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This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsust

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit crazy with the hiring sprees and accumulated some unproductive devs who are probably a net drag. That’s ultimately a healthy force in the economy as those people can do more in smaller firms with less in-house expertise (albeit at lower wages). I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game.

n4r9 3y ago
The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indeed LLMs are providing this supposed boost?
- oblio 3y ago
  They don't. They basically go by highest salaries and various arbitrary measures such as unprofitable division, virtual location, etc.
- paxys 3y ago
  It's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.
  - jmerz 3y ago
    The intersection between politically/socially unpopular and low impact.
    - NotSuspicious 3y ago
      in my experience is greater than the intersection between the politically/socially popular and low impact.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Anecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.
    - paxys 3y ago
      And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?
      - izacus 3y ago
        What do you mean "no operational impact"? How did you measure that? People on this site are constantly complaining how horrible the Google services became.
        JAlexoid 3y ago
        Over the last 3+X years, not suddenly after 1-2 years of layoffs. I can bet that if you bring Google Reader up, you'll get a lot more complaining - than any "horrible Google services" topic.
        izacus 3y ago
        Layoffs were 6 months ago.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  Developers usually follow scrum frameworks, so productivity could easily be measured by overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.
  - danjac 3y ago
    That's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced.
    - KronisLV 3y ago
      > That's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced. How else would you measure how much work someone does, other than by how much tracked work that's attributed to them there is? The people using these indicators probably don't care about someone who might have fewer closed issues but instead is helping out 5 people work more efficiently, but rather about people who are constantly shipping measurably less than others, stack ranking and all - in their minds, development should be viewed as some widget factory. Just look at what happened to agile and how SAFE ended up: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale That's also how you get attempts to turn some abstract complexity evaluation (story points) into hours that could be billed to a client ahead of time, even though it probably shouldn't and doesn't work like that.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Measuring productivity is a fool’s errand. The reality is that performance is subjective and in a hierarchy only the whims of those above you matter.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Ease of measurement is not enough. I can drive badly under the speed limit, so even though speed is easy to measure, it's not nearly good enough to evaluate my driving.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    That's literally the last thing that managers look at, when it comes to making a layoff decision. Never have I ever been the person with highest "overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.", yet I have not been laid off in a very long time. Last time I thought I was getting laid off, I misread the manager's comments as PIP.
- woobar 3y ago
  > how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? The senior management delegates. At every moment your direct manager knows whom they are willing to part ways with if asked. Even if everyone on the team is great there is always some criteria (costs, impact on important project, institutional knowledge) that sets some people apart.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Sorry, but mass layoffs aren't exactly the most rational ones. There's a lot of "you have to cut X off your salary budget", pick whoever you want. Then it's up to the managers to pick, very subjectively, who they want to work with the most. FFS - I managed to dodge 4 layoffs at a startup, including my whole department being cut wholesale. My managers always kept me, even though I wouldn't call myself the "best" or "the cheapest". All of it just boils down to one thing - I'm the one that whoever manages me can rely on. Just that... being reliable.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    That makes sense. In lieu of a reliable objective measure of an employee's impact, the next best thing is to trust the managers judgement. I would still question how effective this is at selecting the "unproductive" workers; I guess it really depends on how good the managers are.
BazookaMusic 3y ago
Anecdotal experience but most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles, where the expectation is that they will be replaced by AI and wishful thinking. Newly hired people were more junior and cheaper than previous employees so it makes no sense to fire them.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.
  - AugustoCAS 3y ago
    I've seen this on the org I work, the whole 'engineer manager' layer was removed and replaced with wishful thinking (love that phrase!). The engineer managers had a good idea of how to manage teams and were doing team/tech lead work and coaching the team/tech leads, which didn't have much experience (mostly senior devs who didn't want to code any more). This org in particular missed, in my eyes, where to cut. There is a number of engineers who cannot do much more than copy/paste code and the org has no wish to train them. Unfortunately, the org thinks that going wide (lots of teams, lots of people) is a good way to scale.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    Until hiring decisions are subjective and prone to manipulation - the "rainmakers" will not be fired. Middle management is screwed, though. Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced By what? A Board-hired AI?
