The Ballad of Shawn K (What Happened When AI Took His Job)

His piece touched a nerve. It made me angry too.

I’ve devoted a lot of thought this week to the plight of Shawn K, the software engineer now living in a trailer and delivering DoorDash after losing his engineering job. He was let go due to AI.

Shawn wrote a piece here on Substack that touched a nerve. Not only did Shawn’s essay garner over 1000 likes and hundreds of comments and restacks, but it popped up on all my other social media feeds. It apparently was also featured on Hacker News and some mainstream media. As Shawn explained in his piece, he’s struggling to find work in his field after losing his job through no fault of his own to AI. He has submitted hundreds of resumes, dramatically lowered his expectations, and is now working as a DoorDash delivery driver to survive with no relief in sight. What shocked me was just how divisive this piece turned out to be.

To some people, Shawn’s rapid descent from educated middle-class engineer to member of the precariat resonated just as it had with me. However, others minimized Shawn’s situation or even blamed him. I restacked Shawn’s essay with a note about how his experience made me angry. A surprising number of people got angry that I was angry at Shawn’s situation. This wide division in the tenor of the comments matched what I read across social media.

Shawn’s experience hasn’t only angered me because I sympathize with how cruelly the world has treated him. What makes me angry is what Shawn’s experience means for this dangerous moment in America. If a highly skilled software engineer like Shawn can be tossed aside by the system despite doing everything right, we’re living in a society in which the ladder is broken. If someone like Shawn, who has a solid education, worked hard for over twenty years, and made all the right choices everyone asked him to make, no longer has a fair shot at a basic good life in America, the future of our nation and democracy is bleak.

This broken system really is a national emergency requiring action. However, those in power aren’t doing much about it beyond mumbling nice words and throwing up their hands. Shawn’s sad tale should make you very worried. His experience may soon be yours.

Shawn’s Story Has Nothing to Do with Personal Morality

To a lot of people, Shawn’s tale is fundamentally one of personal morality. They focus on whether Shawn deserves his situation. Whether Shawn did everything possible to avoid his situation is irrelevant.

For what it’s worth, Shawn has done absolutely nothing wrong. Throughout his life, he did everything America asked of him. He earned his education, and even studied a practical field everyone has always said will permanently be in demand. He was conscientious and he worked hard. He kept up to date, learning new skills on his own initiative. After he lost his job, he did everything he could to find another. He applied to hundreds and hundreds of opportunities with no result. He was willing to take a major step back in his career. He was willing to try new fields. He was even willing to move into a trailer and deliver DoorDash. He did everything right, and he still lost.

You can quibble over his decisions if you’re inclined. A few years ago, Shawn moved out of the Bay Area to New York to work remote. Remote work is less plentiful than it once was, and New York isn’t exactly a hotbed for software engineering. While Shawn now lives in a trailer, he actually owns three houses that he rents out because it doesn’t make financial sense to immediately sell them. They’re in disrepair, underwater, and one houses his elderly mother. Perhaps he could sell them at a loss for a quick one-time cash injection. Many people also nitpicked the kinds of jobs he was pursuing, or think he should give up and climb the ladder as a manager of a local store. He says he has considered all of this, and how exactly would that work?

Maybe Shawn would’ve had better luck adopting your preferred strategy. After eight-hundred applications and no job, I’m pretty sure Shawn, desperate to keep his head above water and delivering DoorDash, has probably already thought of everything you came up with in five minutes and has good reasons for his choices.

The comments I found most concerning were the ones that were simply indifferent, asserting no one owes Shawn a job. They present themselves as market realists. The economy is always changing. We can’t stop progress, nor want to. Those who get caught in the crosshairs must adapt. If they can’t, they must do whatever they can to survive. There’s no point crying for coal miners or autoworkers. We don’t tend to consider the Luddites who smashed textile machines during the Industrial Revolution as the good guys. It’s not the job of the state or society to give you a cushy job and good life. As one comment I saw online said, “Boo Hoo.”

I know all these arguments about how technological change always creates victims but benefits society in the long run. There was a time I would have made them myself. I started out my political life a hard-core free-market fundamentalist and borderline libertarian, and still believe in markets and capitalism, although my more hardline views are now tempered with experience. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not this disruption creates a better economic system in the aggregate because, if nothing changes soon, we may never make it there to benefit. It’s important to remember the Luddites weren’t entirely wrong. Their lives actually were destroyed and never would recover, sacrificed for everybody else’s progress. Society adjusted in the long run, but it was quite a raw deal for them.

