4 ms·

Tech companies axe 34,000 jobs since start of year in pivot to AI

36 points by thm 3y ago

sfc32 3y ago
Link to unpaywalled article?
danpalmer 3y ago
https://archive.is/BWzmk https://archive.is/BWzmk
notso411 3y ago
[dead]
globalise83 3y ago
I raise an eyebrow at the idea that any of the job losses this year are due to a pivot to AI. It will happen, but the workflow integrations and context limitations for AI are not there yet to make it a viable replacement for anyone, and certainly not at the scale of the job losses seen this year. The job losses this year are due to 1. the harsher funding environment, 2. perceived overhiring that went on during the pandemic boom in online services, 3. caution over the state of the global economy.
- higherhalf 3y ago
  It's not due to a move to AI-enhanced workflows. The article speculates that it's caused by companies wanting to develop AI-related products, moving some workforce and culling the unwilling, just like my employer.
- astrange 3y ago
  There's also a recent US tax quirk that made employing any software engineer much more expensive. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/congress-is-running-out-of-time-to-fix-a-critical-rd-tax-issue-in-2023/ https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/congress-is-running-out-of...
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  The real reason is 4: sending the signal to investors that they are a serious big boy company that can make the hard choices and cut budgets when they need to in order to continue to have YoY record profits in fiscally challenging climates.
  - rrr_oh_man 3y ago
    This.
    - rcarmo 3y ago
      Yep. AI is not going to remove jobs. It might displace a few, but the current state of the art feels a lot like Disney’s Sorceror’s Apprentice.
      - nicbou 3y ago
        After playing with AI for a bit and letting my own hype die down, I see something that will undeniably be useful and improve productivity, but still require skillful application and only help at a relatively low level. It doesn't reason or create new things, but it does useful low-level work and eliminates drudgery. In that sense it reminds me of spreadsheets and short python scripts. We've had those for a while and they have not displaced so the entire workforce.
  - oldpersonintx 3y ago
    [dead]
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    I think the real reason is that interest rates are high so growth will be slow for a while so they need to cut headcount in response.
    - whatyesaid 3y ago
      People who cite interest rates and economy are coping hard. It's all of a sudden a factor now but never was before. Apart from dotcom specific crash, tech has seen relentless growth, until recent years where it was shown firing people had no negative effect.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I misinterpreted the article headline in the same way as I think you may have. This is not suggesting that companies are pivoting from employees to AI, it is suggesting that companies are pivoting to development of AI products, and in that process, "re-skilling" and laying off teams that will be unnecessary for that trend.
- tibbar 3y ago
  When major corporations say they are cutting jobs due to AI, it’s not because of internal productivity gains (and this is not what they are claiming), outside of niche cases like content moderation, etc. Rather, the layoffs occur because these companies are making large capital investments, billions of dollars, into additional compute, training data, etc. Vast sums of money will continue to be spent in hopes of… something or other. Ex. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/google-layoffs-2024-sundar-pichai/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/google-layoffs-2024-sundar-...
- red_admiral 3y ago
  I can understand job losses due to AI at Stack Overflow, Chegg, and possibly Quora. Everywhere else, as you say it's a fig leaf for other concerns.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  You don't have to think of this as replacement, but as a multiplier. If AI can make 1000 engineers 1.25x more productive - with good auto-complete, boilerplate gen, auto-generated docs, faq bots, then you can do what you already did with 800 engineers. Although looked at another way, it will give you more for the same money, so maybe it will make some projects more worth to work on than they were previously so you'd rather hire even more people, because more projects would cross the threshold of "being worth for the investment". So there's multiple forces acting on this, it's unclear how exactly it would play out. In addition just standards and competition for existing things may rise, and the productivity gains will just go there, because you have to build 1.25x better products to compete.
  - guenthert 3y ago
    If 25% of your code is boilerplate, then I'd think it's time to invest in better tools, libraries and abstraction. What happened to "don't repeat yourself?" However writing the code is just such a minor component of developers' time, if an 25% improvement in efficiency is desired, I'd think no time at all can be spent anymore on writing the code.
- locopati 3y ago
  4. Moving money to the pockets of investors and C-levels (aka greed)
- foinker 3y ago
  It's true that many many places overextended themselves while under the influence of ZIRP. However, I think it's giving the execs/boards too much credit to say they're reluctant to do layoffs because the tech isn't there yet. Everyone is eager to get on the AI train because they want to pay fewer employees.
camillomiller 3y ago
Well no, it's not in pivot to AI. That's the OpenAI/Microsoft/Others narrative that the FT happily goes along with. It's because another thing called capitalism and free market. They just hired too many people because of low cost of money, covering many project bets that they wouldn't have pursued if money wasn't as cheap. Now they're cleaning up. That's it. It's not AI. Shame on the FT for pushing the narrative.
- mypastself 3y ago
  Without getting into whether or not FT’s analysts are correct, wouldn’t redirecting budgets from human employees to AI development also be part of a free market at work? Even more so than responding to zero interest rates and subsequent increases (which are actually caused by an external, “non-capitalist” factor, the state).