lesuorac 3y ago
> Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. Well, this sounds logical and all but isn't always. For example, Google's revenue/employee exploded during covid but it didn't crater post-covid [1]. So even with a hiring spree, the company is on the same track as it was pre-covid. You might need to layoff employees to get that same covid high but that covid high is the unsustainable part not your current employee count. So some companies may have overhired compared to what their reveneue growth without covid would've been but not all did. You still need to evaluate companies on a company by company basis. [1]: https://www.macroaxis.com/financial-statements/GOOGL/Revenue-Per-Employee https://www.macroaxis.com/financial-statements/GOOGL/Revenue...
- Jensson 3y ago
  Control for inflation and look at the chart again, and those numbers are after layoffs.
mjr00 3y ago
> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. I can confidently say that this factors in 0%. Layoffs were happening in the industry even before the LLM craze. And a 30% overall productivity boost for a "top" developer is a massive overestimate. Your best developers aren't spending their days writing boilerplate unit tests.
- enriquec 3y ago
  everyone looking for any reason when its obviously a massive recession due to govt. spending
  - hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
    Massive government spending? Sure. But "massive recession"? Really?
    - enriquec 3y ago
      Recession = two quarters of negative growth. We've had a lot more. I'm not playing with the kafkaesque political redefinitions and find them pretty pathetic actually.
      - maneesh 3y ago
        The economy has been growing in 2023 though https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
        mistrial9 3y ago
        consolidated economic activity has been growing massively, while Main Street continues to fail. how is this "us" or "we" .. investors here tell one side of a story.. look at the cities where people live.
pharmakom 3y ago
Anecdotally, GitHub Co Pilot is barely a 5% performance boost. Still useful, but I think a nice coffee machine does more.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  Yeah, I think it depends on your specialty. If you're an enterprise developer, you save on some boilerplate for sure, and it's a nice alternative to Stack Overflow. If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe.
  - softfalcon 3y ago
    I'm a senior who generalizes in full stack web development due to my wearing many hats at my company. ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot have regularly barfed out garbage for me while I use them. I spend more time double checking whether it's right than I do writing code with it. It's terrible for my use case where I am doing somewhat complex fixes/refactors everywhere. It just regularly makes up stuff, or gets the wrong API version, or just outright poops out non-existent syntax crap.
    - Rapzid 3y ago
      This is my experience. These productivity gain numbers are being pulled out of thin air, and certainly not broadly applicable.
  - fsdjkflsjfsoij 3y ago
    > If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe. I really doubt this. Copilot/ChatGPT are not useful at all for the hard problems and they're not trustworthy enough for the small problems. Even for the simplest things I have to comb over the generated code very carefully because I've seen them be subtly wrong dozens of times in my relatively short use. If I have to go over everything they generate with a fine tooth comb it's just easier and less error prone to write it entirely myself.
boshalfoshal 3y ago
Keep in mind companies planned like it was sustainable and hired a lot because from a business perspective, its much easier to overhire and lay off later than it is to be understaffed during a period of potential unprecedented growth. It doesn't fully rationalize many companies actions but its just an application of a regret minimization framework. I personally don't believe its a massive function of Generative AI (although it could be), I think the major contributing factor is that the projections that companies made in 2020/2021 and the hiring they did to resource more projects to take advantage of those rosy projections ended up falling short of real expectations. i.e instead of needing to take advantage of a potential 20% yoy future growth in their target markets, they only really need to staff for a 10% yoy growth. Also probably a bit of "monkey see monkey do" where a company that actually needs to layoff (meta) lays off a bunch of people, and other large companies that may not "need" to layoff (like Google) follow suit since now its "socially acceptable."
toyg 3y ago
Meh, it's nothing to do with that, it's just a layoff round. Epic went from 2200 employees in 2020 to almost 9000 in 2023. They are now basically shedding 1 out of 6 hires they've done since 2020. That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out.
- c7DJTLrn 3y ago
  >That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out These layoffs are just a way for CEOs to improve "efficiency" AKA increase margins so they get a nice fat bonus - COVID overhiring has been a convenient excuse and every company has jumped on it.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's not an excuse. They overhired.
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    I don’t think Tim Sweeney is very bonus motivated TBH! Although if you read the article he says directly that it’s efficiency motivated.
  - jmye 3y ago
    So you don’t think they actually overhired and that that massive growth in headcount was needed and justified?
- giantg2 3y ago
  It depends on how they're laying off. If it's by project, they might not be segregating by skill. If it's across the board, then they might.
madeofpalk 3y ago
You think the top 10% of workers are getting, at a minimum, a 30% productivity boost? You think they're getting in an extra 1.5 days worth of work a week because they're using Copilot?
- softfalcon 3y ago