Whether or not the Industrial Revolution worked out isn’t much of an argument because there was only one Industrial Revolution in history. It destroyed lives, but ultimately worked out in the long run. That doesn’t mean this revolution will turn out the same way, because we only have a historical dataset of one. This revolution is different as it may not just change the nature of work, but the amount of work that human beings can do. It may concentrate power differently in a very different global world, leaving millions of people behind and without a chance. A lot of economic history was pretty bad. We used to have child labor. We used to have sweatshops. We used to make people work fourteen-hour days. Just because these things happened in history doesn’t mean it’s wise to bring them back.

All of these are less real arguments than dangerous rationalizations. It’s like when someone gets cancer and a busybody aunt peppers them with ugly questions about what they must have eaten wrong to cause their own disease. Many people find it terrifying that our world is precarious, bad things happen to good people, and it might one day happen to them too. They try to explain away the misfortunes of others as moral failures because that would mean, as good and wise people, they will avoid them and stay safe.

You’re not safe, and this has nothing to do with Shawn’s choices or morality. What happened to Shawn has happened to a lot of people in America over the last few decades, and it’s increasingly going to happen to many more. Shawn’s individual choices are irrelevant because there are lots of guys like Shawn. Did they all do something wrong?

The reality is Shawn did everything right, and the system still threw him to the wolves. I wish I could tell him everything will be okay, but I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t think he deserves what happened to him. I also don’t think he can grind and hustle his way out of it. Shawn neither wants a handout nor does he claim anyone owes him anything. He wants to work hard and do something that will decently support him in this new economy. The economy doesn’t want to let him.

That’s what makes me angry. Tens of millions of desperate Americans who did everything right are in danger of getting locked out of the opportunity to lead a basic decent life. America’s system of social mobility and opportunity is falling apart. This should be a national emergency, one our leaders are jumping up and down in panic to urgently address. They’re not, and I don’t think they will anytime soon.

What perplexes me is how the idea that we should do something other than abandon tens of millions of coming Shawns makes other people angry. I realized they don’t truly understand how success works in complex systems. Working hard, having talent, making sacrifices, and doing everything right is necessary, but doesn’t guarantee you’ll be okay.

The Tragedy of Dr. Douglas Prasher

Perhaps you remember the story of Dr. Douglas Prasher, the molecular biologist who pioneered using green fluorescent protein (GFP), the protein that glows in jellyfish, as a genetic tracer. Prasher was the first person to have the idea to genetically sequence GFP so we could attach it to other proteins in a cell, allowing us to identify and track them. This created a medical miracle, one so important it won the Nobel Prize in 2008. When this monumental discovery was recognized in Sweden, however, Dr. Prasher, at the age of 57, was driving a shuttle van at a Toyota dealership for $8.50 per hour.

Dr. Prasher’s downward trajectory wasn’t a story of bad decisions, mental illness, alcohol, or drugs. It’s just a story of hard choices and bad luck. Prasher started researching GFP in the late 1970s when he was working in a lab at the University of Georgia. He had just about managed to sequence the DNA of GFP when his research grant ran out. He tried to get another grant, but NIH, failing to understand the importance of his research, turned him down. Discouraged, Prasher left the lab, handing off his pioneering research to another scientist.

From there, Prasher ran into increasing bad luck. He took a job at USDA to study agricultural pests, but then USDA wanted to transfer him to Maryland. Prasher couldn’t move his family, so he found another job at NASA. After just one-and-a-half years, NASA slashed that program leaving Prasher without a job. He looked for another position, ideally one that wouldn’t disrupt his family, but this time struggled to find one. After a year or two of searching, his savings had dried up and he had to accept the job at the dealership. Then in 2008, the scientists who had taken over his research won the Nobel Prize.

Prasher’s former colleagues were more than gracious about his contributions to the discovery—they explicitly told anyone who would listen that Prasher’s work was just as, if not more, important than theirs had been. They even paid to fly him out to the ceremony in Sweden, so he could watch from a seat in the audience.

This story is said to have a happy ending because, after countless news stories about a Nobel-caliber scientist driving a van, NASA reached out to offer him another job. Prasher later moved to the lab of his former colleagues to finish his career working on the discovery that launched it. What this supposedly happy version doesn’t acknowledge is the years in which Prasher struggled and suffered, thrown away by a society that wouldn’t give him a chance. Once he had fallen out of the system, no one wanted to hire a former biologist now driving a van for minimum wage. If even a Nobel-caliber biologist isn’t safe from the unpredictability of life, what chance do you have of it never happening to you?