danpalmer 3y ago
The "pivot" is not from employees to AI, it's from other products to AI products. The headline is a little ambiguous on this, but the article is clear in its premise and conclusions, and I think it's fairly clear to anyone watching the industry that all sorts of companies are jumping on the AI hype, and it's reasonable to expect that a major platform shift like that would come with changes in the necessary skills. Whether that's the real reason or just an excuse is up to you, but that's the premise of the article.
Madmallard 3y ago
"in pivot to AI" Nice clickbait
vishnugupta 3y ago
Since 2018-19 this topic of employee bloat kept coming up within my circle of friends (late 30s, early/mid 40s). Despite working in big/small orgs I always reacted with massive surprise whenever a team/company said they have X employees, X being an order of magnitude higher than what I expected. And it's not as if I'm not aware of products' complexities, I have had experience in working in and leading small teams that delivered high impact projects. My cohort entered the workforce in mid 2000s when efficiency was paramount. Now looking back the impact of ZIRP is quite clear. The justification for last yaer's layoffs was rate hikes and macro conditions. This year it's AI. It's as if companies are still quite bloated and they are jumping at the first opportunity to lay them off. AI is just a reason I feel. Elon demonstrated with Twitter that tech companies can work despite cutting down a good chunk of workforce; CFOs at other companies can now point finger at Twitter and say, look they are still up and running despite cutting down like 80%, what's stopping us from reducing headcount by 15%-20%? Anyway, I feel middle managers will be the ones hardest hit by these layoffs. I've already begun hearing that line/middle managers are now expected to code; which is a good thing IMO. Will be interesting to see how this plays out this decade.
- melon_taeppe 3y ago
  twitters advertising revenue is down 54% since musk took over https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usage-tech/?zephr_sso_ott=PpEqrk https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usag...
  - whatyesaid 3y ago
    That's nothing to do with number of engineers you have.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      A significant fractions of this layoffs weren't engineers but instead worked on moderation. When moderation was gone, antisemitic tweets (among others) became ubiquitous, which drove advertisers away.
seydor 3y ago
Title was truncated, it was "pivot to AI valuations"
TrackerFF 3y ago
Are the gravy days of tech over? WFH, as much as I love it, has opened the eyes to more remote work. AI/ML tools means senior workers don't need as many interns to do tedious boilerplate work. AI/ML tools can also break down language barriers, and other things between companies and remote/foreign work. Of course, you still need experts and top talent if you're trying to be a market leader - but what about junior workers? Fresh grads? If these people have to compete against low-salaried competition from abroad AND AI/ML "assistants", what will their moat be? I've seen a lot of experienced workers dismiss the threats of cheaper competition and AI/ML, but juniors obviously do not have the same leverage... EDIT: And obviously the end of ZIRP means that startups etc. can't simply try to out-pay their (profitable and cash strong) competition, if they're not flush with investor money. I'm excited to see how the largest tech companies will set the course, when it comes to talent management and comp policies.
- __loam 3y ago
  We can hope the MBAs realize this AI stuff is crap, just like they did with outsourcing. Hopefully some of them also realize that investing in talent is good for the industry as a whole but I'm not holding my breath.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    Bad code in the long run leads to more positions. Someone will be needed to maintain all this crap. Legacy code rarely dies and the beast is always hungry. The problem is when GPT writes code that seem to work, have people ever really looked at the kind of unit tests it generate? It is convincing, lots of code, but stupid, idiot assertions everywhere, complete disregard for edge cases, terrible setups, the list is endless. But people get easily convinced. Most people seem to believe that GPT understands the code it generates.
- visarga 3y ago
  > AI/ML tools means senior workers don't need as many interns to do tedious boilerplate work. That works under the assumption that the demand for development remains the same. But in reality AI changes demand dramatically. We end up still needing everyone because we are aiming higher.
Devasta 3y ago
Has far more to do with interest rates than AI.
mathverse 3y ago
Companies hired too many people but that does not mean they cant afford to pay them. This many people creates friction and makes it harder to manage and allocate resources. Especially money printing machines (Meta,Google) should be ordered to spend as much money as possible on potential innovation and therefore should have internal "startups/VC" culture and not optimize for stocks.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  They pay their employees (partially) with said stocks, so they kinda need to optimise for the stock price, in some sense. And who would order them to do this? How would that even work?
schnitzelstoat 3y ago
It has more to do with the high interest rates, large amount of hiring during the cheap money period, and the bleak economic outlook (especially outside of the USA). I mean there are entire companies whose business model basically depended on low interest rates.
kypro 3y ago
