4 ms·

CEOs say AI is just a tool to help workers, but our jobs are already on the line

48 points by rntn 1y ago

arealaccount 1y ago
Companies are always trying to grow as quickly as possible, especially compared to their market. I can’t imagine a world where excess capacity will just be cut instead of fed back into the business (meaning people will stay but growth will be faster)
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Sane companies are working in a decreasing RoI order of projects. The ideas not being worked on now are “worse” ideas than the ones being worked on, at least by the priorities the company is using. At some point, you cut off the investment in worse ideas as not having an attractive risk-adjusted return. AI may nudge that slightly positively, but I think plenty of companies just flat-out over-hired, the reckoning is here, and AI-generating worse projects won’t be the salvation.
  - jjk166 1y ago
    > The ideas not being worked on now are “worse” ideas than the ones being worked on, at least by the priorities the company is using. That's hardly true. Nearly all companies are heavily resource constrained. They have limited capital, limited manpower, and limited expertise. There are things they would love to be working on, which they know would be immensely beneficial, but just are not in a position to tackle those challenges at the moment. Even with speculative investment, you're still limited to what you can convince someone else will be successful given your current situation. Yes there exist some massive companies who do have essentially unlimited access to capital, and they can in theory engage in any endeavor with a sufficiently high ROI, although even then in practice they don't. Projects get canned because of office politics or to make quarterly figures look good. You go to just about any company in the world and ask just about any employee "is what you are currently working on the thing that this company needs done the most" the answer will be just about universally "No!"
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      In any company with 100 possible projects and resources to chase only 25, they’re probably working on numbers 1-25 (or at least all from the top 35 or so). Interview a random employee and that employee is unlikely to be working on the number 1 project (and so will answer “no” to your question).
      - jjk166 1y ago
        Not how real companies work. Numbers 1-15 are all off the table because the company does not have the means to do them at the time. Maybe something in the top 35 is being worked on, but the overwhelming majority are going to be coming from the bottom 25. These are the projects which are quick and cheap to implement, have some short term benefit, and are low risk and low complexity. The projects tend to have low, and sometimes even negative ROI, but short term success, or the appearance of success, is typically more highly valued among real human decision makers. Ask any employee if the number 1 project is being worked on by anyone, and they will answer no. Ask the CEO if the number 1 project is being worked on, and they will answer no. Ask the CEO if they think it'll be possible to start working on the number 1 project in the next 2 years, the optimistic ones will say maybe.
- atonse 1y ago
  I think part of the risk of AI is that you will be able to grow even with a smaller staff.
whatshisface 1y ago
This isn't an area where you can trust the direct statements because everyone's looking for a way to cut costs without harming investor's faith in the potential for growth.
- 12_throw_away 1y ago
  Yes, that's 100% correct. They'd be trumpeting increased productivity numbers from the rooftops if LLMs were actually changing things that much. It's recessionary cost-cutting masked with tech hype.
shmerl 1y ago
When AI will replace CEOs, it will come full circle. https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Delamain_Corp_Headquarters/Computers https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Delamain_Corp_Headquarters...
- oytis 1y ago
  Yeah, if workers are not needed, CEOs are not needed either. Luckily most CEOs are rich enough to also be investors.
  - vkou 1y ago
    Why would investors be needed in an AI world? They and their assets could safely be liquidated, and placed under management by it. The only thing that protects them from this is the social contract. If AI unravels the social contract for the rest of us, why should they survive unimpacted? If this sounds cruel or unfair - remember that are always free to retain themselves to do a useful job.
    - oytis 1y ago
      I am not thinking of a scenario where all labour is eliminated, but just knowledge work. In this case one can divest from most tech companies (except those running AI infrastructure), and reinvest in something else. Tech CEOs will not be needed in this case, but it is unlikely to cause a social unrest that will abolish private property altogether
      - vkou 1y ago
        Why would investors be needed in that world? What value would their existence add to anyone else? What work will they do to earn their bread and roof?
        oytis 1y ago
        Same value and same work as today I guess?
no_wizard 1y ago