People who lecture that life is all about hard work and drive fail to appreciate that success also requires opportunity. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how hard you work, if no one will open the door to give you a chance. When the system throws you away and locks you out, it doesn’t matter how good you actually are or what you’re capable of accomplishing. People are eager to ignore this depressing truth because it’s terrifying. We all live much closer to the knife’s edge than we think.

Success happens inside a system, and now that system in America is breaking down.

Why Success Happens Inside Systems

The world has many invisible tracks. Every system has its rules and guardians, and those guardians decide if they want to let you in to play their game.

If you were born a medieval peasant, it didn’t matter how smart you were or how hard you worked. You could make your life somewhat better or worse through your actions, but no amount of work or talent would change the fact that you were a commoner and a peasant. Many doors would be forever closed to you, and many opportunities you couldn’t ever earn. Perhaps in a one-in-a-billion fluke some noble might take you under his wing and guide you upward, but that kind of unlikely luck is so rare we write fairy tales about it.

There’s a track to become an investment banker. There’s a track to become doctor and another to become a nurse. There’s a track to become an actor in Hollywood. There’s a track for marketing and another for engineers. Each track has rules and ladders to climb, certifications, progressions through different jobs and roles, and approvals from groups of people. To move to the next spot, you need to reach the previous spot first. There’s always some unspoken road you need to travel to get there from wherever it is you are. If you fail to check the right boxes, your resume gets tossed aside. Increasingly this isn’t even done by humans in HR departments, but algorithms looking for keywords and patterns in hundreds of resumes per job instead of looking for a person. Access to opportunities is mediated through gates that favor the already-successful, and exclude those already left out.

Even seeming solo efforts like entrepreneurship and sports have their own tracks. Silicon Valley is a system, and like any it has its gates and rules. Two computer science students from Stanford with a great idea for an app can get into the right events, meet talented people, and get a VC to take their calls, while two forty-year-old self-taught engineers from Arkansas, no matter how brilliant their idea, probably can’t. The NBA is also a system with its ladders like high school tournaments, college recruiters, and drafts. There are people you must meet, things they’re looking to see, and people who decide your fate. We no longer live in a world in which most of us can hitch up our covered wagon and pioneer a farm on our effort alone. We live inside complex systems in which most of us depend on others to let us play their games.

That isn’t saying “it takes a village” or “you didn’t build that,” because you absolutely did build it through your good ideas, hard work, and grinding when others didn’t. It’s saying hard work and good ideas mean nothing without opportunities to use them, and those opportunities come with gates. You must be smart, work hard, and hustle to win at anything, but there are thousands of other people looking to climb the same ladders. There are always gatekeepers and rules that decide which of the many smart and talented people get to play the game. These things are related, since the moxy necessary to get a system to give a nobody a chance is a kind of talent. At the same time, these decisions aren’t always rational or fair. When they decide to lock you outside the gate, you might as well be that medieval peasant trying to get opportunities reserved for aristocrats.

The more talented people and the fewer opportunities, the more the opportunities control who wins. This is why people complain about Hollywood “nepo babies.” Everyone who makes it in Hollywood is extremely talented and works insanely hard, but there are more talented people than jobs. When deciding who to hire, it helps if your dad has a famous name and famous friends. Every competitive industry works the same—in your case, maybe your dad could get you an internship at Goldman Sachs.

A lot of people only see the climb and pretend that’s all there is. They don’t see the system the climb exists inside because they’re already inside it, its vast power invisible. The system only becomes visible when you fall out and realize there’s no way back inside. That’s what happened to Douglas Prasher and Shawn K.

Why I’m Angry

The modern industrial age is over. The post-industrial is here. It’s more than just AI. It’s a host of factors that uprooted the industrial economy and hollowed out the middle class. It’s moving manufacturing to China. It’s businesses becoming global entities. It’s changes in our business culture, treating workers as replaceable costs. It’s a meritocracy that believes leadership is a reward instead of a responsibility. It’s a cultural of managerialism. It’s an economy of leveraging information providing increasing control. It’s all of it together, with AI just the final blow.