The main cause here is that training AI models is extremely expensive so companies are cutting costs where they can so they can make these big investments without upsetting investors. It's also partly related to the higher interest rate environment where investors have made it clear that growth without profit isn't something that will be rewarded anymore. So anything that isn't adding to the bottom line, and isn't likely to add to the bottom line near-term, is now being cut. Unfortunately, it's hard to see when this trend will end. Tech hiring trends tend to be driven by the latest technology trends and AI products unlike past trends do not require large teams of software engineers. Instead AI companies need their capital for compute and only require a handful of researchers who can make improvements to their models. Additionally, we should remember that software engineering isn't like traditional engineering in the sense that software doesn't require maintenance like a physical building or bridge would. Once a software product has been built that's most of the work done. Amazon, Google and Facebook don't need to be constantly rewriting their core products – they simply need to a small team to make minor improvements and fix bugs. Obviously, if a fancy new language or framework comes out they could choose to rebuild parts of the product, but as software ecosystems mature this is likely to happen less and less. Similarly, SaaS companies that built out software products over the last decade are now enabling companies to build complex software products with much fewer engineers. A decade ago it was quite common for companies to have their own eCommerce products, for example. Today most will just use something like Shopify and hire a small team of engineers for the integrations and customisations. I think over the next few years more companies are going to realise a lot of the building has been done and hiring large teams of expensive software engineers is no longer needed. Some industries like gaming where new products are constantly being developed will continue to need software engineers, but companies like Google with established products will likely require fewer and fewer. Those here who like to talk about reskilling in my opinion are not understanding the shift that's happening here. This is less like past market shifts we've seen where a C developer might need to learn C++, or a PHP developer might need to learn React. It's simply that less software engineers are needed today and regardless of what skills you acquire jobs are far more limited. That said, there will obviously remain some demand for software engineers and I'm not even saying that the total number of software engineers will decrease. What I suspect will happen is that demand for software engineers in the coming years will increase much slower than the past, while supply will continue to increase rapidly. Those with good experience and niche expertise will likely continue to find work, but even for these individuals it will be much harder going forward. This is all just my opinion anyway. I'd be interested to hear counter arguments. I hope I'm wrong, but I really struggle to see how demand for software engineers is going to continue to double every few years as it has been for the last several decades. And this isn't even factoring in other demand issue like outsourcing, increasing automation, and the massive influx of new tech talent we saw during the pandemic. I know it's an unpopular opinion here, but I suspect many of us will need to find new careers this decade. Perhaps not because we we can't find work, but because the work we will find isn't going to be as lucrative as in the past. Our wage growth will stall out. Our work conditions will worsen. And many of us might find there are just better more rewarding industries to reskill into.
dappermanneke 3y ago
lots of bad articles that won’t stand the test of lowered interest rates the next years
thiago_fm 3y ago
CEOs must constantly pretend that their companies are into the new trend, so they prioritize things & invest money into things that might never turn into a profit. They do this to say the current buzzword in board and shareholder meetings (this time: "AI"). This satisfies shareholders or board members cluelessly because then it looks like the company is "future-proof." The reality is that it's mostly likely that any money to be made in that space will be by 1-2 players(OpenAI, NVidia?) and a few Startups competing for the scraps. The average company won't win that much. Even Meta. Since Apple changed iOS, advertising businesses have been more difficult (Meta, Google). Their Ads haven't been improved solely by AI; they've also found new ways to collect user data. It's all a fugazi.
darth_avocado 3y ago
At the very least HN needs to downvote these clickbait articles. This is like the 4th I’ve seen this month on here. There is no evidence the layoffs are at all related to AI, workers are not being replaced by AI and companies aren’t letting people go because they want to build AI products. All the layoffs are because low interest gravy train is now gone and the R&D tax benefits are gone.
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  Here's a script I use to strip out low quality discussions from the HN front page: const boringDomains = [ "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com", "economist.com", "wired.co.uk", "bbc.com", "aella.substack.com", "hecolumn.substack.com", "wsj.com", "kqed", "voanews.com", "wusa9.com", "noemamag.com", "arstechnica.com", "independent.co.uk", "axios.com", "southseattleemerald.com", "eff.org", "freep.com", "ft.com" ] Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a")) .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain))) .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement) .flatMap(elem => [elem, elem.nextElementSibling, elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]) .forEach(elem => elem.remove())
nbzso 3y ago
What a joke. Shareholders like the axing. They believe this makes companies more resilient against recession. CEO's push away workers, and then rehire with lower wages. But this is due to AI. Ok, computer.
tareqak 3y ago
The “in pivot to AI” part is speculation: https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ says 141 tech companies laid off 34,250 in 2024.
hnaccountme 3y ago
Nothing to do with AI. Job cuts due to high interest rates. Most tech companies don't make profit, they just take out huge loans and pay the minimum monthly. Now US interest rates are 5%+ and those companies cannot afford to make the minimum payment and are cutting jobs to compensate. AI is just as much a scam as blockchain.

