6 ms·

More big companies bet they can still grow without hiring

73 points by LostMyLogin 1y ago

paulsutter 1y ago
The existing org chart is the biggest barrier to AI productivity improvements, because tasks/responsibilities and departmental boundaries are set up for the old way to get things done. This is why adding AI to an existing org chart results in modest (at best) improvement. Starting over with a new org chart is the fastest path to higher productivity, but it should also work to gradually migrate to a more efficient structure by not hiring. Of course this could take many years and meanwhile you'll be outperformed by a smaller org.
neonate 1y ago
https://kanebridgenews.com/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-still-grow-without-hiring/ https://kanebridgenews.com/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-s...
sxndmxn 1y ago
Enough of the wsj posts with their engagement-bait
dfxm12 1y ago
My big company just throws more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Our managers are quiet quitting as we're mostly told to just figure it out for ourselves. I've asked for more money due to having more responsibilities, but the answer is "we can't have that conversation now". I suspect I'll get the same answer in a few months. Hey, the stock is up though. Talking to friends in other places, and reading the article, it isn't really different elsewhere. Given the disarray the US government is in & their refusal to give us benefits we've already paid for, employers know they have all the power at this time.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  They may have all the power, but all of this shows is they have no idea how to wield it. The job market is horribly broken, there are inefficiencies everywhere, and their hedging/procrastination on what to do with hiring and growth is tanking the economy (and their customers ability to purchase their products). If their goal is reducing wages through layoffs/attrition and lowballing new hires, they aren't going to get it without triggering a recession or worse.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    Companies don't care about triggering a recession. They care about profits and stock price (If they're publicly traded).
  - heathrow83829 1y ago
    there's a vast oversupply of labor so employers can take their pick and treat employees however they will. that doesn't mean the job market is broken.
- 1dom 1y ago
  Tech companies need engineers to create the products, and as long as people like yourself are knowingly and willingly tolerating those environments, they'll continue. I left tech for this reason.
- marbro 1y ago
  Employers don't have all the power, employees do because they can quit and work for a competitor. All businesses must compete for employees.
  - t-writescode 1y ago
    That’s only true when there’s jobs available for the employees to move to.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    No, this isn't true and it's especially not true when, as I mentioned, so many benefits are tied to employment.
    - spwa4 1y ago
      Employers only have that power as a group. Any individual employer cannot kill any benefits if you change, or even have the option to change employer. Really it's the government pushing very hard to force people to accept jobs.
- kakacik 1y ago
  Why not simply quietly refuse to jump on that train? Maintain velocity, keep working as per your contract, not a second more. Don't pick up phones outside work hours, weekends are for yourself, recharging and family. You know, humane working conditions, the only setup sustainable long term without risking permanent (both mental and physical) health damage. No amount of money is worth that, despite many otherwise brilliant people get into tunnel vision (mortgage, some investment, chasing some top performer image or whatever else) and then SHTF. Maybe its my European perspective, maybe I am old enough to realize its just a job and life satisfaction and legacy is defined by very different things, maybe I don't give a fuck anymore. Maybe all of it.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    Maybe it is possible when you have a sane social safety net. If I don't work and I get sick, I will not be able to afford treatment. If I need a loan for a new car (might be necessary to find a new job) or home repairs, and they see I'm not working. I will not be approved. The US is systemically anti worker.
    - kakacik 1y ago
      You write a new car, you write home repairs. I've never bought a new car, despite it being always an affordable option - they are simply too expensive, literally throwing money into fire. If you are a home owner, it means you are at least moderately wealthy, probably more. If you ended up as a prisoner in some sort of golden cage, your own choices brought you there. Probably too late for you but a cautionary tale for others - dont go down that path unless you grok what it really means, its a decision for rest of life. Also I never said don't work. Just dont be a prisoner of your company, with your rationale you already gave up the fight for yourself and ended up as a modern slave to... ability to afford health care treatment? Maybe start some good sports, eat healthy and sleep well and healthcare costs will most probably not be your major concern till retirement.
- thw_9a83c 1y ago
  > ...more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Many people around me want to leave tech because of this. I'm considering it too, but unfortunately, I have no other skills outside of IT. I guess I would need to get re-qualified. These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT.
  - cool_man_bob 1y ago
    > These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT. Meh, nurse pay seemed alright till I learned how much they’re worked. Maybe physicians get a pretty good deal, but the reasons for that are also why you won’t be able to transition to that career.
    - SR2Z 1y ago
      Physicians have to work residency, which SUCKS. It is quite common for an advanced postgrad resident (neurosurgery, heart surgery, other specialties) to be paid less than a CRNA.
matusp 1y ago
I don't think AI has anything to do with this. For a while, investors were using headcount as a metric for growth, even though startups often showed very poor utilization of their new hires. Hiring was done for the sake of hiring. Trying to achieve more with less is simply a reasonable response to a market where money is much more expensive than before. Many tech companies were unreasonably ineffective with their manpower, this is a much bigger problem now.
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  Twitter is a concrete demonstration of this. There were so many prognostications [0] that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees following Musk's takeover, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964 [1] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-percent-of-twitter-x-silicon-valley-companies-meta-amazon-google-microsoft-adopted-practice-report-11718252374022.html https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