Industrial America was a system. That system promised that everyone in America willing to work hard and follow the system’s rules would have a decent life. There were enough opportunities for everybody. There were clear rules for how to get them. Not everyone could become a rock star or a CEO, but everyone willing to play the game could buy groceries, health care, a car, and a decent house. You didn’t need to be extraordinary, and you didn’t need to get lucky. The system was set up so every American who wanted to participate in the system would be okay. What worries me is this post-industrial era looks like a world with more people looking for opportunities than opportunities.

A functional society has to ensure the system produces efficiency and prosperity as a whole. It must produce wealth, create things, and outcompete its neighbors. It must unleash innovators and disruptors to invent new technologies that make us collectively richer, and through us make America stronger. On the other hand, it also must ensure its systems create good individual lives. If ordinary Americans work hard and contribute, they must be able to put affordable and healthy food on their table, buy a home, provide an education to their children, and take care of their health. Ordinary people must be able to plug themselves effortlessly into the system and contribute. A society sacrificing this second goal for the first is begging for its own collapse. No matter how much prosperity it collectively creates, all the people it leaves behind eventually will—quite understandably—tear it down.

In today’s America, the system no longer rewards virtue, competence, or contribution. You can do everything right—get the degrees, do good work, show up with integrity—and still end up broke, invisible, and adrift. The old story about effort leading to dignity is breaking down, and in its place is something colder, more chaotic, and morally disorienting. As the moral logic of work collapses, people like Shawn K find themselves exiled not just from the economy, but from any story about what a good life is supposed to look like. If you think this is something that only happens to other people, you aren’t paying much attention. The same forces that destroyed the life of Shawn K may soon come for you.

This is the challenge of our era. Ordinary Americans no longer trust they will have an opportunity to work hard, contribute, and get back a decent basic life. The system we all depend on is broken. Shawn K got an education and studied a good trade. He gained new skills. He worked hard for over twenty years and became an expert in what he did. He isn’t complaining that anyone owes him a job. He isn’t asking anyone to take care of him. All he wants is an opportunity to work and a chance to contribute so he can take care of his family. If we can’t build an America in which every American gets a basic decent life, our system will not last no matter how productive or efficient it appears to be. This is a national crisis.

I foresee an America with tens of millions of Shawns. America will not survive that. America is supposed to be a great nation, a superpower with a powerful middle class. The Luddites in their class-based society had no choice but to tolerate what was done to them. Americans will not accept such a terrible step down and back. They will fight. They will elect people willing to break a system that isn’t serving them. If that doesn’t work, they’ll break the system themselves. This isn’t a statement about what I want to happen, but what I know will happen. Our leaders have a responsibility to ensure the path to opportunity functions out of simple self-preservation. If we continue to abandon people like Shawn, people like Shawn will eventually abandon us.

The only reason I can see for why calling this out make so many people angry is habit and inertia. They’re used to old mid-twentieth-century debates between markets and the state, and instinctively repeat ideas they’ve heard for years about keeping the state out of markets. They’re still inside the system, and therefore can’t see its walls slowly crumbling from outside. Their ideas are out of date, created for a different time in which the system was still producing expected outcomes. Thirty or forty years ago, when people were thrown out of work it probably was somewhat their fault and something they could do something about. Intervening then would probably do more harm than good. The best way to ensure everyone had a chance at the American Dream was to leave the machine producing it alone. We no longer live in the industrial twentieth century, and its time to let these notions go. We must see clearly what America is today, and then ensure the system we’re building for the future works as well as the one that’s gone.

I want to see America continue to thrive with a market-based democracy. That means our leaders need to deal with this serious and looming threat. There are things we can do, but we actually have to do them. The sooner we start, the more likely it is we peacefully make it through the transition. What are our leaders doing to ensure our systems continue to create good paths to opportunity? How are they working to ensure the system continues to make a place for everyone who wants one? The options aren’t between government making someone give Shawn a job, or doing nothing. They aren’t between halting progress, or allowing the next few generations to get destroyed. There’s a third option, managing change so ordinary people who simply want to work hard and lead a decent life can do it. Prosperity and growth and innovation are all worthless if they don’t lead to a nation in which everyone willing to participate can sign up for a decent life. The purpose of the people isn’t to serve the state and the economy. The purpose of the state and economy is to serve the people.

Yet the supposed leaders in a position to do something are still fiddling in their tuxedos, praising what a strong ship it is while the hull takes on fatal water. On the front line of this reality is Shawn K.

What do you think about Shawn K and his essay? Join the conversation in the comments.