  You mostly have to ignore these AI solution hopefuls. They're living in a momentary dream that AI LLM tools will solve all our coding problems. They don't and reality hasn't hit them yet. I don't know any real seasoned dev who is getting a 30% boost because they installed Co-Pilot. The tools poop out too many errors/fake-garbage to be useful to devs working on battle hardened codebases.
  - ynx 3y ago
    My productivity boost is much more modest than 30% to be sure, but I'm less tired at the end of the day. The productivity boost for non-seasoned devs, or devs of average skill level or above doing relatively routine but needed work? For a large chunk of the nearly-invisible-to-silicon-valley workforce doing those tasks, I would be surprised if it wasn't more than 30%.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Another way of spinning this - if "fancy autocomplete" is giving you a 30% productivity boost then either you're not actually in the top 10%, or you're doing working on "top 10% problems".
  - kyleee 3y ago
    Which of course, is the overwhelming majority of people! Perhaps about 90% of people :)
hibikir 3y ago
I'd argue that the productivity boost is mich higher for the lower end developers than for the best ones. They are best at the simple tasks in the most verbose programming languages: Easier to think of them as higher quality auto-completion. The terser the language, and more innovative the problem is, the smalle the LLM help. So if anyone gains from this, is the companies paying under-market, and therefore typically getting somewhat substandard devs to do boring things. There's major savings in productivity there, precisely because the training for those tasks is so good. If you had your highest performance developers spending a significant amount of time on that kind of busywork, you weren't getting that great of a performance in the first place.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Maybe this is the answer to a disconnect I've noticed. A number of devs where I work have started using ChatGPT to help with their work, but it hasn't resulted in any noticeable productivity or quality gains. But the devs here are all very experienced senior-level engineers. Perhaps that's why we aren't seeing any gains?
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Of it's anything like my job, it's likely that a majority of the slowness is in the non-coding steps - meetings, upgrades/config, business ideation and prioritization, etc.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      I mean, that's like most non-junior software development jobs--at least it has been the case for all the ones I've had: Actual, physical, typing-in-of-code is usually about 5-10% of any software developer's job. The rest is tools management, configuration, compiling, merging/source control, code reviews, helping other developers, brainstorming, planning, design reviews, bug management, status reporting, project management rituals like scrum, and so on. I think many software developers have this romantic, idealized notion that their entire job should be furiously typing code into a computer, and that anything else they have to grudgingly do is unproductive overhead.
0xDEF 3y ago
>I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. I have been evangelizing GitHub Copilot (+ Copilot Chat) and ChatGPT Pro to my coworkers that include full-stack .Net/React devs, Python data science people, and embedded C devs. Only the .Net/React devs have been sticking to both Copilot and ChatGPT Pro. The Python data science are using ChatGPT Pro but have dropped Copilot. The embedded C devs are using neither.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  There's a very simple reason for it - the amount of slightly customized code is directly proportional to automation. When working with embedded systems - I barely ever have "lightly" customized code. Meanwhile the closer you're to the frontend - the closer you get to having majority of your code being boilerplate.
mulmen 3y ago
I’d love to know how these top developers are identified. What’s this mythical productivity metric? If Epic has one that accurately models productivity they should 1) share individual scores with their employees and 2) stop wasting time on games and start selling it to every other corporation. If they really did over-hire during the pandemic and fail to plan for the future that was either 1) intentional and they lied to recruits about the duration of employment or 2) incompetence on the part of leadership and recruiting. Have heads rolled in the responsible departments?
gumballindie 3y ago
> ChatGPT are factoring into this Likely not a reason for layoffs. If someone was fired due to llms it was probably due to the incompetence to think the chat bot is more than a data leaking search engine.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/ There is still some insane growth Fortnite's game as a service fatigue, for some reason they didn't jump on the Extraction Shooter hype and it cost them today IMO, Fortnite became successful because they jumped on a trend at the right time (from Survival Base Building to Battle Royal), they seem to have forgotten that EPIC launcher is still bad today.. which doesn't make me want to have it open, and let alone to browse it.. which might hurt their numbers Steam's launcher follows the same path it seems, slow and bloated CEF bullshit.. makes me want to use it less
Mc91 3y ago
If ChatGPT should be able to generate any code, a function that outputs a set of prime numbers longs in Kotlin should be simple enough (unless you consider Kotlin, the 12th-20th most popular language according to various surveys, too obscure). One that has a good big-O runtime that is compact as possible. After a bit of futzing I get this: fun sieve(n: Long) = (2L until n).fold((2L until n).toMutableList()){p,i->p.apply{for(j in i * 2 until n step i)this[(j-2).toInt()]=0}}.filter{it!= 0L} and it works OK in some situations: >>> sieve(100L) res5: kotlin.collections.List<kotlin.Long> = [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97] Let's try another test input - >>> sieve(10000000L) java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space Oops. Also if the 12th-20th most popular language (Kotlin) being too obscure is the reason, how will they fare currently except with the most popular languages? This is about as simple as a function as you can get. 95% of my programming work is standups, sprint planning and grooming, looking at Swagger or other API backend documentation for information, looking through Outlook, Teams and Confluence for information about my story, looking for UI on Figma, contacting various teams for more information - then someone wants me to review their pull request and stop to do that - but notice they have some business logic wrong because they don't fully understand the domain. Yet even something simple like a function generating a list of prime numbers, ChatGPT struggles with. Not that it can't get better, but it's no threat to most programmers I know in the short term (and if it becomes one, I'll shift over to writing Python scripts that call Pytorch, numpy etc. - I already do so in my spare time).
