I formed my opinion about this year’s artificial intelligence (AI) layoffs a few decades before there was an AI to blame. I was a kid, and the Cape Breton coal mines were dying, and the strange part is that everybody knew. The seams were getting thinner and the world was moving to cheaper energy, and the numbers had stopped working long before anyone with a microphone was willing to say so.
Towns on life support
When the company is the town, honesty feels like violence. Tearing the bandaid off would have killed those communities outright, everyone understood that, so nobody tore it. The federal government stepped in and kept the mines breathing with subsidies, decade after decade, and what I watched growing up was the third option nobody designs on purpose. The towns withered, neither quite living nor quite ending, slowly enough that you could pretend it wasn’t happening and fast enough that every graduating class had fewer reasons to stay.
I suspect Pennsylvania coal country could tell the same story with a different accent, and so could the steel towns that followed, the mill towns after them, and half the fishing ports on either coast. The pattern is the point: when an economy shifts underneath a community, protecting the roles looks like the kind thing to do, and the kinder thing almost always takes more courage.
The other road
A while back I watched a documentary about island communities off the west coast of Scotland, places where the old way of life collapsed underneath the people living it. The most famous of them, St Kilda, did something in 1930 that I have not been able to stop thinking about: the residents wrote to the government and asked to be evacuated. A whole community, sitting down together and signing a letter that says, in effect, it’s over here, help us start again somewhere it isn’t.
Imagine drafting that letter. Imagine being the person who reads it aloud before the signatures go on. It might be the bravest paragraph anybody wrote that decade, because it names the ending early enough to afford a beginning, which is exactly the thing the subsidized mines never did.
The passenger, not the driver
Which brings me to the layoff headlines, and the thing I think they get backwards. AI is accompanying this change in our industry. It is not shepherding it. The economics of building software started shifting years ago: tooling got dramatically better, teams learned to do more with fewer people, whole categories of work got absorbed into platforms, and budgets noticed. The robots arrived late and took the blame, the same way the coal seams were thinning long before the closure announcements gave everyone a date to be angry at.
It has always been easier to blame the machine than to read the balance sheet. Blaming the machine feels like something happened to you. Reading the balance sheet suggests the ending had been arriving for years, politely, while everyone looked away, and honestly, that version is harder to live with.
What you owe the people in the fading roles
A few years ago, people in my industry told laid-off manufacturing workers to “learn to code,” and I won’t pretend I stood up and objected at the time. This year, in a twist of fate almost too neat to be accidental, the same professionals are hearing “learn to build” delivered with the same breezy certainty. The advice stings twice as much when you understand what it misses: work like this is a trade, and a trade is not just an income. It’s an identity. Ask the miner. Ask the developer. Ask me. I build websites the way a tradesperson works a bench, and losing the trade would cut somewhere well below the wallet.
So here is the transferable part, for anyone who leads a team through the next few years. The bandaid beats the wither: if a role in your shop is fading, the kindest thing you own is the honest conversation, early, while there’s still runway to do something with it. Retraining works best when it starts before anyone needs it, which is most of what my training work is for and a large part of why I answer every question a beginner asks me. And if you’re ever tempted to tell someone to learn to build, remember that the slogan is useless and the offer is priceless, so sit down and actually teach them.
Nobody in Cape Breton got to write the St Kilda letter. The withering wrote it for them, one moving van at a time, over thirty years. As the economics shift under our industry, we get to choose which letter we write, and when. I hope we’re brave enough to write ours early.
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