Jul 5, 2026
Cristina Estupiñán spent nearly a decade writing software in Silicon Valley. Then, earlier this year, she got a rejection email in the middle of the night, and that was the final straw.
Estupiñán, 33, had been interviewing with a European company for two and a half months while recovering from a bruising layoff. She was looking forward to finally getting an answer, but the email arrived in her inbox at 3 a.m. "After I got that email, I was like, 'OK, I'm going to be going into nursing,'" she told Business Insider. "I was just done."
Advertisement
Estupiñán is now completing the prerequisite coursework to enter Rutgers University's accelerated nursing program in 2028, a 15-month track designed for people who already hold a bachelor's degree in another field. Her plan is to become a nurse practitioner.
Thanks for subscribing!
Read the best of Moneywise in 5 minutes or less.
By signing up, you accept Moneywise Terms of Use, Subscription Agreement, and Privacy Policy.
Her primary complaint about the job hunt was that virtually everyone she spoke with, from recruiters to managers to other engineers, seemingly wanted her to show she was enthusiastic about AI. "I have to make up something about what excites me about AI because, frankly, nothing really excites me about AI,” she told BI.
But she admitted that last email sent her over the edge: "I can't get on the AI train. I just can't do it."
Estupiñán, to be clear, clearly loves technology. She credited GitHub Copilot with being genuinely useful in her last role, saying it automated the repetitive parts of coding while leaving her own creativity untouched. But her problems were less about the tools, rather than the culture that’s grown around said tools.
Walking away from tech
Estupiñán's disenchantment set in last year, during the job hunt. The cultural aspect of AI pervading every conversation at work was one thing, but she also worries about the environmental and social costs of AI. "I certainly don't want to be monitored," she said.
This waning enthusiasm for AI is becoming increasingly common among software engineers. In Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey, which drew responses from more than 49,000 developers, favorable sentiment toward AI tools slid to 60%, down from upwards of 70% in 2023 and 2024. Usage, meanwhile, kept climbing: 84% of developers now use or plan to use the tools.
What’s interesting about that developer survey is only 29% of respondents said they trust the accuracy of AI output, down 11 percentage points from the prior year — and the most common frustration, cited by two-thirds of developers, was AI code that comes out almost right but it still isn’t quite there, which then eats time in the debugging process.
When you pull back and look at the broader labor market, a lot of folks are reckoning with the impact of AI in the workplace. In some cases, people are trying to break out; in others, folks are trying to get. back in. Over 127,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in mass job cuts over the course of 2025, according to Crunchbase's tracker.
Cuts have seemingly accelerated in 2026, with companies increasingly naming AI as the reason. When Block cut its workforce sharply this year, CEO Jack Dorsey wrote in a memo that the move wasn't about financial difficulty but about "the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks."
Advertisement
And it’s tough for those trying to break into the labor market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York pegged unemployment among recent computer science grads at 6.1% and computer engineering grads at 7.5%, both higher than the rates for art history, English or performing arts majors. Software developer job postings on Indeed fell 71% between February 2022 and August 2025, per data the St. Louis Fed highlighted.
Universities, meanwhile, roughly doubled the number of computer science degrees they awarded over the past decade, flooding a shrinking market.
Plenty of leaders, especially in Silicon Valley, have pushed back on the doom-and-gloom narrative, though. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has called AI job fears "complete nonsense," arguing the technology makes companies want to hire more engineers, not fewer. But obviously it’s significantly more difficult at the entry level.
Must Read
- The ultra-rich use these 5 real estate strategies to build wealth while they sleep — you can start with just $100
- Here’s the average income of Americans by age in 2026. Are you keeping up or falling behind?
- Insurance companies profit most from drivers who auto-renew without shopping around. Comparing 100+ quotes takes 2 minutes and costs nothing
Join 250,000+ readers and get Moneywise’s best stories and exclusive interviews first — clear insights curated and delivered weekly. Subscribe now.
A safe haven
Estupiñán's pivot lands her in one of the few large fields that economists consistently call difficult to automate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of registered nurses to grow 5% from 2024 to 2034, faster than the 3% average across all occupations, with about 189,100 openings a year over the decade.
Nursing already sits at 3.4 million jobs, making it the single largest healthcare profession in the country. And, good news for Estupiñán, the BLS expects employment of nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists and nurse midwives to jump 35% over the same period, one of the fastest growth rates of any occupation it tracks.
Advertisement
The reason those jobs resist automation is the reason they're so difficult: they require sustained, hands-on human contact in unpredictable settings. Not something software can easily solve.
Anthropic's own labor-market research, cited in industry analyses, put registered nurses' AI exposure at 26% but their automation risk at just 12%, with the technology mostly handling documentation and monitoring rather than bedside care.
Laura Ullrich, director of economic research for North America at Indeed, made the same point to CNBC, noting that white-collar roles face the most disruption while hands-on jobs like nursing and construction are harder to replicate.
Nurses also have it pretty good on the salary front. The median annual wage for healthcare practitioners was $83,090 in May 2024, well above the $49,500 median across all occupations, and nurse practitioners earn considerably more, with an average near $129,000.
Estupiñán obviously made a very personal decision about her career in this case, but many others are doing the same. Undergraduate computer science enrollment at four-year schools dropped 8.1% recently, according to National Student Clearinghouse data, the sharpest reversal in years for what was long treated as a golden-ticket major.
You May Also Like
- JP Morgan sees gold hitting $6,000/oz before 2027 — and a Gold IRA lets you hold the physical metal while deferring the tax bill. Get your free guide from Priority Gold
- Dave Ramsey warns nearly 50% of Americans are making 1 big Social Security mistake — here’s what it is and the simple steps to fix it ASAP
- Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now become a landlord for as little as $100 — and no, you don't have to deal with tenants or fix freezers. Here's how
- Millionaires under 43 are reshaping investing — just 25% of their portfolios are in stocks. Here’s where their money is going
Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