- bombcar 3y ago
  Microsoft breaking Outlook and Teams does more for productivity than all the AI in the world combined until now.
Reticularas 3y ago
No one in game and game engine development is using ChatGPT. It doesn't even work, even if it was productive, as barely any problems the average gamedev faces on a day-to-day have been surfaced to the training data of an LLM.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  Yeah, this exactly. The only person I know who is succeeding at "game dev" with ChatGPT is an older bloke I know who just began their baby steps on a pet project with Unity. Sure, if you're still learning how to move position from x to x+1, ChatGPT can help you with those basics, but anything more than that and they start hitting me up on Discord looking for real answers. Something as simple as how the serialization of fields in behaviour classes was too much for ChatGPT. They read what it hallucinated up, got confused, and were calling me up to explain minutes later. For those who don't know Unity, this is something you have to do daily when building new logic into game components and ChatGPT was clueless about it. The limitations of ChatGPT as a programming aid are very very obvious and it has a long way to go before it's really useful to seasoned professionals.
- Rapzid 3y ago
  ChatGPT 4 may be better but CoPilot is terrible at making suggestions on algorithm work. It'll slip a -(x) in to parameters where it's supposed to be positive. Use the sim but wrong variable names. Swap parameters around. It's can be a nightmare and cost you way more time debugging than it saves typing. Specifically with type-ahead suggestions I believe with typing you are more engaged in thinking about what is correct. With a CoPilot suggestion the tendency is to just skim it to see if it look good. And that's probably part of the problem; the LLM is trained on what looks good! This may look good: computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesA, x, -1) But it's supposed to be: computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesB, x, 1) Good times.
- xgkickt 3y ago
  Not until legal approve it, which doesn't seem like any time soon.
AYBABTME 3y ago
LLM code generation tools are producing output equivalent to a new grad who doesn't know much how to write code that integrates well in a program. It churns out a lot of text but every bit of it needs to be questioned and reviewed. As such it's not exactly a productivity booster where correctness matters, it's actually a liability. But for churning out code that isn't critical, it's great.
napierzaza 3y ago
[dead]
bakugo 3y ago
> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. Epic's game programmers are already incompetent to the point that Fortnite is basically falling apart at the seams and every update adds dozens of new bizarre bugs, I don't even want to imagine how much worse it would get if they started using AI to write code.
pelasaco 3y ago
> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. Probably 0%. What I heard, mostly people not performing (which is the real pandemic after COVID-19). If I'm not wrong as other companies, devs there are not "allowed" to use copilot and chatgpt fearing code plagiarism and ending up with some license violations..
giantg2 3y ago
"If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost" Is that really how it works? It seems like the biggest gains are actually in the less skilled segment.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Gaming is a notoriously boom/bust field. Layoffs, failures and bankruptcies happen even in the best of times. Reading anything macro into a game developer layoff is really stretching things.
WorldMaker 3y ago
Layoffs are rarely about productivity, especially at super profitable companies. Layoffs are primarily about short-term metrics to drive shareholder expectations. Where those metrics reflect productivity it is generally three or four degrees of separation from any actual productivity data. The thing those metrics are most good at showing are labor cost aggregates versus industry base rates. The biggest reason for layoffs has always been, and likely will always be, the "C-Suite class" controlling expectations on labor costs (salaries/wages) in an industry. That's why they often happen in waves, many companies at once, it's a pressure release valve to keep the labor market in "control" propagated by the largest shareholders, especially those born and bred into the C-Suites. Those shareholders don't actually care how productive a company is, productivity is increasingly orthogonal to profit. They care how profitable a company is, and companies stay the most profitable when (among other things) the labor market is most effectively depressed (and layoffs are a useful depression tactic) and laborers aren't comfortable enough to fight for better wages.
callalex 3y ago
This is starting to get even more irritating than the “put a blockchain on it” spammers ever were.
JakeAl 3y ago
This is standard for economic conditions. When there's a lot of easy to come by money (loans) there's a lot of disposable income and excessive employment. As soon as the money supply tightens (or in this case year on year the money in the economy goes negative), businesses trim the fat and get conservative about only keeping people creating value/profits. Which is why unemployment figures lag in a collapsing economy.

