Fewer Perks, More Work. Tech Jobs Aren’t What They Used to Be

Summary

WSJ Tech News Briefing Summary
Episode: Fewer Perks, More Work. Tech Jobs Aren’t What They Used to Be
Release Date: May 2, 2025
Host: Victoria Craig
Reporter: Isabel Bousquet
Producer: Julie Chang

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Introduction: The Evolving Landscape of Tech Jobs

In this episode of WSJ Tech News Briefing, host Victoria Craig delves into the significant transformations occurring within the tech industry’s employment landscape. Once celebrated for high salaries, generous benefits, and enticing workplace perks, tech jobs are now experiencing a notable shift towards more conventional and demanding roles. This change is driven by rapid technological advancements, evolving company priorities, and a recalibration of workplace cultures.

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The Rise and Decline of Prompt Engineering

Isabel Bousquet introduces the concept of the "Prompt Engineer," a role that emerged approximately two years prior to the episode’s release.

Katherine Bindley explains:

"Prompt Engineering... is 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." [01:49]

Initially, prompt engineers were in high demand, with salaries reaching up to $200,000. However, the role has since diminished in prominence. Bindley attributes this decline to:

• Improved AI Models: Advanced language models have become more intuitive, reducing the necessity for specialized prompt engineering skills.
• Organizational Training: Companies have implemented training programs to empower all employees to interact effectively with AI, negating the need for dedicated prompt engineers.

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Fragmented Job Titles and Role Confusion

The episode highlights the broader issue of increasingly varied and confusing job titles within the tech sector. Katherine Bindley notes:

"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." [03:39]

Several factors contribute to this complexity:

• Rapid Technological Advancements: Constant innovation leads to the creation and obsolescence of roles at an unprecedented pace.
• Lack of Industry Consensus: New roles often lack standardized titles, leading to over 40 different nomenclatures for similar positions. Bindley states:

"She's seen some essentially very similar roles titled up to 40 different ways." [04:32]

For job seekers, this fragmentation complicates the search process, requiring the use of multiple search terms to find equivalent positions.

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Culture Shift in Big Tech: From Perks to Productivity

The episode transitions to discussing the cultural transformation within major tech companies. Isabel Bousquet references experiences from long-time tech employees who describe a move away from the "fun-centric" workplace culture towards a more stringent and results-driven environment.

Katie Bentley, WSJ tech reporter, expands on this shift:

"Tech jobs, once the envy of office workers everywhere, are just starting to look like every other job, according to some workers." [06:22]

Key changes include:

• Reduction of Workplace Perks: Iconic amenities like ping pong tables and free gourmet snacks are becoming less prevalent.
• Increased Workloads Without Compensation: Employees face "job creep," where additional responsibilities are added without corresponding promotions or raises. Bentley explains:

"You’re accumulating more work, working longer hours without some of the recognition that you would typically associate with that." [07:49]

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Case Study: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The episode provides a specific example from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where the emphasis on AI and efficiency has led to operational challenges.

Bentley shares insights from a product manager at AWS:

"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." [08:03]

Additional issues highlighted include:

• Lack of Role Backfilling: As employees leave, positions are not always refilled, increasing the burden on remaining staff.
• Invasive Monitoring Practices: Instances of keystroke tracking and screen monitoring have raised privacy concerns. Bentley notes:

"Amazon did say that these types of programs are to protect sensitive and proprietary information and they are not to monitor employees." [08:59]

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Employee Perspectives: End of the 'Glory Days'

Long-term employees express a sense of nostalgia for the "glory days" of tech, characterized by open dialogues and flexible work environments. Bentley reflects:

"There may have been a perception that the glory days could last forever because of the way the cultures were built." [09:38]

Several factors have contributed to this decline:

• Market Dynamics: Shifts in supply and demand, along with changes in the labor market, have reduced employees' leverage.
• Leadership Approaches: There's a noticeable shift towards top-down directives, emphasizing efficiency and productivity over employee satisfaction and engagement.

