Moyan Chen was laid off from her role as a data scientist at Meta in May after just under a year on the job. The 24-year-old, who lives in New York City, isn’t sure what she wants to do next. Business Insider has verified her identity and former employment. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
When the rumor of layoffs at Meta leaked in March, there was no timeline. Some of my colleagues and I were fearing Wednesdays because Meta has sometimes laid off people on those days. So, every Tuesday night, when I left work, I wondered if I would be coming back.
On Wednesday mornings, I would wake up early to check my email. That lasted for a month, until April, when there was a date for the layoffs: May 20. When the day finally came, and I got laid off, I was like, “This is it.” It was more like relief than pain.
I feel like, ultimately, I lost my job to AI.
A lot of my coworkers were also impacted, and they’re trying to find jobs. They are making posts on LinkedIn and asking for new opportunities. It feels like we are all sailing on the sea, and Meta is a huge ship that’s moving very fast. When the AI storm comes, is your next move to jump to a smaller, slower ship?
Some people I worked with were saying it’s better to find a job in finance because it takes longer for them to adopt AI. But ultimately, is the same thing going to happen to you?
A switch in my career path
After I got laid off, I wasn’t that nervous, because I’m single and have no family in the US. My parents have been wanting me to go back to China anyway. That’s the worst-case scenario because I love the US and the energy of New York City.
I don’t know if I plan to find another job at a big company. I have interned at three of them, and now I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder. I used to wonder, “How am I going to feed myself if I don’t work for a big company?” That’s why I didn’t resign from Meta. I kept working, and I worked hard.
Now I feel like it’s not safe anymore, like I can get laid off at any time. Meta has been very generous with severance, so I have a couple of months to figure out what I’ll do next.
I don’t think this layoff is a bad thing for me. It’s more like a switch in my career path. It’s making me see that I could live a different life, and it’s probably better than the corporate life.
I’m still in a transition period and don’t have all the answers. Seeing how AI is changing things, it makes me rethink the type of job I might want. I’ve started creating content online to document my career journey and what I’m learning about AI. I’m also interested in exploring career coaching to help people who are experiencing this transition brought about by this new technology.
The longer-term risk
Whatever I end up doing, I expect AI will have an impact. At Meta, I was a data scientist working on Instagram. For that kind of job, the more repetitive tasks are definitely going away. So, writing queries and spending time creating visualizations — these things have already been replaced by AI in Big Tech.
If you only know how to code, that’s not enough. If you’re just writing SQL queries, using Python, or tracking and analyzing metrics, it’s not a very promising career anymore. There will still be a role called “data scientist,” but they will need to know more about other functions. There is this emerging trend that requires us to have broader skills and knowledge because of AI.
It got to the point where I wouldn’t check AI-generated queries because they have gotten so accurate. I thought that if AI made a mistake on a specific task, I would make 10. For big, ambiguous projects, AI would still make a lot of mistakes, but for specific tasks, it was super accurate. It’s very much like a talented individual contributor.
I’m less interested in AI as a stand-alone technology and more interested in how it changes the way people work and build products. If I come across a team that aligns with my interests and values, I would seriously consider joining an AI startup.
Those companies can be risky, but staying at a big company doing traditional data analytics and reporting jobs just feels like I will be left behind. That’s riskier in the long term.
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