n4r9 3y ago

The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indeed LLMs are providing this supposed boost?

oblio 3y ago
They don't. They basically go by highest salaries and various arbitrary measures such as unprofitable division, virtual location, etc.
paxys 3y ago
It's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.
- jmerz 3y ago
  The intersection between politically/socially unpopular and low impact.
  - NotSuspicious 3y ago
    in my experience is greater than the intersection between the politically/socially popular and low impact.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Anecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.
  - paxys 3y ago
    And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?
    - izacus 3y ago
      What do you mean "no operational impact"? How did you measure that? People on this site are constantly complaining how horrible the Google services became.
      - JAlexoid 3y ago
        Over the last 3+X years, not suddenly after 1-2 years of layoffs. I can bet that if you bring Google Reader up, you'll get a lot more complaining - than any "horrible Google services" topic.
        izacus 3y ago
        Layoffs were 6 months ago.
otteromkram 3y ago
Developers usually follow scrum frameworks, so productivity could easily be measured by overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.
- danjac 3y ago
  That's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced.
  - KronisLV 3y ago
    > That's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced. How else would you measure how much work someone does, other than by how much tracked work that's attributed to them there is? The people using these indicators probably don't care about someone who might have fewer closed issues but instead is helping out 5 people work more efficiently, but rather about people who are constantly shipping measurably less than others, stack ranking and all - in their minds, development should be viewed as some widget factory. Just look at what happened to agile and how SAFE ended up: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale That's also how you get attempts to turn some abstract complexity evaluation (story points) into hours that could be billed to a client ahead of time, even though it probably shouldn't and doesn't work like that.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Measuring productivity is a fool’s errand. The reality is that performance is subjective and in a hierarchy only the whims of those above you matter.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Ease of measurement is not enough. I can drive badly under the speed limit, so even though speed is easy to measure, it's not nearly good enough to evaluate my driving.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  That's literally the last thing that managers look at, when it comes to making a layoff decision. Never have I ever been the person with highest "overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.", yet I have not been laid off in a very long time. Last time I thought I was getting laid off, I misread the manager's comments as PIP.
woobar 3y ago
> how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? The senior management delegates. At every moment your direct manager knows whom they are willing to part ways with if asked. Even if everyone on the team is great there is always some criteria (costs, impact on important project, institutional knowledge) that sets some people apart.
JAlexoid 3y ago
Sorry, but mass layoffs aren't exactly the most rational ones. There's a lot of "you have to cut X off your salary budget", pick whoever you want. Then it's up to the managers to pick, very subjectively, who they want to work with the most. FFS - I managed to dodge 4 layoffs at a startup, including my whole department being cut wholesale. My managers always kept me, even though I wouldn't call myself the "best" or "the cheapest". All of it just boils down to one thing - I'm the one that whoever manages me can rely on. Just that... being reliable.
- n4r9 3y ago
  That makes sense. In lieu of a reliable objective measure of an employee's impact, the next best thing is to trust the managers judgement. I would still question how effective this is at selecting the "unproductive" workers; I guess it really depends on how good the managers are.

BazookaMusic 3y ago

Anecdotal experience but most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles, where the expectation is that they will be replaced by AI and wishful thinking. Newly hired people were more junior and cheaper than previous employees so it makes no sense to fire them.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.
- AugustoCAS 3y ago
  I've seen this on the org I work, the whole 'engineer manager' layer was removed and replaced with wishful thinking (love that phrase!). The engineer managers had a good idea of how to manage teams and were doing team/tech lead work and coaching the team/tech leads, which didn't have much experience (mostly senior devs who didn't want to code any more). This org in particular missed, in my eyes, where to cut. There is a number of engineers who cannot do much more than copy/paste code and the org has no wish to train them. Unfortunately, the org thinks that going wide (lots of teams, lots of people) is a good way to scale.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Until hiring decisions are subjective and prone to manipulation - the "rainmakers" will not be fired. Middle management is screwed, though. Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced By what? A Board-hired AI?

lesuorac 3y ago

> Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. Well, this sounds logical and all but isn't always. For example, Google's revenue/employee exploded during covid but it didn't crater post-covid [1]. So even with a hiring spree, the company is on the same track as it was pre-covid. You might need to layoff employees to get that same covid high but that covid high is the unsustainable part not your current employee count. So some companies may have overhired compared to what their reveneue growth without covid would've been but not all did. You still need to evaluate companies on a company by company basis. [1]: https://www.macroaxis.com/financial-statements/GOOGL/Revenue-Per-Employee https://www.macroaxis.com/financial-statements/GOOGL/Revenue...