36 points by thm 3y ago

sfc32 3y ago

Link to unpaywalled article?

danpalmer 3y ago

https://archive.is/BWzmk https://archive.is/BWzmk

notso411 3y ago

[dead]

globalise83 3y ago

I raise an eyebrow at the idea that any of the job losses this year are due to a pivot to AI. It will happen, but the workflow integrations and context limitations for AI are not there yet to make it a viable replacement for anyone, and certainly not at the scale of the job losses seen this year. The job losses this year are due to 1. the harsher funding environment, 2. perceived overhiring that went on during the pandemic boom in online services, 3. caution over the state of the global economy.

higherhalf 3y ago
It's not due to a move to AI-enhanced workflows. The article speculates that it's caused by companies wanting to develop AI-related products, moving some workforce and culling the unwilling, just like my employer.
astrange 3y ago
There's also a recent US tax quirk that made employing any software engineer much more expensive. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/congress-is-running-out-of-time-to-fix-a-critical-rd-tax-issue-in-2023/ https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/congress-is-running-out-of...
hyperhopper 3y ago
The real reason is 4: sending the signal to investors that they are a serious big boy company that can make the hard choices and cut budgets when they need to in order to continue to have YoY record profits in fiscally challenging climates.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  This.
  - rcarmo 3y ago
    Yep. AI is not going to remove jobs. It might displace a few, but the current state of the art feels a lot like Disney’s Sorceror’s Apprentice.
    - nicbou 3y ago
      After playing with AI for a bit and letting my own hype die down, I see something that will undeniably be useful and improve productivity, but still require skillful application and only help at a relatively low level. It doesn't reason or create new things, but it does useful low-level work and eliminates drudgery. In that sense it reminds me of spreadsheets and short python scripts. We've had those for a while and they have not displaced so the entire workforce.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  [dead]
- aurareturn 3y ago
  I think the real reason is that interest rates are high so growth will be slow for a while so they need to cut headcount in response.
  - whatyesaid 3y ago
    People who cite interest rates and economy are coping hard. It's all of a sudden a factor now but never was before. Apart from dotcom specific crash, tech has seen relentless growth, until recent years where it was shown firing people had no negative effect.
danpalmer 3y ago
I misinterpreted the article headline in the same way as I think you may have. This is not suggesting that companies are pivoting from employees to AI, it is suggesting that companies are pivoting to development of AI products, and in that process, "re-skilling" and laying off teams that will be unnecessary for that trend.
tibbar 3y ago
When major corporations say they are cutting jobs due to AI, it’s not because of internal productivity gains (and this is not what they are claiming), outside of niche cases like content moderation, etc. Rather, the layoffs occur because these companies are making large capital investments, billions of dollars, into additional compute, training data, etc. Vast sums of money will continue to be spent in hopes of… something or other. Ex. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/google-layoffs-2024-sundar-pichai/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/google-layoffs-2024-sundar-...
red_admiral 3y ago
I can understand job losses due to AI at Stack Overflow, Chegg, and possibly Quora. Everywhere else, as you say it's a fig leaf for other concerns.
mewpmewp2 3y ago