Not sure if anyone paying attention is surprised. US industry in particular has been anti labor openly since the 1980s after whether Reagan did during the FAA strike, its only gotten worse over time, even in tech.
- 9283409232 1y ago
  > even in tech Especially in tech. Tech has always been anti-labor and anti-union.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    There was a time where software companies at least did seem, if you read the historical records available, treat workers actually well on balance. Like at Google, there were secretaries that became millionaires because they were granted stock options (a practice that has gotten less generous over time and more restrictive) I feel like from about 1996-2012 was the golden years, everything got corporatized as the MBAs flooded in around 2013. I’m talking about early Google, Netscape, early Facebook, Sun Microsystems, flurry of Web 2.0 companies etc
    - 9283409232 1y ago
      They were granted stock options because of the high risk nature of startups. It was the leverage they had over the old guard is that if you join us and we succeed, you're set for life. It wasn't because they were worker friendly, they were trying to compete with the IBM and Intels of the world.
mmillin 1y ago
>In 2024, 551 tech companies laid off nearly 152,922 employees, according to data from Layoff.fyi. The pace has accelerated dramatically this year. In just the first six months of 2025, 151 tech companies have already laid off over 63,823 people. On average a tech company cut 277 workers in 2024. If that rate is maintained for the rest of the year, the average number of layoffs per tech company in 2025 would soar to 851, roughly three times the 2024 average. Am I missing something with this analysis? It seems like 2025 is on pace for fewer workers laid off, not more.
- oytis 1y ago
  They are counting people per company per unit of time
  - oblio 1y ago
    Yeah, but statistics don't work like that. Are those companies a representative sample? Did only 150 companies lay workers off in 2025? How did they extrapolate for 2025?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
s_dev 1y ago
LLMs in their current state are very useful writing tools but not necessarily good thinking tools. A programmer can be more productive because boilerplate can be generated with a prompt like other 'templating' procedures but it's just far more flexible. I recall a professor in my university stating that there is a vast difference between knowing information and having access to information. While this distinction in the era of the internet, search engines and smart phones seems slight the distinction is becoming more and more important. It's worth stating because we are 'knowledge' workers and pride ourselves on our ability to learn and adapt. Every technological advancement has made certain jobs redundant and yet the prophecies that people will sit around idling and twidling their thumbs has never come close to fruition. There will always be 'work' because there are things we want to do and things we don't want to really do and work is simply the latter. We all wish to work purely to buy our future laziness even 'security' can be understood in this sense. It will be intersting to see how our learning institutions adapt -- pretty soon CS grads will have classes on how LLMs work in theory and more so in practice -- how to prompt effectively. I'm less fearful than many -- this is just as someone put it before 'auotmation on steroids'.
- luckylion 1y ago
  > It's worth stating because we are 'knowledge' workers and pride ourselves on our ability to learn and adapt. I don't think this is universally true for people working in IT. For some it definitely is, others don't care about their work and avoid learning and adapting at all cost because it's effort. They want the paycheck, but you'll need to threaten them with termination to get them to learn something new.
  - throwaway31131 1y ago
    Those regular paycheck jobs exist but they’re never going to be safe and they’ve never been safe. I’ve been in tech for decades and waves of safe jobs disappearing happens regularly as technology improves. I view these types of articles as 2025’s version of the 2003 article below, which was very big news in its day. Outsourcing didn’t cause all American programming jobs to go away but it did raise the bar. Expect the bar for “professional programmer” to go higher still. And expect to level up your skills if you haven’t already. On the flip side, the number of amateur programmers is likely to increase a lot with improved tooling. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/
theusus 1y ago
I have to reluctantly say that Claude Code has done a lot of work in more than a week that I could in double time. But doing so it made a lot of mistakes. I'm not really sure about the final opinion I should make. It's fast for sure but it's far from correct. Sometimes it just feels a placebo.
- 9283409232 1y ago
  It's a mixed bag to the point where I would agree that it's placebo. It is great for getting you from nothing to something quickly but it makes no many mistakes that I think it evens out to being marginally faster than if I did it on my own at the cost of my own learning and knowledge to where I don't use it any more.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I think it’s decent for getting a project bootstrapped (which is always a slog), but the further you get beyond that and the more you’re writing app-specific logic, the less useful it becomes. That’s valuable, particularly for those who have trouble with pushing projects through those earliest phases, but it’s hardly a panacea.