Jensson 3y ago
Control for inflation and look at the chart again, and those numbers are after layoffs.

mjr00 3y ago

> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. I can confidently say that this factors in 0%. Layoffs were happening in the industry even before the LLM craze. And a 30% overall productivity boost for a "top" developer is a massive overestimate. Your best developers aren't spending their days writing boilerplate unit tests.

enriquec 3y ago
everyone looking for any reason when its obviously a massive recession due to govt. spending
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  Massive government spending? Sure. But "massive recession"? Really?
  - enriquec 3y ago
    Recession = two quarters of negative growth. We've had a lot more. I'm not playing with the kafkaesque political redefinitions and find them pretty pathetic actually.
    - maneesh 3y ago
      The economy has been growing in 2023 though https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        consolidated economic activity has been growing massively, while Main Street continues to fail. how is this "us" or "we" .. investors here tell one side of a story.. look at the cities where people live.

pharmakom 3y ago

Anecdotally, GitHub Co Pilot is barely a 5% performance boost. Still useful, but I think a nice coffee machine does more.

itsoktocry 3y ago
Yeah, I think it depends on your specialty. If you're an enterprise developer, you save on some boilerplate for sure, and it's a nice alternative to Stack Overflow. If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  I'm a senior who generalizes in full stack web development due to my wearing many hats at my company. ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot have regularly barfed out garbage for me while I use them. I spend more time double checking whether it's right than I do writing code with it. It's terrible for my use case where I am doing somewhat complex fixes/refactors everywhere. It just regularly makes up stuff, or gets the wrong API version, or just outright poops out non-existent syntax crap.
  - Rapzid 3y ago
    This is my experience. These productivity gain numbers are being pulled out of thin air, and certainly not broadly applicable.
- fsdjkflsjfsoij 3y ago
  > If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe. I really doubt this. Copilot/ChatGPT are not useful at all for the hard problems and they're not trustworthy enough for the small problems. Even for the simplest things I have to comb over the generated code very carefully because I've seen them be subtly wrong dozens of times in my relatively short use. If I have to go over everything they generate with a fine tooth comb it's just easier and less error prone to write it entirely myself.

boshalfoshal 3y ago

Keep in mind companies planned like it was sustainable and hired a lot because from a business perspective, its much easier to overhire and lay off later than it is to be understaffed during a period of potential unprecedented growth. It doesn't fully rationalize many companies actions but its just an application of a regret minimization framework. I personally don't believe its a massive function of Generative AI (although it could be), I think the major contributing factor is that the projections that companies made in 2020/2021 and the hiring they did to resource more projects to take advantage of those rosy projections ended up falling short of real expectations. i.e instead of needing to take advantage of a potential 20% yoy future growth in their target markets, they only really need to staff for a 10% yoy growth. Also probably a bit of "monkey see monkey do" where a company that actually needs to layoff (meta) lays off a bunch of people, and other large companies that may not "need" to layoff (like Google) follow suit since now its "socially acceptable."

toyg 3y ago

Meh, it's nothing to do with that, it's just a layoff round. Epic went from 2200 employees in 2020 to almost 9000 in 2023. They are now basically shedding 1 out of 6 hires they've done since 2020. That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out.

c7DJTLrn 3y ago
>That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out These layoffs are just a way for CEOs to improve "efficiency" AKA increase margins so they get a nice fat bonus - COVID overhiring has been a convenient excuse and every company has jumped on it.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It's not an excuse. They overhired.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  I don’t think Tim Sweeney is very bonus motivated TBH! Although if you read the article he says directly that it’s efficiency motivated.
- jmye 3y ago
  So you don’t think they actually overhired and that that massive growth in headcount was needed and justified?
giantg2 3y ago
It depends on how they're laying off. If it's by project, they might not be segregating by skill. If it's across the board, then they might.

madeofpalk 3y ago

You think the top 10% of workers are getting, at a minimum, a 30% productivity boost? You think they're getting in an extra 1.5 days worth of work a week because they're using Copilot?

