Snowflake’s AI investment may signal a broader shift: technical writers are increasingly seen as expendable.
In March 2026, Snowflake, a data analytics company, cut its technical writing team.
The tech writing space on LinkedIn lit up. Colleagues expressed solidarity. Someone asked what would happen to the customers. Someone asked what would happen to the product. Underneath all of it was the unspoken question: What will happen to me?
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I’ve seen this before, and I can tell you we’ll see it again. And yet every time it happens, many act surprised.
We shouldn’t be.
Here’s a theory I’ve been sitting with for a while. I call it i-1 staffing, borrowed loosely from Stephen Krashen, who argued that language learners acquire best when input is set just above their current level, called i+1. Just enough friction to produce growth.
Tech companies have been running the opposite experiment for years. Not i+1. i-1. Staffing just below what the work actually requires. It creates friction, but not so much to cause an immediate collapse. Just enough to make everyone feel slightly behind, always slightly stretched, always a little too busy, or afraid to ask whether that business model is the problem.
i-1 has a business logic. It caps costs and creates urgency. It selects for people who will work late, skip weekends, and interpret exhaustion as a badge of engagement.
I know this because I lived it. Years ago, at a Toronto consultancy, we all believed we were working toward a higher purpose. We were on the environmental vanguard. Saving the planet one blue box at a time. The company called itself a family.
When the economy turned, half the family was on the street by Monday. Saving the planet took a back seat to saving enough to make rent.
The mission was a cover story. It always was. I just couldn’t see it until I was outside it.
Today, tech leverages something real: a genuine excitement of building things that hadn’t existed before. That energy is authentic. The culture that grows around it is not. Work hard because this is meaningful, because the fridge is stocked, and the ping pong table is over there, and we’re all in this together.
Until we aren’t.
The i-1 calculation, I suspect, was always underneath it. The mission is a cover story.
What’s changed is that AI gives companies a new line for the press release. Before, layoffs were an economic necessity. Now they’re an AI transformation. Who could possibly question rationalization? I mean, we’re all united in this seemingly unstoppable march toward progress, right?
Until we aren’t.
Technical writers aren’t being replaced by nothing. They’re being replaced by the future. That’s a much cleaner story.
Every day inside an i-1 company looks the same. A client deadline. A meeting that runs long. An artifact to ship. A proposal due Friday afternoon. A quiet private decision not to work the weekend becomes an act of resistance so small it doesn’t even feel like resistance. Just survival.
The breaking point doesn’t arrive as a crisis. It arrives as a pattern: support tickets that take longer, documentation that’s wrong, a customer who churns quietly because they couldn’t figure out how to use the thing they paid for. The cost is real. It just doesn’t get recorded on the same spreadsheet as the savings.
The spin and tales and vacant promises of tech employment remind me of a children’s story. It’s the one about a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion needs to cross the river. The frog hesitates.
“You’ll sting me,” the frog says.
The scorpion says, “Why would I do that? We’d both drown.”
The frog carries it anyway. Halfway across, the sting comes.
“Why?” the frog asks as they sink.
“I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”
Snowflake did what any rational billion-dollar company with an AI bet and a cost-conscious board does. It ran the i-1 calculation one more time and decided that technical writers were on the wrong side of the ledger.
It’s bred in the bone.
Sure, we can ask about the customers or the product. We can even ask about the people.
Or we can stop being the frog.