blululu 1y ago
No disagreements with the article. Best to be clear eyed as this comes down the pipe. Getting told 'we will fire you as soon as we can' is not a great workplace, but the bigger indictment of management here is that they have no plan for growth. If your people are more productive, you could invest that in more ambitious projects if you had any good ideas about new opportunities. You look at Andy Jassy's company wide memo referenced in the article and it starts with 'we are the world's largest start up', followed by claims of increased productivity that will be applied toward cost cutting instead of growth. Most VC's would pass on a 'start up' that has such an apparent no/slow growth mentality.
- oytis 1y ago
  I have this impression as well. AI, interest rates are secondary. Tech industry has just run out of ideas that would promise profits - and that didn't start in 2023. Same story as with "overhiring". If you have a bigger crew, you just go plunder bigger ships - except if the ships are just not there or you have no idea how to find them.
  - MichaelZuo 1y ago
    How do you know this? From what I’ve heard cream of the crop grads in hot fields are still getting huge offers and getting snapped up by the big names as well as smaller firms. Some of those must be real positions doing promising work.
    - oblio 1y ago
      > From what I’ve heard cream of the crop grads in hot fields are still getting huge offers and getting snapped up by the big names as well as smaller firms. Yeah, but that's making the distribution something like 1-5% vs 95-95% versus maybe 30-40% - 60-70% 5-10 years ago. The shift is significant. > Some of those must be real positions doing promising work. Of course, there are always ad optimizations and engagement optimizations to be made :-p
      - 1y ago
softwaredoug 1y ago
I spent a good chunk of last week debugging a production issue that was tricky, stateful, and solved with 3 lines of code. Could AI have done all that? Not yet. I trust it to get me started on a new project. I mostly trust it for inspiration for ideas and research. I don’t trust anything that removes the burden of maintenance and ownership from humans. That seems like a safety disaster waiting to happen. And my 2 cents humans will feel more “ownership” when they have an intimate relationship with the code.
- bestouff 1y ago
  > Could AI have done all that? Not yet. You wouldn't believe it with your naked eyes. I have seen solve some subtle problems.
Synaesthesia 1y ago
Their interest are not our interests.
androng 1y ago
relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THfBccihkVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THfBccihkVQ
ineedasername 1y ago
It feels like AI providers eg google, OpenAI, etc are significantly holding back functionality from general public use, under the label of being in-development, that is at the same time being used by startups and established corps alike to already automate tasks. CUA has a big price tag in terms of overall API use to gain access, for example. To what extent is this hold back truly “not yet ready” vs not wanting to open the floodgates of every medium and small corp with automatable white collar work and a few people who can duct tape together API calls and LangChain from crashing job markets already?
kleiba 1y ago
My advice: move to Germany, like I did. Seriously, you always think of Germany as this technologically advanced country, but reality sets in pretty fast once you live here. With respect to IT, Germany is a few years behind the US, maybe as much a 8-10 years. They've also for years been looking (rather unsucessfully) to attract more academics to relocate here. So, if you're willing to move continents, consider it. Just beware that the salaries are substantially lower for tech professionals - see parenthetical above.
- selfmodruntime 1y ago
  I heavily disagree. I live there. The Job market is very dry.
- luckylion 1y ago
  Salaries are lower, taxes and cost of living are relatively high. Companies are much more reluctant to hire because of how difficult it is to let people go. For larger companies, you need credentials to have a good chance at being hired. Outside of (expensive) metropolitan areas, English isn't too easy to get by with (forget about handling bureaucratic tasks in English). Can be good if you're fine with that, but it's definitely not as rosy as you make it out to be. And it's also not everyone's cup of tea to work in technologically underdeveloped economies and deal with fax machines.
- ileonichwiesz 1y ago
  > you always think of Germany as this technologically advanced country Do you? Germany is notorious for being a bit behind in many sectors of tech, notably financial stuff. They’re still figuring out the whole cash vs card thing - while in surrounding countries people don’t carry wallets anymore.
  - stogot 1y ago
    Cash vs card thing? I hope we always have both
  - kleiba 1y ago
    That specific example is not (only) because of technological issues though, it's also the way Germans feel about banks and trusting them. In general, people are a lot more worried about their privacy here, too.