softfalcon 3y ago
You mostly have to ignore these AI solution hopefuls. They're living in a momentary dream that AI LLM tools will solve all our coding problems. They don't and reality hasn't hit them yet. I don't know any real seasoned dev who is getting a 30% boost because they installed Co-Pilot. The tools poop out too many errors/fake-garbage to be useful to devs working on battle hardened codebases.
- ynx 3y ago
  My productivity boost is much more modest than 30% to be sure, but I'm less tired at the end of the day. The productivity boost for non-seasoned devs, or devs of average skill level or above doing relatively routine but needed work? For a large chunk of the nearly-invisible-to-silicon-valley workforce doing those tasks, I would be surprised if it wasn't more than 30%.
madeofpalk 3y ago
Another way of spinning this - if "fancy autocomplete" is giving you a 30% productivity boost then either you're not actually in the top 10%, or you're doing working on "top 10% problems".
- kyleee 3y ago
  Which of course, is the overwhelming majority of people! Perhaps about 90% of people :)

hibikir 3y ago

I'd argue that the productivity boost is mich higher for the lower end developers than for the best ones. They are best at the simple tasks in the most verbose programming languages: Easier to think of them as higher quality auto-completion. The terser the language, and more innovative the problem is, the smalle the LLM help. So if anyone gains from this, is the companies paying under-market, and therefore typically getting somewhat substandard devs to do boring things. There's major savings in productivity there, precisely because the training for those tasks is so good. If you had your highest performance developers spending a significant amount of time on that kind of busywork, you weren't getting that great of a performance in the first place.

JohnFen 3y ago
Maybe this is the answer to a disconnect I've noticed. A number of devs where I work have started using ChatGPT to help with their work, but it hasn't resulted in any noticeable productivity or quality gains. But the devs here are all very experienced senior-level engineers. Perhaps that's why we aren't seeing any gains?
- giantg2 3y ago
  Of it's anything like my job, it's likely that a majority of the slowness is in the non-coding steps - meetings, upgrades/config, business ideation and prioritization, etc.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I mean, that's like most non-junior software development jobs--at least it has been the case for all the ones I've had: Actual, physical, typing-in-of-code is usually about 5-10% of any software developer's job. The rest is tools management, configuration, compiling, merging/source control, code reviews, helping other developers, brainstorming, planning, design reviews, bug management, status reporting, project management rituals like scrum, and so on. I think many software developers have this romantic, idealized notion that their entire job should be furiously typing code into a computer, and that anything else they have to grudgingly do is unproductive overhead.

0xDEF 3y ago

>I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. I have been evangelizing GitHub Copilot (+ Copilot Chat) and ChatGPT Pro to my coworkers that include full-stack .Net/React devs, Python data science people, and embedded C devs. Only the .Net/React devs have been sticking to both Copilot and ChatGPT Pro. The Python data science are using ChatGPT Pro but have dropped Copilot. The embedded C devs are using neither.

JAlexoid 3y ago
There's a very simple reason for it - the amount of slightly customized code is directly proportional to automation. When working with embedded systems - I barely ever have "lightly" customized code. Meanwhile the closer you're to the frontend - the closer you get to having majority of your code being boilerplate.

mulmen 3y ago

I’d love to know how these top developers are identified. What’s this mythical productivity metric? If Epic has one that accurately models productivity they should 1) share individual scores with their employees and 2) stop wasting time on games and start selling it to every other corporation. If they really did over-hire during the pandemic and fail to plan for the future that was either 1) intentional and they lied to recruits about the duration of employment or 2) incompetence on the part of leadership and recruiting. Have heads rolled in the responsible departments?

gumballindie 3y ago

> ChatGPT are factoring into this Likely not a reason for layoffs. If someone was fired due to llms it was probably due to the incompetence to think the chat bot is more than a data leaking search engine.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/ There is still some insane growth Fortnite's game as a service fatigue, for some reason they didn't jump on the Extraction Shooter hype and it cost them today IMO, Fortnite became successful because they jumped on a trend at the right time (from Survival Base Building to Battle Royal), they seem to have forgotten that EPIC launcher is still bad today.. which doesn't make me want to have it open, and let alone to browse it.. which might hurt their numbers Steam's launcher follows the same path it seems, slow and bloated CEF bullshit.. makes me want to use it less

Mc91 3y ago

If ChatGPT should be able to generate any code, a function that outputs a set of prime numbers longs in Kotlin should be simple enough (unless you consider Kotlin, the 12th-20th most popular language according to various surveys, too obscure). One that has a good big-O runtime that is compact as possible. After a bit of futzing I get this: fun sieve(n: Long) = (2L until n).fold((2L until n).toMutableList()){p,i->p.apply{for(j in i * 2 until n step i)this[(j-2).toInt()]=0}}.filter{it!= 0L} and it works OK in some situations: >>> sieve(100L) res5: kotlin.collections.List<kotlin.Long> = [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97] Let's try another test input - >>> sieve(10000000L) java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space Oops. Also if the 12th-20th most popular language (Kotlin) being too obscure is the reason, how will they fare currently except with the most popular languages? This is about as simple as a function as you can get. 95% of my programming work is standups, sprint planning and grooming, looking at Swagger or other API backend documentation for information, looking through Outlook, Teams and Confluence for information about my story, looking for UI on Figma, contacting various teams for more information - then someone wants me to review their pull request and stop to do that - but notice they have some business logic wrong because they don't fully understand the domain. Yet even something simple like a function generating a list of prime numbers, ChatGPT struggles with. Not that it can't get better, but it's no threat to most programmers I know in the short term (and if it becomes one, I'll shift over to writing Python scripts that call Pytorch, numpy etc. - I already do so in my spare time).

bombcar 3y ago
Microsoft breaking Outlook and Teams does more for productivity than all the AI in the world combined until now.