You don't have to think of this as replacement, but as a multiplier. If AI can make 1000 engineers 1.25x more productive - with good auto-complete, boilerplate gen, auto-generated docs, faq bots, then you can do what you already did with 800 engineers. Although looked at another way, it will give you more for the same money, so maybe it will make some projects more worth to work on than they were previously so you'd rather hire even more people, because more projects would cross the threshold of "being worth for the investment". So there's multiple forces acting on this, it's unclear how exactly it would play out. In addition just standards and competition for existing things may rise, and the productivity gains will just go there, because you have to build 1.25x better products to compete.
- guenthert 3y ago
  If 25% of your code is boilerplate, then I'd think it's time to invest in better tools, libraries and abstraction. What happened to "don't repeat yourself?" However writing the code is just such a minor component of developers' time, if an 25% improvement in efficiency is desired, I'd think no time at all can be spent anymore on writing the code.
locopati 3y ago
4. Moving money to the pockets of investors and C-levels (aka greed)
foinker 3y ago
It's true that many many places overextended themselves while under the influence of ZIRP. However, I think it's giving the execs/boards too much credit to say they're reluctant to do layoffs because the tech isn't there yet. Everyone is eager to get on the AI train because they want to pay fewer employees.

camillomiller 3y ago

Well no, it's not in pivot to AI. That's the OpenAI/Microsoft/Others narrative that the FT happily goes along with. It's because another thing called capitalism and free market. They just hired too many people because of low cost of money, covering many project bets that they wouldn't have pursued if money wasn't as cheap. Now they're cleaning up. That's it. It's not AI. Shame on the FT for pushing the narrative.

mypastself 3y ago
Without getting into whether or not FT’s analysts are correct, wouldn’t redirecting budgets from human employees to AI development also be part of a free market at work? Even more so than responding to zero interest rates and subsequent increases (which are actually caused by an external, “non-capitalist” factor, the state).

danpalmer 3y ago

The "pivot" is not from employees to AI, it's from other products to AI products. The headline is a little ambiguous on this, but the article is clear in its premise and conclusions, and I think it's fairly clear to anyone watching the industry that all sorts of companies are jumping on the AI hype, and it's reasonable to expect that a major platform shift like that would come with changes in the necessary skills. Whether that's the real reason or just an excuse is up to you, but that's the premise of the article.

Madmallard 3y ago

"in pivot to AI" Nice clickbait

vishnugupta 3y ago

Since 2018-19 this topic of employee bloat kept coming up within my circle of friends (late 30s, early/mid 40s). Despite working in big/small orgs I always reacted with massive surprise whenever a team/company said they have X employees, X being an order of magnitude higher than what I expected. And it's not as if I'm not aware of products' complexities, I have had experience in working in and leading small teams that delivered high impact projects. My cohort entered the workforce in mid 2000s when efficiency was paramount. Now looking back the impact of ZIRP is quite clear. The justification for last yaer's layoffs was rate hikes and macro conditions. This year it's AI. It's as if companies are still quite bloated and they are jumping at the first opportunity to lay them off. AI is just a reason I feel. Elon demonstrated with Twitter that tech companies can work despite cutting down a good chunk of workforce; CFOs at other companies can now point finger at Twitter and say, look they are still up and running despite cutting down like 80%, what's stopping us from reducing headcount by 15%-20%? Anyway, I feel middle managers will be the ones hardest hit by these layoffs. I've already begun hearing that line/middle managers are now expected to code; which is a good thing IMO. Will be interesting to see how this plays out this decade.

