s coming.

This isn’t HP “getting ahead”—this is HP doing what every major tech company is already doing, just with the honesty to publish the numbers upfront.

And yet, the reaction from tech workers is… muted. A few resigned LinkedIn posts. Some hopeful chatter about “new opportunities.” A fresh crop of bootcamp ads promising to upskill them into the same AI pipeline that’s shrinking.

The house burns. Engineers adjust the thermostat.

Meanwhile, Artists Grabbed Fire Extinguishers

Now look at the arts. When AI came for screenwriters, they didn’t host webinars about “navigating change.” They walked out.

Writers shut down studios. Actors shut down productions. Musicians, illustrators, designers, performers—when they saw how quickly generative AI was encroaching on their livelihood, they didn’t minimize it. They didn’t rationalize it. They didn’t say, “Well, the technology isn’t that good yet.”

They fought.

They unionized, protested, negotiated, and won contractual protections—guardrails that tech workers don’t even have the vocabulary for, let alone the organizational infrastructure.

Artists saw the threat clearly. Tech workers see a career opportunity.

Why Tech Workers Keep Ignoring Reality

1. The Cult of the Individual

Tech is built on the myth of the lone genius. The unspoken belief is: If I’m good enough, I’m safe. So layoffs are taken personally, not collectively.

If engineers lose jobs, the story becomes, “Well, they didn’t stay relevant.” Not, “The system is replacing humans at scale.”

2. Belief in AI as a Partner—Not a Competitor

Tech workers built these tools. Of course they trust them.

There’s a cute optimism that AI will “augment” their roles, not absorb them. They keep insisting: “The tech isn’t good enough to replace engineers.”

Companies don’t need it to be perfect. They just need it to be cheap.

3. Comfort—Until the Fall

Good salaries and cushy severance packages soften the urgency. A six-month runway makes systemic risk feel like a future problem.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Every year, the jobs being automated aren’t coming back. This isn’t a cycle. It’s a contraction.

The comfort is temporary. The consequences are not.

HP Exposes the Bigger Problem: Tech Workers Still Think They’re on the Winning Team

Tech workers spent a decade believing they were the exception in the labor market. They saw automation as something that happened to other industries—manufacturing, retail, logistics. Never their own.

They forgot the most important rule of automation:

If a task can be turned into code, it can be automated. And if your job is writing code… you should probably be paying attention.

But instead of organizing, tech workers are tweaking prompts. Instead of advocating for standards, they’re chasing certifications. Instead of building protections, they’re building the tools that replace the protections.

Artists fought because they understood something tech workers still don’t: If you don’t shape how AI is integrated into your industry, the people cutting headcount will do it for you.

The Wild Part? Tech Workers Have the Leverage—They Just Don’t Use It

Software engineers aren’t powerless. They’re one of the most scarce, most mobile, most context-critical workforces in the economy. Companies cannot deploy AI without them.

If tech workers acted together—even modestly—companies would be forced to take their concerns seriously. But the culture of tech has spent 25 years training workers to compete with each other, not organize with each other.

That’s why studios feared screenwriters. And why corporations don’t fear engineers.

HP’s Layoffs Are the Canary—and Tech Workers Are Still Debating Whether It’s a Bird

HP’s move isn’t unique. It’s directionally inevitable. And the denial among tech workers is no longer charming—it’s self-sabotage.

You cannot automate your own job and then be shocked when it disappears. You cannot praise AI as the next revolution and then complain when the revolution reaches your cubicle. You cannot keep treating layoffs as personal misfortunes when they are clearly structural changes.

Artists recognized the threat. They fought for their value. Tech workers keep assuming their value is self-evident.

It isn’t. Not to the budget spreadsheet.

If You Work in Tech, Now’s the Time to Pull Your Head Out of the Sand

The question isn’t whether AI is coming for tech jobs—it already has. The real question is whether tech workers will continue pretending nothing is happening, or whether they’ll start shaping the conditions under which AI is deployed.

Because if the people building the future don’t fight for their place in it, someone else will decide it for them.

And that decision will look a lot like HP’s: fewer humans, more automation, and a workforce that never figured out how to protect itself.