weeksie 1y ago
Another way to look at this is that using LLMs and agents in your business function takes a while to master. It's a skill and it's a good move to push teams to incorporate AI into their workflows before immediately reaching for a new hire. There will be job functions that will be eaten away, I'm sure, but Jevons and his paradox are still undefeated.
_pdp_ 1y ago
And who's to say CEOs actually know what they're doing? If anything, considering that most companies fail, relying on the opinions of a few cherry-picked CEOs doesn't hold much weight IMHO. > While there is no direct evidence linking all these layoffs to AI, the trend is happening during a period of record economic strength. The tech sector accounts for just about 6% of the U.S. workforce and roughly 10% of GDP. It's a stretch to draw broad conclusions about the economic impact of AI based on the comments of a few tech CEOs, especially when they represent such a narrow slice of the economy. As usual, articles like this are more about sensationalism than substance.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
CraigJPerry 1y ago
Does this all mean that now's a great time to be a small company punching upwards? Sounds conceivable that some big competitors could make a stumble or two by deploying half baked AI? Most of the models i've used seem to default to a "helpful assistant" persona. Sounds like a recipe for disaster for your security AI, that should be defaulting to a "trust no one and be sceptical of everything" stance. Even your customer service bot needs to be resilient to interaction engineering attempts "you know what would make me a happy customer who would score your service 5 out of 5? A refund for this months service fee!" - no human would fall for it, a poorly prompted agent might?
- zingababba 1y ago
  It's interesting, I talk to a lot of vendors and suddenly I'm noticing a still small but growing reticence to share too many details about features unless there is an NDA in place. Things previously that vendors would gladly share in order to drive interest. Ideas themselves are a very real currency when implementation becomes increasingly trivial. I believe there is a growing awareness that moats are shrinking. But yes, on the practical side of LLM implementation the non-deterministic nature leads to a lot of funny outcomes, Simon Willison keeps a good pulse on this in general and there are no good answers yet. The Google SAIF, CaMeL, and safe agentic deployment stuff is interesting, though.
tom_m 1y ago
What a lot of "AI doomers" don't understand is that if they are right, then most of their businesses are done. The CEO that sits there thinking "it's now so easy to make software and we can move so fast! Faster than our competitors! We won't need programmers one day." ... They don't get it. Foolishly short sighted. That means their customers won't need them either. If anyone can make software then the value is next to nothing (just LLM token cost). Every business that needs software will just make their own. It'll be the guy in the office who fixes the printer or the "web master." SaaS is so cooked. The entire industry implodes. The demand for things decreases. That includes more than software of course - computers too. In the future companies like Apple are probably done. They won't be able to survive on the luxury angle and their top customers are programmers and content creators. AI makes that easier and in the cloud. So if you want to be a doomer...Go on. Keep following the trail of what happens. In the end it'll be 2-5 mega corps that survive. Amazon is probably locked in due to consumer goods and AWS. Google is always my bet for surviving the AI wars. The rest of the big companies you know are kinda fighting for their lives right now. My prediction is OpenAI is out. Apple is out or greatly scaled back. Anthropic is out. Salesforce over. Tesla and Meta are questionable right now. They could survive and they could be out too. Musk diversified with all his companies which was incredibly smart. So that's too hard to predict. I don't have a good feeling about his AI prospects though. What's worse yet is that if venture capitalists believe this, then investments are over. The whole industry just implodes. Anyway, if you want to really go down this path. It gets pretty dark. I choose to believe AI will create more jobs. Just like the computer did and the internet. You could imagine how people felt about the computer too. Robotics too. Oh that's going to take away jobs and factory jobs. Well yea, parts were automated and all, but people just found other work. It led to more jobs. So I choose to believe the same will happen here, it's just not realized yet.
dcre 1y ago
> Consider the tech industry’s recent layoff trends. In 2024, 551 tech companies laid off nearly 152,922 employees, according to data from Layoff.fyi. The pace has accelerated dramatically this year. In just the first six months of 2025, 151 tech companies have already laid off over 63,823 people. Am I missing something here? Don’t these numbers indicate fewer layoffs in 2025 than in 2024? You can see the lack of an upward trend in the chart on https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/.

