Meta is making headlines for offering $100 million “please-come-work-for-us” bonuses to poach top talent from OpenAI. Mark Zuckerberg is basically flinging Scrooge-McDuck-sized vaults of cash at a few, elite people in the world who can bend neural networks to their will.
As the Founder & CEO of Rise, I have a broad view of the job market. Our dashboard tracks data from over half a million job seekers, most of whom are college graduates with solid work experience. What we’re seeing tells a very different story. The most-typed phrases in our search bar right now are “data entry no experience,” “work from home easy job,” and “how can I make money online.” These are desperation queries. They don’t lead to six-figure stock grants—they lead to commodity gigs you can outsource to someone in Kenya for $1.50 an hour (as Scale AI, whose CEO was also recently poached by Meta, controversially, does). The middle-skill, climb-the-ladder roles that once built American prosperity are vanishing, and our site data screams it.
We are watching a barbell economy form in real time. On one end: elite AI scientists collecting eye-popping, life-changing sums and building generational wealth. On the other: millions hustling for low-skill piecework that can be automated or off-shored. In the middle? Crickets. Middle-management product managers, HR generalists, and marketing analysts are the ones laid off first. The media have already labeled it the “missing middle,” noting that companies are flattening org charts precisely because AI can now do the first draft of their work.
Take Lydia. Ten years ago she ran splashy campaigns for household-name brands; today she’s on her second layoff in eighteen months. She has a mortgage, 10 years of marketing chops, and (so far) 800+ unanswered applications to prove it. To keep the lights on, she drives Uber at dawn, delivers DoorDash at lunch, and books one-off personal-assistant gigs on weekends. Lydia isn’t an anecdote; she is an archetype. Scroll the Laid Off Substack and you’ll find hundreds of stories that echo hers.
Remember CareerBuilder and Monster? They just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection citing “challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment.” If the titans of Web 1.0 recruiting cannot survive this labor market, what hope does a 28-year-old comms associate have? Shrinking job boards are a symptom of shrinking demand for broad white-collar talent. The pipeline that once took interns to analyst to manager to director is rusted through.
There’s a growing chorus saying we should all pivot to blue-collar work now that white-collar roles have been decimated. But here’s the problem: blue-collar jobs, while indispensable, don’t move a nation. They’re hyper-local by nature, tied to single towns, single projects, single supply chains—and they can’t propel the kind of broad-based innovation that keeps the United States competitive on the global stage.
Why should you care, especially if your job is safe for now? Because this is not merely about inequality; it is about national competitiveness. If the United States allows its professional middle class to wither, we lose the lattice that turns breakthroughs into the next generation of industries. A handful of AI wizards cannot carry the GDP alone.
History offers a quiet warning. In Weimar Germany, the rich held gold, the poor bartered bread, and the middle lost everything. When the center collapsed, extremism filled the void. America isn’t 1923 Berlin, but the echoes should concern us all.
Lydia’s inbox, Meta’s nine-figure carrots, and Weimar’s ghost all point in the same direction: the divide is no longer just about money. It’s about access—to skills, to stable jobs, to a future. A society cannot balance on two poles forever. It’s time to talk about the gap before silence makes it permanent.
About Vivian:
Vivian Chen is the Founder & CEO of Rise, a modern career platform and professional community with over half a million registered job seekers and 80 million job impressions. At Rise, she helps ambitious professionals navigate their job search, grow their careers, and explore the future of work with clarity and confidence. A champion of diverse voices in the workforce, Vivian also serves on the board of the Wharton Alumnae Founders & Funders Association and is an Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Saint Peter’s University.
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