  - JohnMakin 1y ago
    Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.
    - MontyCarloHall 1y ago
      Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.
aantix 1y ago
Growth through savings is limited. Greed is sustainable. When there's enough money on the sidelines, the pendulum swings, and big bets come back in fashion. Downsizing is not a big bet. Nobody leads tech to save billions and have money sit on the sidelines. It's a weak, shallow bet that should be reserved for discount retail and commodity markets. The savings will be spent on engineering, eventually.
- weard_beard 1y ago
  I hope you are right, but my understanding is that the high headcount in engineering could, in large part, be offset by American tax exemptions for engineering salaries and that this exemption is being actively sunset. See: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-software-companies https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof... https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startups/ https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startu...
  - selimthegrim 1y ago
    This was reverted in the big beautiful bill.
    - teeray 1y ago
      However, I wonder how long it takes company policies to catch up with the reality of that reversion. How many are still operating as though it was never reverted?
  - aantix 1y ago
    This was reverted.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  How does this jive with all of the big tech cos sitting on a Smaug's cave level of dollars? There's rainy day funds, but having billions in cash and cash equivalents seems odd.
- 1y ago
bgwalter 1y ago
As long as the government keeps printing money and handing it out to unproductive sectors like the sample companies in the article the scam might work. If it collapses, maybe AirBnB will still be able to rent out (illegally in many cases) apartments to rich foreigners from productive countries.
whatever1 1y ago
The economies of the west (and some eastern ones) are facing a k style growth where a small fraction of the population gets all of the gains. It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  > It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up. (Joke), well, if they keep convincing the small part of the population to spend ever increasing amount of money on "better" widgets... In reality, if too many people are unemployed, no one's going to be able to buy things so that companies can have profits! That being said, what I read is that a lot of companies are doing general housekeeping and trying to avoid bloat.
janalsncm 1y ago
This kind of “hope growth” and LLM based metrics speaks to rot within the economy. Don’t hire more, just say you’re going to build new products and launch something half baked with a skeleton crew that’s also maintaining the legacy products. These incumbent companies are able to keep doing this because there’s no one around to eat their lunch. Maybe it’s cheaper to just buy (and kill) any company who legitimately threatens the status quo. Companies should be hungry for real growth. You should not be able to financially engineer your way into stock growth.
- strict9 1y ago
  Interesting insight. High interest rates keep new startups low. Well, not counting AI startups I guess. And the lack of new (non-AI) startups allows bloated incumbents to get by without innovating or offering new products. Quality destroying measures like offshoring and outsourcing are easier to pull off. As is allowing services and standards to slide. Maybe we'll only know once interest rates come back down. Or once the AI-replacing-workers veil has been lifted. I think this dynamic is an under appreciated source of the chart that shows the decoupling of the job market with the stock market [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-scary-is-the-scariest-chart-jolts-spx-labor-market-2025-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-scary-is-the-scariest-ch...
  - marbro 1y ago
    Interest rates aren't high, they're manipulated by the government and they're too low. When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low.
    - Fade_Dance 1y ago
      >When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low. That's not necessarily the case. Credit expansion comes with healthy growth as well.
  - 1y ago
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
There is a HUGE amount of waste in big companies from: 1. People being blocked on others 2. Lack of focus (Upper management ordering lower ICs to build bridges to nowhere, stop midway, start another bridge to nowhere project) 3. A lot of work being purely performative 4. A large chunk of REAL work having negative returns (management telling people to do stuff you'd be better off not doing financially) 5. ICs having slack. AI doesn't need to do any of the real work. If it can increase efficiency ANYWHERE in this chain, it could have huge rewards. Most people are focusing on getting AI to do REAL work. But most "work" is waste or exceptionally low value, and I think more effort should go to AI reducing (instead of increasing) that.
- cool_man_bob 1y ago
  2. Has me damn ready to leave the industry if I’m not forced out.
- dasil003 1y ago
  I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    A lot of what I'm seeing feels like LLMs are "perfect" bridge-to-nowhere enablers. They are the ultimate Yes Men and give upper management an impression that nowhere not only needs plenty more bridges but that the bridges are cheap to build and easy to use and may already have been built with magic strong enough to attract leprechauns and their pots of gold to the end of the bridges. Too much of my career has been in the "Legacy Code" mines, and the LLMs seem like the worst pipeline for expanding "Legacy Code" faster than ever. Some of them may as well be called "Legacy Code-as-a-Service". I'm not worried that my "Legacy Code" skills are going to get out-of-date, I'm worried they are going to be in higher, uglier demand when some of these bridge-to-nowhere factories finally get shutdown or at least slowed down for some of the real maintenance costs to finally show up on companies' bottom lines.
alphazard 1y ago
This implies a kind of efficiency gain that is pretty much unheard of outside of acquisitions and layoffs. Inefficient organizations need huge culture and incentive shifts to move the needle on efficiency. Humans (especially the bureaucrats) resist changes in culture, so it's often necessary to shift the culture by shifting the humans. LLMs that don't quite fully replace any role aren't going to do it.
nickdothutton 1y ago
If large companies were prepared to really change then they could grow faster by _removing_ headcount.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
No SNI: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-still-grow-without-hiring/ar-AA1Pevu9/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/more-big-companies... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Pevu9/ https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Pevu9...

