> you can tell shareholders a story about AI that doesn't cause them to panic. Anecdotally I'm hearing that this is the story they're telling inside as a reaso

> you can tell shareholders a story about AI that doesn't cause them to panic. Anecdotally I'm hearing that this is the story they're telling inside as a reason they're doing less hiring. > "AI makes engineers more productive" should lead to more hiring not layoffs. I'm not sure that follows. If you're a bean counter and you start thinking that maybe you'll be able to cut the engineering budget by 30% ("because AI") then that's going to be very tempting. It's not unlike the offshoring craze that started about 15 years ago. The MBAs then said "Hey, we could pay 1/2 of what we're paying now for the same engineering function" and they started offshoring willy-nilly. Then a year or two later when things weren't working they wondered why, but by then the MBA had moved on to the next company to initiate an offshoring program.