Former data scientist Lis Cooper from Melbourne said in an earlier Instagram post that she resigned at the end of 2025, although she did not reveal the company’s name. She said she had chosen to “not stick around while it burns” as the “tech industry has broken bad.”
“If you work in the tech industry, consider your days numbered,” Lis Cooper warned Instagram under the username @mes.lisebrales in a short video. She shared the video last month after revealing what was happening at the tech company where she previously worked.
Explaining what had unfolded inside the company before she left, she said the company’s head of data gathered some 200 to 300 data analysts and data engineers, including her, announcing that over the next 12 months they would rebuild the company’s data warehouse into a format optimised for AI data analysis.
After that, they were also given a demo of a tool the company was building, or planning to build, an internal system designed to handle data analysis, essentially product analytics.
“I watched them proudly demonstrate a tool that does the things that I have spent my career skilling up in. The parts of the job that I enjoyed the most. The reason that I joined this company. I saw them being done by AI, or at least, being projected to be done by AI,” she said.
When she then asked the head of data, “This tool that you’re demoing seems to do product analytics, you know, the thing that we’re here to do. Where does that leave us?”
“Well, it’ll save time for you, so you don’t need to spend your time doing product analytics anymore. Instead, you can spend your time doing more technical things,” the head of data answered.
However, when she probed further, asking, “What technical things?”, she was met with no response.
“They’re automating our jobs away. We’re building a warehouse so that AI can do our jobs for us. This is what I mean when I say it’s humiliating. Watching a company that’s employed us and told us that we are the thing that makes the company great, trying their hardest to replace us as soon as they can. Whether these tools work or not is only a matter of time. The writing is on the wall.”
At that time, the company was on a talent freeze and hadn’t hired any new data analysts for over a year.
Some commenters urged tech workers to “unionise” and “collectively refuse” to build these tools. Another argued that in a “socialist” economic system, technology could help people do less work while taking care of workers, rather than tossing them out to dry.
Still, another woman in tech offered a possible “silver lining” and commented: “My background is tech. There will ALWAYS be more technical things to do. There will always be things to improve. Tech systems DON’T run themselves. They are constantly failing. I spent my years in tech banking fixing things. So many things we couldn’t keep up. Don’t worry your days are definitely not numbered- because I can assure you – tech always fails.” /TISG
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