48 points by rntn 1y ago

Companies are always trying to grow as quickly as possible, especially compared to their market. I can’t imagine a world where excess capacity will just be cut instead of fed back into the business (meaning people will stay but growth will be faster)

sokoloff 1y ago
Sane companies are working in a decreasing RoI order of projects. The ideas not being worked on now are “worse” ideas than the ones being worked on, at least by the priorities the company is using. At some point, you cut off the investment in worse ideas as not having an attractive risk-adjusted return. AI may nudge that slightly positively, but I think plenty of companies just flat-out over-hired, the reckoning is here, and AI-generating worse projects won’t be the salvation.
- jjk166 1y ago
  > The ideas not being worked on now are “worse” ideas than the ones being worked on, at least by the priorities the company is using. That's hardly true. Nearly all companies are heavily resource constrained. They have limited capital, limited manpower, and limited expertise. There are things they would love to be working on, which they know would be immensely beneficial, but just are not in a position to tackle those challenges at the moment. Even with speculative investment, you're still limited to what you can convince someone else will be successful given your current situation. Yes there exist some massive companies who do have essentially unlimited access to capital, and they can in theory engage in any endeavor with a sufficiently high ROI, although even then in practice they don't. Projects get canned because of office politics or to make quarterly figures look good. You go to just about any company in the world and ask just about any employee "is what you are currently working on the thing that this company needs done the most" the answer will be just about universally "No!"
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    In any company with 100 possible projects and resources to chase only 25, they’re probably working on numbers 1-25 (or at least all from the top 35 or so). Interview a random employee and that employee is unlikely to be working on the number 1 project (and so will answer “no” to your question).
    - jjk166 1y ago
      Not how real companies work. Numbers 1-15 are all off the table because the company does not have the means to do them at the time. Maybe something in the top 35 is being worked on, but the overwhelming majority are going to be coming from the bottom 25. These are the projects which are quick and cheap to implement, have some short term benefit, and are low risk and low complexity. The projects tend to have low, and sometimes even negative ROI, but short term success, or the appearance of success, is typically more highly valued among real human decision makers. Ask any employee if the number 1 project is being worked on by anyone, and they will answer no. Ask the CEO if the number 1 project is being worked on, and they will answer no. Ask the CEO if they think it'll be possible to start working on the number 1 project in the next 2 years, the optimistic ones will say maybe.
atonse 1y ago
I think part of the risk of AI is that you will be able to grow even with a smaller staff.

whatshisface 1y ago

This isn't an area where you can trust the direct statements because everyone's looking for a way to cut costs without harming investor's faith in the potential for growth.

12_throw_away 1y ago
Yes, that's 100% correct. They'd be trumpeting increased productivity numbers from the rooftops if LLMs were actually changing things that much. It's recessionary cost-cutting masked with tech hype.

shmerl 1y ago

When AI will replace CEOs, it will come full circle. https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Delamain_Corp_Headquarters/Computers https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Delamain_Corp_Headquarters...

oytis 1y ago
Yeah, if workers are not needed, CEOs are not needed either. Luckily most CEOs are rich enough to also be investors.
- vkou 1y ago
  Why would investors be needed in an AI world? They and their assets could safely be liquidated, and placed under management by it. The only thing that protects them from this is the social contract. If AI unravels the social contract for the rest of us, why should they survive unimpacted? If this sounds cruel or unfair - remember that are always free to retain themselves to do a useful job.
  - oytis 1y ago
    I am not thinking of a scenario where all labour is eliminated, but just knowledge work. In this case one can divest from most tech companies (except those running AI infrastructure), and reinvest in something else. Tech CEOs will not be needed in this case, but it is unlikely to cause a social unrest that will abolish private property altogether
    - vkou 1y ago
      Why would investors be needed in that world? What value would their existence add to anyone else? What work will they do to earn their bread and roof?
      - oytis 1y ago
        Same value and same work as today I guess?

no_wizard 1y ago

Not sure if anyone paying attention is surprised. US industry in particular has been anti labor openly since the 1980s after whether Reagan did during the FAA strike, its only gotten worse over time, even in tech.