73 points by LostMyLogin 1y ago

The existing org chart is the biggest barrier to AI productivity improvements, because tasks/responsibilities and departmental boundaries are set up for the old way to get things done. This is why adding AI to an existing org chart results in modest (at best) improvement. Starting over with a new org chart is the fastest path to higher productivity, but it should also work to gradually migrate to a more efficient structure by not hiring. Of course this could take many years and meanwhile you'll be outperformed by a smaller org.

neonate 1y ago

https://kanebridgenews.com/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-still-grow-without-hiring/ https://kanebridgenews.com/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-s...

sxndmxn 1y ago

Enough of the wsj posts with their engagement-bait

dfxm12 1y ago

My big company just throws more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Our managers are quiet quitting as we're mostly told to just figure it out for ourselves. I've asked for more money due to having more responsibilities, but the answer is "we can't have that conversation now". I suspect I'll get the same answer in a few months. Hey, the stock is up though. Talking to friends in other places, and reading the article, it isn't really different elsewhere. Given the disarray the US government is in & their refusal to give us benefits we've already paid for, employers know they have all the power at this time.

candiddevmike 1y ago
They may have all the power, but all of this shows is they have no idea how to wield it. The job market is horribly broken, there are inefficiencies everywhere, and their hedging/procrastination on what to do with hiring and growth is tanking the economy (and their customers ability to purchase their products). If their goal is reducing wages through layoffs/attrition and lowballing new hires, they aren't going to get it without triggering a recession or worse.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  Companies don't care about triggering a recession. They care about profits and stock price (If they're publicly traded).
- heathrow83829 1y ago
  there's a vast oversupply of labor so employers can take their pick and treat employees however they will. that doesn't mean the job market is broken.
1dom 1y ago
Tech companies need engineers to create the products, and as long as people like yourself are knowingly and willingly tolerating those environments, they'll continue. I left tech for this reason.
marbro 1y ago
Employers don't have all the power, employees do because they can quit and work for a competitor. All businesses must compete for employees.
- t-writescode 1y ago
  That’s only true when there’s jobs available for the employees to move to.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  No, this isn't true and it's especially not true when, as I mentioned, so many benefits are tied to employment.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    Employers only have that power as a group. Any individual employer cannot kill any benefits if you change, or even have the option to change employer. Really it's the government pushing very hard to force people to accept jobs.
kakacik 1y ago
Why not simply quietly refuse to jump on that train? Maintain velocity, keep working as per your contract, not a second more. Don't pick up phones outside work hours, weekends are for yourself, recharging and family. You know, humane working conditions, the only setup sustainable long term without risking permanent (both mental and physical) health damage. No amount of money is worth that, despite many otherwise brilliant people get into tunnel vision (mortgage, some investment, chasing some top performer image or whatever else) and then SHTF. Maybe its my European perspective, maybe I am old enough to realize its just a job and life satisfaction and legacy is defined by very different things, maybe I don't give a fuck anymore. Maybe all of it.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  Maybe it is possible when you have a sane social safety net. If I don't work and I get sick, I will not be able to afford treatment. If I need a loan for a new car (might be necessary to find a new job) or home repairs, and they see I'm not working. I will not be approved. The US is systemically anti worker.
  - kakacik 1y ago