Reticularas 3y ago

No one in game and game engine development is using ChatGPT. It doesn't even work, even if it was productive, as barely any problems the average gamedev faces on a day-to-day have been surfaced to the training data of an LLM.

softfalcon 3y ago
Yeah, this exactly. The only person I know who is succeeding at "game dev" with ChatGPT is an older bloke I know who just began their baby steps on a pet project with Unity. Sure, if you're still learning how to move position from x to x+1, ChatGPT can help you with those basics, but anything more than that and they start hitting me up on Discord looking for real answers. Something as simple as how the serialization of fields in behaviour classes was too much for ChatGPT. They read what it hallucinated up, got confused, and were calling me up to explain minutes later. For those who don't know Unity, this is something you have to do daily when building new logic into game components and ChatGPT was clueless about it. The limitations of ChatGPT as a programming aid are very very obvious and it has a long way to go before it's really useful to seasoned professionals.
Rapzid 3y ago
ChatGPT 4 may be better but CoPilot is terrible at making suggestions on algorithm work. It'll slip a -(x) in to parameters where it's supposed to be positive. Use the sim but wrong variable names. Swap parameters around. It's can be a nightmare and cost you way more time debugging than it saves typing. Specifically with type-ahead suggestions I believe with typing you are more engaged in thinking about what is correct. With a CoPilot suggestion the tendency is to just skim it to see if it look good. And that's probably part of the problem; the LLM is trained on what looks good! This may look good: computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesA, x, -1) But it's supposed to be: computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesB, x, 1) Good times.
xgkickt 3y ago
Not until legal approve it, which doesn't seem like any time soon.

AYBABTME 3y ago

LLM code generation tools are producing output equivalent to a new grad who doesn't know much how to write code that integrates well in a program. It churns out a lot of text but every bit of it needs to be questioned and reviewed. As such it's not exactly a productivity booster where correctness matters, it's actually a liability. But for churning out code that isn't critical, it's great.

napierzaza 3y ago

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bakugo 3y ago

> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. Epic's game programmers are already incompetent to the point that Fortnite is basically falling apart at the seams and every update adds dozens of new bizarre bugs, I don't even want to imagine how much worse it would get if they started using AI to write code.

pelasaco 3y ago

> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. Probably 0%. What I heard, mostly people not performing (which is the real pandemic after COVID-19). If I'm not wrong as other companies, devs there are not "allowed" to use copilot and chatgpt fearing code plagiarism and ending up with some license violations..

giantg2 3y ago

"If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost" Is that really how it works? It seems like the biggest gains are actually in the less skilled segment.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Gaming is a notoriously boom/bust field. Layoffs, failures and bankruptcies happen even in the best of times. Reading anything macro into a game developer layoff is really stretching things.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Layoffs are rarely about productivity, especially at super profitable companies. Layoffs are primarily about short-term metrics to drive shareholder expectations. Where those metrics reflect productivity it is generally three or four degrees of separation from any actual productivity data. The thing those metrics are most good at showing are labor cost aggregates versus industry base rates. The biggest reason for layoffs has always been, and likely will always be, the "C-Suite class" controlling expectations on labor costs (salaries/wages) in an industry. That's why they often happen in waves, many companies at once, it's a pressure release valve to keep the labor market in "control" propagated by the largest shareholders, especially those born and bred into the C-Suites. Those shareholders don't actually care how productive a company is, productivity is increasingly orthogonal to profit. They care how profitable a company is, and companies stay the most profitable when (among other things) the labor market is most effectively depressed (and layoffs are a useful depression tactic) and laborers aren't comfortable enough to fight for better wages.

callalex 3y ago

This is starting to get even more irritating than the “put a blockchain on it” spammers ever were.

JakeAl 3y ago

This is standard for economic conditions. When there's a lot of easy to come by money (loans) there's a lot of disposable income and excessive employment. As soon as the money supply tightens (or in this case year on year the money in the economy goes negative), businesses trim the fat and get conservative about only keeping people creating value/profits. Which is why unemployment figures lag in a collapsing economy.