9283409232 1y ago
> even in tech Especially in tech. Tech has always been anti-labor and anti-union.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  There was a time where software companies at least did seem, if you read the historical records available, treat workers actually well on balance. Like at Google, there were secretaries that became millionaires because they were granted stock options (a practice that has gotten less generous over time and more restrictive) I feel like from about 1996-2012 was the golden years, everything got corporatized as the MBAs flooded in around 2013. I’m talking about early Google, Netscape, early Facebook, Sun Microsystems, flurry of Web 2.0 companies etc
  - 9283409232 1y ago
    They were granted stock options because of the high risk nature of startups. It was the leverage they had over the old guard is that if you join us and we succeed, you're set for life. It wasn't because they were worker friendly, they were trying to compete with the IBM and Intels of the world.

mmillin 1y ago

>In 2024, 551 tech companies laid off nearly 152,922 employees, according to data from Layoff.fyi. The pace has accelerated dramatically this year. In just the first six months of 2025, 151 tech companies have already laid off over 63,823 people. On average a tech company cut 277 workers in 2024. If that rate is maintained for the rest of the year, the average number of layoffs per tech company in 2025 would soar to 851, roughly three times the 2024 average. Am I missing something with this analysis? It seems like 2025 is on pace for fewer workers laid off, not more.

oytis 1y ago
They are counting people per company per unit of time
- oblio 1y ago
  Yeah, but statistics don't work like that. Are those companies a representative sample? Did only 150 companies lay workers off in 2025? How did they extrapolate for 2025?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

s_dev 1y ago

LLMs in their current state are very useful writing tools but not necessarily good thinking tools. A programmer can be more productive because boilerplate can be generated with a prompt like other 'templating' procedures but it's just far more flexible. I recall a professor in my university stating that there is a vast difference between knowing information and having access to information. While this distinction in the era of the internet, search engines and smart phones seems slight the distinction is becoming more and more important. It's worth stating because we are 'knowledge' workers and pride ourselves on our ability to learn and adapt. Every technological advancement has made certain jobs redundant and yet the prophecies that people will sit around idling and twidling their thumbs has never come close to fruition. There will always be 'work' because there are things we want to do and things we don't want to really do and work is simply the latter. We all wish to work purely to buy our future laziness even 'security' can be understood in this sense. It will be intersting to see how our learning institutions adapt -- pretty soon CS grads will have classes on how LLMs work in theory and more so in practice -- how to prompt effectively. I'm less fearful than many -- this is just as someone put it before 'auotmation on steroids'.

luckylion 1y ago
> It's worth stating because we are 'knowledge' workers and pride ourselves on our ability to learn and adapt. I don't think this is universally true for people working in IT. For some it definitely is, others don't care about their work and avoid learning and adapting at all cost because it's effort. They want the paycheck, but you'll need to threaten them with termination to get them to learn something new.
- throwaway31131 1y ago
  Those regular paycheck jobs exist but they’re never going to be safe and they’ve never been safe. I’ve been in tech for decades and waves of safe jobs disappearing happens regularly as technology improves. I view these types of articles as 2025’s version of the 2003 article below, which was very big news in its day. Outsourcing didn’t cause all American programming jobs to go away but it did raise the bar. Expect the bar for “professional programmer” to go higher still. And expect to level up your skills if you haven’t already. On the flip side, the number of amateur programmers is likely to increase a lot with improved tooling. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/

theusus 1y ago

I have to reluctantly say that Claude Code has done a lot of work in more than a week that I could in double time. But doing so it made a lot of mistakes. I'm not really sure about the final opinion I should make. It's fast for sure but it's far from correct. Sometimes it just feels a placebo.