    You write a new car, you write home repairs. I've never bought a new car, despite it being always an affordable option - they are simply too expensive, literally throwing money into fire. If you are a home owner, it means you are at least moderately wealthy, probably more. If you ended up as a prisoner in some sort of golden cage, your own choices brought you there. Probably too late for you but a cautionary tale for others - dont go down that path unless you grok what it really means, its a decision for rest of life. Also I never said don't work. Just dont be a prisoner of your company, with your rationale you already gave up the fight for yourself and ended up as a modern slave to... ability to afford health care treatment? Maybe start some good sports, eat healthy and sleep well and healthcare costs will most probably not be your major concern till retirement.
thw_9a83c 1y ago
> ...more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Many people around me want to leave tech because of this. I'm considering it too, but unfortunately, I have no other skills outside of IT. I guess I would need to get re-qualified. These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT.
- cool_man_bob 1y ago
  > These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT. Meh, nurse pay seemed alright till I learned how much they’re worked. Maybe physicians get a pretty good deal, but the reasons for that are also why you won’t be able to transition to that career.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    Physicians have to work residency, which SUCKS. It is quite common for an advanced postgrad resident (neurosurgery, heart surgery, other specialties) to be paid less than a CRNA.

matusp 1y ago

I don't think AI has anything to do with this. For a while, investors were using headcount as a metric for growth, even though startups often showed very poor utilization of their new hires. Hiring was done for the sake of hiring. Trying to achieve more with less is simply a reasonable response to a market where money is much more expensive than before. Many tech companies were unreasonably ineffective with their manpower, this is a much bigger problem now.

MontyCarloHall 1y ago
Twitter is a concrete demonstration of this. There were so many prognostications [0] that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees following Musk's takeover, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964 [1] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-percent-of-twitter-x-silicon-valley-companies-meta-amazon-google-microsoft-adopted-practice-report-11718252374022.html https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.
  - MontyCarloHall 1y ago
    Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.

aantix 1y ago

Growth through savings is limited. Greed is sustainable. When there's enough money on the sidelines, the pendulum swings, and big bets come back in fashion. Downsizing is not a big bet. Nobody leads tech to save billions and have money sit on the sidelines. It's a weak, shallow bet that should be reserved for discount retail and commodity markets. The savings will be spent on engineering, eventually.

weard_beard 1y ago
I hope you are right, but my understanding is that the high headcount in engineering could, in large part, be offset by American tax exemptions for engineering salaries and that this exemption is being actively sunset. See: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-software-companies https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof... https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startups/ https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startu...
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  This was reverted in the big beautiful bill.
  - teeray 1y ago
    However, I wonder how long it takes company policies to catch up with the reality of that reversion. How many are still operating as though it was never reverted?
- aantix 1y ago
  This was reverted.
candiddevmike 1y ago
How does this jive with all of the big tech cos sitting on a Smaug's cave level of dollars? There's rainy day funds, but having billions in cash and cash equivalents seems odd.
1y ago

bgwalter 1y ago

As long as the government keeps printing money and handing it out to unproductive sectors like the sample companies in the article the scam might work. If it collapses, maybe AirBnB will still be able to rent out (illegally in many cases) apartments to rich foreigners from productive countries.

