‘I got laid off from my S$8K/mth job and lost $12K/mth side hustles to foreigners’ — SG tech professional says he now has to ‘apply for security guard jobs’

SINGAPORE: Once a high-flying techie with an S$8,000/month salary and side hustles raking in an additional S$12,000 monthly, a Singaporean now finds himself pondering a stark career pivot: becoming a security guard.

In a candid Reddit post on the r/singaporejobs subreddit, he unloaded his frustrations about a brutal economic slide, the unforgiving realities of artificial intelligence (AI), and a side-hustle scene swarmed by cheaper foreign competition.

“I just want to share how bad the economy is right now,” he began, telling his story. “Only when you get laid off from work do you have time to ponder and think about stuff like this. Touch grass la, the current generation will say,” he wrote, but he revealed that it wasn’t so simple for him.

“Basically, my life has been downhill since COVID. I was earning comfortable money working in the tech sector. I also had a side hustle in video production (events and weddings), and I was already starting to see problems emerge when my side-hustle gigs were competing with those of foreigners from India and Malaysia,” he explained.

“Then, a sudden wave of people not wanting to spend during weddings or not getting married at all,” he added. And then came the final blow in his career and life: AI.

“Now, AI has totally taken away everything else. It’s like one after another,” he lamented. While the narrative around AI often focuses on job enhancement, he calls out what he sees as a myth: “Many say that AI will enhance your job, but the truth is, like everything we see now, that only applies to the top 0.1%.”

In a particularly dark analogy, he compared the odds of success to dating apps. “Just like in Tinder, 95% of the girls will go after the same top 5% guys (or some statistic like that, I can’t recall).”

With what he sees as fact, he now advises others who are thinking of pursuing a passion project or a second income stream: “I say if you have the chance, do not start a side hustle. There’s no point.”

Blaming rising rentals, what he describes as unsupportive policies, and global agendas, he cited: “WEF (World Economic Forum) says ‘You will own nothing, and you will be happy.’” This is the reason even neighbourhood staples like “Istanbul kopitiam in Tampines” are “closing down because of rental,” he claimed, due to skyrocketing rents.

With tech and media work drying up, he’s eyeing a completely different path out of not being left with much of a choice: “Now I’m thinking of applying for security-guard jobs. I heard they pay better than others.”

So, from once coding scripts to now guarding gates, his story is a harsh reality that in today’s economy, Singapore or not, no job is truly “safe.”

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