9283409232 1y ago
It's a mixed bag to the point where I would agree that it's placebo. It is great for getting you from nothing to something quickly but it makes no many mistakes that I think it evens out to being marginally faster than if I did it on my own at the cost of my own learning and knowledge to where I don't use it any more.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I think it’s decent for getting a project bootstrapped (which is always a slog), but the further you get beyond that and the more you’re writing app-specific logic, the less useful it becomes. That’s valuable, particularly for those who have trouble with pushing projects through those earliest phases, but it’s hardly a panacea.

blululu 1y ago

No disagreements with the article. Best to be clear eyed as this comes down the pipe. Getting told 'we will fire you as soon as we can' is not a great workplace, but the bigger indictment of management here is that they have no plan for growth. If your people are more productive, you could invest that in more ambitious projects if you had any good ideas about new opportunities. You look at Andy Jassy's company wide memo referenced in the article and it starts with 'we are the world's largest start up', followed by claims of increased productivity that will be applied toward cost cutting instead of growth. Most VC's would pass on a 'start up' that has such an apparent no/slow growth mentality.

oytis 1y ago
I have this impression as well. AI, interest rates are secondary. Tech industry has just run out of ideas that would promise profits - and that didn't start in 2023. Same story as with "overhiring". If you have a bigger crew, you just go plunder bigger ships - except if the ships are just not there or you have no idea how to find them.
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  How do you know this? From what I’ve heard cream of the crop grads in hot fields are still getting huge offers and getting snapped up by the big names as well as smaller firms. Some of those must be real positions doing promising work.
  - oblio 1y ago
    > From what I’ve heard cream of the crop grads in hot fields are still getting huge offers and getting snapped up by the big names as well as smaller firms. Yeah, but that's making the distribution something like 1-5% vs 95-95% versus maybe 30-40% - 60-70% 5-10 years ago. The shift is significant. > Some of those must be real positions doing promising work. Of course, there are always ad optimizations and engagement optimizations to be made :-p
    - 1y ago

softwaredoug 1y ago

I spent a good chunk of last week debugging a production issue that was tricky, stateful, and solved with 3 lines of code. Could AI have done all that? Not yet. I trust it to get me started on a new project. I mostly trust it for inspiration for ideas and research. I don’t trust anything that removes the burden of maintenance and ownership from humans. That seems like a safety disaster waiting to happen. And my 2 cents humans will feel more “ownership” when they have an intimate relationship with the code.

bestouff 1y ago
> Could AI have done all that? Not yet. You wouldn't believe it with your naked eyes. I have seen solve some subtle problems.

Synaesthesia 1y ago

Their interest are not our interests.

androng 1y ago

relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THfBccihkVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THfBccihkVQ

ineedasername 1y ago

It feels like AI providers eg google, OpenAI, etc are significantly holding back functionality from general public use, under the label of being in-development, that is at the same time being used by startups and established corps alike to already automate tasks. CUA has a big price tag in terms of overall API use to gain access, for example. To what extent is this hold back truly “not yet ready” vs not wanting to open the floodgates of every medium and small corp with automatable white collar work and a few people who can duct tape together API calls and LangChain from crashing job markets already?

kleiba 1y ago

My advice: move to Germany, like I did. Seriously, you always think of Germany as this technologically advanced country, but reality sets in pretty fast once you live here. With respect to IT, Germany is a few years behind the US, maybe as much a 8-10 years. They've also for years been looking (rather unsucessfully) to attract more academics to relocate here. So, if you're willing to move continents, consider it. Just beware that the salaries are substantially lower for tech professionals - see parenthetical above.

selfmodruntime 1y ago
I heavily disagree. I live there. The Job market is very dry.
luckylion 1y ago
Salaries are lower, taxes and cost of living are relatively high. Companies are much more reluctant to hire because of how difficult it is to let people go. For larger companies, you need credentials to have a good chance at being hired. Outside of (expensive) metropolitan areas, English isn't too easy to get by with (forget about handling bureaucratic tasks in English). Can be good if you're fine with that, but it's definitely not as rosy as you make it out to be. And it's also not everyone's cup of tea to work in technologically underdeveloped economies and deal with fax machines.
ileonichwiesz 1y ago
> you always think of Germany as this technologically advanced country Do you? Germany is notorious for being a bit behind in many sectors of tech, notably financial stuff. They’re still figuring out the whole cash vs card thing - while in surrounding countries people don’t carry wallets anymore.
- stogot 1y ago
  Cash vs card thing? I hope we always have both
- kleiba 1y ago
  That specific example is not (only) because of technological issues though, it's also the way Germans feel about banks and trusting them. In general, people are a lot more worried about their privacy here, too.

weeksie 1y ago

Another way to look at this is that using LLMs and agents in your business function takes a while to master. It's a skill and it's a good move to push teams to incorporate AI into their workflows before immediately reaching for a new hire. There will be job functions that will be eaten away, I'm sure, but Jevons and his paradox are still undefeated.