melon_taeppe 3y ago
twitters advertising revenue is down 54% since musk took over https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usage-tech/?zephr_sso_ott=PpEqrk https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usag...
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  That's nothing to do with number of engineers you have.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    A significant fractions of this layoffs weren't engineers but instead worked on moderation. When moderation was gone, antisemitic tweets (among others) became ubiquitous, which drove advertisers away.

seydor 3y ago

Title was truncated, it was "pivot to AI valuations"

TrackerFF 3y ago

Are the gravy days of tech over? WFH, as much as I love it, has opened the eyes to more remote work. AI/ML tools means senior workers don't need as many interns to do tedious boilerplate work. AI/ML tools can also break down language barriers, and other things between companies and remote/foreign work. Of course, you still need experts and top talent if you're trying to be a market leader - but what about junior workers? Fresh grads? If these people have to compete against low-salaried competition from abroad AND AI/ML "assistants", what will their moat be? I've seen a lot of experienced workers dismiss the threats of cheaper competition and AI/ML, but juniors obviously do not have the same leverage... EDIT: And obviously the end of ZIRP means that startups etc. can't simply try to out-pay their (profitable and cash strong) competition, if they're not flush with investor money. I'm excited to see how the largest tech companies will set the course, when it comes to talent management and comp policies.

__loam 3y ago
We can hope the MBAs realize this AI stuff is crap, just like they did with outsourcing. Hopefully some of them also realize that investing in talent is good for the industry as a whole but I'm not holding my breath.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Bad code in the long run leads to more positions. Someone will be needed to maintain all this crap. Legacy code rarely dies and the beast is always hungry. The problem is when GPT writes code that seem to work, have people ever really looked at the kind of unit tests it generate? It is convincing, lots of code, but stupid, idiot assertions everywhere, complete disregard for edge cases, terrible setups, the list is endless. But people get easily convinced. Most people seem to believe that GPT understands the code it generates.
visarga 3y ago
> AI/ML tools means senior workers don't need as many interns to do tedious boilerplate work. That works under the assumption that the demand for development remains the same. But in reality AI changes demand dramatically. We end up still needing everyone because we are aiming higher.

Devasta 3y ago

Has far more to do with interest rates than AI.

mathverse 3y ago

Companies hired too many people but that does not mean they cant afford to pay them. This many people creates friction and makes it harder to manage and allocate resources. Especially money printing machines (Meta,Google) should be ordered to spend as much money as possible on potential innovation and therefore should have internal "startups/VC" culture and not optimize for stocks.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
They pay their employees (partially) with said stocks, so they kinda need to optimise for the stock price, in some sense. And who would order them to do this? How would that even work?

schnitzelstoat 3y ago

It has more to do with the high interest rates, large amount of hiring during the cheap money period, and the bleak economic outlook (especially outside of the USA). I mean there are entire companies whose business model basically depended on low interest rates.