whatever1 1y ago

The economies of the west (and some eastern ones) are facing a k style growth where a small fraction of the population gets all of the gains. It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.

gwbas1c 1y ago
> It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up. (Joke), well, if they keep convincing the small part of the population to spend ever increasing amount of money on "better" widgets... In reality, if too many people are unemployed, no one's going to be able to buy things so that companies can have profits! That being said, what I read is that a lot of companies are doing general housekeeping and trying to avoid bloat.

janalsncm 1y ago

This kind of “hope growth” and LLM based metrics speaks to rot within the economy. Don’t hire more, just say you’re going to build new products and launch something half baked with a skeleton crew that’s also maintaining the legacy products. These incumbent companies are able to keep doing this because there’s no one around to eat their lunch. Maybe it’s cheaper to just buy (and kill) any company who legitimately threatens the status quo. Companies should be hungry for real growth. You should not be able to financially engineer your way into stock growth.

strict9 1y ago
Interesting insight. High interest rates keep new startups low. Well, not counting AI startups I guess. And the lack of new (non-AI) startups allows bloated incumbents to get by without innovating or offering new products. Quality destroying measures like offshoring and outsourcing are easier to pull off. As is allowing services and standards to slide. Maybe we'll only know once interest rates come back down. Or once the AI-replacing-workers veil has been lifted. I think this dynamic is an under appreciated source of the chart that shows the decoupling of the job market with the stock market [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-scary-is-the-scariest-chart-jolts-spx-labor-market-2025-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-scary-is-the-scariest-ch...
- marbro 1y ago
  Interest rates aren't high, they're manipulated by the government and they're too low. When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low.
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    >When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low. That's not necessarily the case. Credit expansion comes with healthy growth as well.
- 1y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

There is a HUGE amount of waste in big companies from: 1. People being blocked on others 2. Lack of focus (Upper management ordering lower ICs to build bridges to nowhere, stop midway, start another bridge to nowhere project) 3. A lot of work being purely performative 4. A large chunk of REAL work having negative returns (management telling people to do stuff you'd be better off not doing financially) 5. ICs having slack. AI doesn't need to do any of the real work. If it can increase efficiency ANYWHERE in this chain, it could have huge rewards. Most people are focusing on getting AI to do REAL work. But most "work" is waste or exceptionally low value, and I think more effort should go to AI reducing (instead of increasing) that.

cool_man_bob 1y ago
2. Has me damn ready to leave the industry if I’m not forced out.
dasil003 1y ago
I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  A lot of what I'm seeing feels like LLMs are "perfect" bridge-to-nowhere enablers. They are the ultimate Yes Men and give upper management an impression that nowhere not only needs plenty more bridges but that the bridges are cheap to build and easy to use and may already have been built with magic strong enough to attract leprechauns and their pots of gold to the end of the bridges. Too much of my career has been in the "Legacy Code" mines, and the LLMs seem like the worst pipeline for expanding "Legacy Code" faster than ever. Some of them may as well be called "Legacy Code-as-a-Service". I'm not worried that my "Legacy Code" skills are going to get out-of-date, I'm worried they are going to be in higher, uglier demand when some of these bridge-to-nowhere factories finally get shutdown or at least slowed down for some of the real maintenance costs to finally show up on companies' bottom lines.

alphazard 1y ago

This implies a kind of efficiency gain that is pretty much unheard of outside of acquisitions and layoffs. Inefficient organizations need huge culture and incentive shifts to move the needle on efficiency. Humans (especially the bureaucrats) resist changes in culture, so it's often necessary to shift the culture by shifting the humans. LLMs that don't quite fully replace any role aren't going to do it.

nickdothutton 1y ago

If large companies were prepared to really change then they could grow faster by _removing_ headcount.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

No SNI: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-still-grow-without-hiring/ar-AA1Pevu9/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/more-big-companies... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Pevu9/ https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Pevu9...