_pdp_ 1y ago

And who's to say CEOs actually know what they're doing? If anything, considering that most companies fail, relying on the opinions of a few cherry-picked CEOs doesn't hold much weight IMHO. > While there is no direct evidence linking all these layoffs to AI, the trend is happening during a period of record economic strength. The tech sector accounts for just about 6% of the U.S. workforce and roughly 10% of GDP. It's a stretch to draw broad conclusions about the economic impact of AI based on the comments of a few tech CEOs, especially when they represent such a narrow slice of the economy. As usual, articles like this are more about sensationalism than substance.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

CraigJPerry 1y ago

Does this all mean that now's a great time to be a small company punching upwards? Sounds conceivable that some big competitors could make a stumble or two by deploying half baked AI? Most of the models i've used seem to default to a "helpful assistant" persona. Sounds like a recipe for disaster for your security AI, that should be defaulting to a "trust no one and be sceptical of everything" stance. Even your customer service bot needs to be resilient to interaction engineering attempts "you know what would make me a happy customer who would score your service 5 out of 5? A refund for this months service fee!" - no human would fall for it, a poorly prompted agent might?

zingababba 1y ago
It's interesting, I talk to a lot of vendors and suddenly I'm noticing a still small but growing reticence to share too many details about features unless there is an NDA in place. Things previously that vendors would gladly share in order to drive interest. Ideas themselves are a very real currency when implementation becomes increasingly trivial. I believe there is a growing awareness that moats are shrinking. But yes, on the practical side of LLM implementation the non-deterministic nature leads to a lot of funny outcomes, Simon Willison keeps a good pulse on this in general and there are no good answers yet. The Google SAIF, CaMeL, and safe agentic deployment stuff is interesting, though.

tom_m 1y ago

What a lot of "AI doomers" don't understand is that if they are right, then most of their businesses are done. The CEO that sits there thinking "it's now so easy to make software and we can move so fast! Faster than our competitors! We won't need programmers one day." ... They don't get it. Foolishly short sighted. That means their customers won't need them either. If anyone can make software then the value is next to nothing (just LLM token cost). Every business that needs software will just make their own. It'll be the guy in the office who fixes the printer or the "web master." SaaS is so cooked. The entire industry implodes. The demand for things decreases. That includes more than software of course - computers too. In the future companies like Apple are probably done. They won't be able to survive on the luxury angle and their top customers are programmers and content creators. AI makes that easier and in the cloud. So if you want to be a doomer...Go on. Keep following the trail of what happens. In the end it'll be 2-5 mega corps that survive. Amazon is probably locked in due to consumer goods and AWS. Google is always my bet for surviving the AI wars. The rest of the big companies you know are kinda fighting for their lives right now. My prediction is OpenAI is out. Apple is out or greatly scaled back. Anthropic is out. Salesforce over. Tesla and Meta are questionable right now. They could survive and they could be out too. Musk diversified with all his companies which was incredibly smart. So that's too hard to predict. I don't have a good feeling about his AI prospects though. What's worse yet is that if venture capitalists believe this, then investments are over. The whole industry just implodes. Anyway, if you want to really go down this path. It gets pretty dark. I choose to believe AI will create more jobs. Just like the computer did and the internet. You could imagine how people felt about the computer too. Robotics too. Oh that's going to take away jobs and factory jobs. Well yea, parts were automated and all, but people just found other work. It led to more jobs. So I choose to believe the same will happen here, it's just not realized yet.

dcre 1y ago

> Consider the tech industry’s recent layoff trends. In 2024, 551 tech companies laid off nearly 152,922 employees, according to data from Layoff.fyi. The pace has accelerated dramatically this year. In just the first six months of 2025, 151 tech companies have already laid off over 63,823 people. Am I missing something here? Don’t these numbers indicate fewer layoffs in 2025 than in 2024? You can see the lack of an upward trend in the chart on https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/.