kypro 3y ago

The main cause here is that training AI models is extremely expensive so companies are cutting costs where they can so they can make these big investments without upsetting investors. It's also partly related to the higher interest rate environment where investors have made it clear that growth without profit isn't something that will be rewarded anymore. So anything that isn't adding to the bottom line, and isn't likely to add to the bottom line near-term, is now being cut. Unfortunately, it's hard to see when this trend will end. Tech hiring trends tend to be driven by the latest technology trends and AI products unlike past trends do not require large teams of software engineers. Instead AI companies need their capital for compute and only require a handful of researchers who can make improvements to their models. Additionally, we should remember that software engineering isn't like traditional engineering in the sense that software doesn't require maintenance like a physical building or bridge would. Once a software product has been built that's most of the work done. Amazon, Google and Facebook don't need to be constantly rewriting their core products – they simply need to a small team to make minor improvements and fix bugs. Obviously, if a fancy new language or framework comes out they could choose to rebuild parts of the product, but as software ecosystems mature this is likely to happen less and less. Similarly, SaaS companies that built out software products over the last decade are now enabling companies to build complex software products with much fewer engineers. A decade ago it was quite common for companies to have their own eCommerce products, for example. Today most will just use something like Shopify and hire a small team of engineers for the integrations and customisations. I think over the next few years more companies are going to realise a lot of the building has been done and hiring large teams of expensive software engineers is no longer needed. Some industries like gaming where new products are constantly being developed will continue to need software engineers, but companies like Google with established products will likely require fewer and fewer. Those here who like to talk about reskilling in my opinion are not understanding the shift that's happening here. This is less like past market shifts we've seen where a C developer might need to learn C++, or a PHP developer might need to learn React. It's simply that less software engineers are needed today and regardless of what skills you acquire jobs are far more limited. That said, there will obviously remain some demand for software engineers and I'm not even saying that the total number of software engineers will decrease. What I suspect will happen is that demand for software engineers in the coming years will increase much slower than the past, while supply will continue to increase rapidly. Those with good experience and niche expertise will likely continue to find work, but even for these individuals it will be much harder going forward. This is all just my opinion anyway. I'd be interested to hear counter arguments. I hope I'm wrong, but I really struggle to see how demand for software engineers is going to continue to double every few years as it has been for the last several decades. And this isn't even factoring in other demand issue like outsourcing, increasing automation, and the massive influx of new tech talent we saw during the pandemic. I know it's an unpopular opinion here, but I suspect many of us will need to find new careers this decade. Perhaps not because we we can't find work, but because the work we will find isn't going to be as lucrative as in the past. Our wage growth will stall out. Our work conditions will worsen. And many of us might find there are just better more rewarding industries to reskill into.

dappermanneke 3y ago

lots of bad articles that won’t stand the test of lowered interest rates the next years

thiago_fm 3y ago

CEOs must constantly pretend that their companies are into the new trend, so they prioritize things & invest money into things that might never turn into a profit. They do this to say the current buzzword in board and shareholder meetings (this time: "AI"). This satisfies shareholders or board members cluelessly because then it looks like the company is "future-proof." The reality is that it's mostly likely that any money to be made in that space will be by 1-2 players(OpenAI, NVidia?) and a few Startups competing for the scraps. The average company won't win that much. Even Meta. Since Apple changed iOS, advertising businesses have been more difficult (Meta, Google). Their Ads haven't been improved solely by AI; they've also found new ways to collect user data. It's all a fugazi.

darth_avocado 3y ago

At the very least HN needs to downvote these clickbait articles. This is like the 4th I’ve seen this month on here. There is no evidence the layoffs are at all related to AI, workers are not being replaced by AI and companies aren’t letting people go because they want to build AI products. All the layoffs are because low interest gravy train is now gone and the R&D tax benefits are gone.

LAC-Tech 3y ago
Here's a script I use to strip out low quality discussions from the HN front page: const boringDomains = [ "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com", "economist.com", "wired.co.uk", "bbc.com", "aella.substack.com", "hecolumn.substack.com", "wsj.com", "kqed", "voanews.com", "wusa9.com", "noemamag.com", "arstechnica.com", "independent.co.uk", "axios.com", "southseattleemerald.com", "eff.org", "freep.com", "ft.com" ] Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a")) .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain))) .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement) .flatMap(elem => [elem, elem.nextElementSibling, elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]) .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

nbzso 3y ago

What a joke. Shareholders like the axing. They believe this makes companies more resilient against recession. CEO's push away workers, and then rehire with lower wages. But this is due to AI. Ok, computer.

tareqak 3y ago

The “in pivot to AI” part is speculation: https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ says 141 tech companies laid off 34,250 in 2024.

hnaccountme 3y ago

Nothing to do with AI. Job cuts due to high interest rates. Most tech companies don't make profit, they just take out huge loans and pay the minimum monthly. Now US interest rates are 5%+ and those companies cannot afford to make the minimum payment and are cutting jobs to compensate. AI is just as much a scam as blockchain.