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Corporate Responses to the Cultural Shift

Corporate leadership within tech companies is responding to the evolving landscape by prioritizing financial performance and operational efficiency. Bentley explains:

"Leaders are not... 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." [10:30]

This approach involves:

• Cost-Conscious Strategies: Post-pandemic hiring surges followed by economic downturns have led to more cautious business practices.
• Productivity Focus: Companies are adopting a "take it or leave it" mentality, where employees must align with new priorities or consider leaving.

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Conclusion: The New Era of Tech Employment

The episode concludes by underscoring the profound changes reshaping tech jobs. What was once an industry synonymous with innovation and employee-centric cultures is now grappling with the need to balance profitability and efficiency with maintaining its unique workplace environments. As technological advancements continue to accelerate, the tech sector must navigate these challenges to redefine what it means to work in technology today.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Prompt Engineering... is 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." — Katherine Bindley [01:49]
• "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." — Katherine Bindley [03:39]
• "Tech jobs, once the envy of office workers everywhere, are just starting to look like every other job, according to some workers." — Katie Bentley [06:22]
• "You’re accumulating more work, working longer hours without some of the recognition that you would typically associate with that." — Katie Bentley [07:49]
• "Amazon did say that these types of programs are to protect sensitive and proprietary information and they are not to monitor employees." — Katie Bentley [08:59]
• "There may have been a perception that the glory days could last forever because of the way the cultures were built." — Katie Bentley [09:38]
• "Leaders are... telling workers exactly what's up, which is, yeah, you need to be efficient, you need to be more productive." — Katie Bentley [10:30]

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from the episode, providing a clear understanding of the current state and future trajectory of tech jobs for listeners and non-listeners alike.

Transcript

[Victoria Craig]

Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, cultural enrichment and all inclusive fares.

[Isabel Bousquet]

Discover [e-mail] hey TNB listeners, before we get started, a heads up we're going to be asking you a question at the top of each show for the next few weeks. Our goal here at Tech News Briefing is to keep you updated with the latest headlines and trends on all things tech. Now we want to know more about you, what you like about the show, and what more you'd like to be hearing from us this week. Our question is which areas of tech are you most interested in hearing more about AI Crypto tech policy gadgets? If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description or you can send us an email to tnvsj.com now onto the show. Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Friday, May 2nd. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. For 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 luxe 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 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 Bousquet has been writing about for WSJ's CIO Journal. Isabel, tell us first what this particular job actually is.

[Katherine Bindley]

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.

[Isabel Bousquet]

And it became a really hot job. But now it's not. Why?

[Katherine Bindley]

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. 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.

[Isabel Bousquet]

And your 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. Why is that?

[Katherine Bindley]

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, 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?

[Isabel Bousquet]

You need to search for like four different search terms to get the exact same result.

[Katherine Bindley]

Yeah, sometimes 40. 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.

[Isabel Bousquet]

That was Isabel Busquet, 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.

[Victoria Craig]

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[Isabel Bousquet]

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. WSJ tech reporter Katherine 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.

[Katie Bentley]

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.

[Isabel Bousquet]

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.

[Katie Bentley]

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 okay, the ping pong tables are 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 the 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. One worker referred to said the company refers to it as agility, which is the 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.

[Isabel Bousquet]

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.

[Katie Bentley]

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. 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. So that was kind of another example of just like job creep and the impact of doing more with less.

[Isabel Bousquet]

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?

[Katie Bentley]

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 they are not to monitor employees.

[Isabel Bousquet]

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?

[Katie Bentley]

In 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 parks 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 whether or not their workers were in favor of things or not. There are 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 changing dramatically.

[Isabel Bousquet]

And what have the companies themselves or their bosses said about this cultural shift that they're seeing?

[Katie Bentley]

Yeah, I mean, we've been hearing this for a while now, essentially ever since there was all this over hiring during the pandemic. Then we had a downturn. And then following that, it really became just a much more kind of cautious, cost conscious 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.

[Isabel Bousquet]

That was WSJ tech reporter Katie Bentley. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show is produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Victoria Craig. Additional support this week from Katie Dayton and Melanie Roy. Jessica Fenton and Michael Lavall wrote our theme music. Our development producer is Aisha El Musleam. 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.