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Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
by paxys 9mo ago
Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
- Insanity 9mo ago“Overhiring during the pandemic” was a common, senseless, catchphrase a few years ago.
- paxys 9mo agoAh yeah completely forgot that one.
- thewebguyd 9mo agoAmazon just recently used that excuse for their 2025 layoffs a few months ago iirc.
- larkost 9mo agoI think the thing to remember is that with interest rates being essentially 0 during the (middle/end of) pandemic that made it really easy for a lot of companies to finance a virtually free checkbook. They were at liberty to try out all sorts of new experiments, virally for free (at that moment). Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting. Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.
- 29athrowaway 9mo agoAI is the perfect scapegoat. Insurance providers are also doing it. AI is also used in the legal space too.
- shevy-java 9mo agoQuite true. Many corporations use AI as excuse to "re-structure" their internal and external costs.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 9mo agoyeah. pretending to innovate rather than just shed ZIRP-era deadweight. like IBM laid off a few thousand "due to AI" in 2023, lol.
- trgn 9mo ago"ZIRP-era deadweight" that's 3-4 years ago now
- scottLobster 9mo agoYou underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune 500s and not be fired for over a year.
- locknitpicker 9mo ago> You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work (...) This is the very first time I saw anyone with a straight face talking about Amazon workers and mentioning "people do zero work, quite visible".
- scottLobster 9mo agoTo be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I have a bridge to sell you. Certain sectors are high performing centers of excellence whose staff write blog posts that get posted to HN, publish papers, get put on the covers of hiring media and give speeches. The majority of the company is somewhere in the middle holding down their relatively uneventful but important functions, and probably a larger chunk than Corporate leadership would like to acknowledge are deadweight hiding in the cracks.
- Apocryphon 9mo ago
- lm28469 9mo ago10 days later: Amazon to hire 16 000 new workers in its new remote Indian campus
- nateglims 9mo agoThe layoff includes people in India.
- moshegramovsky 9mo agoYou don't have to shop at Amazon. I know I don't. Anymore.
- finolex1 9mo agoIn this case, there might be some truth to the statement. Not in the sense that AI is replacing current jobs, but that they would rather invest that money in Anthropic or on Data Center buildouts
- rich_sasha 9mo agoExcuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance. Global economy doesn't look that terrible. Nor is the AI story that believable. Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? All the guys at Aspen talking about what fraction they cut, just as 5 years ago they bragged how bloated their org chart is? TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects. But if that's really it, no idea.
- computerphage 9mo agoWhy isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
- bopbopbop7 9mo agoIs there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?
- medvezhenok 9mo agoWhat exactly would that evidence look like, for you? It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat. In order to observe the productivity increases you need a good scale where the productivity would really matter (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model improvement)
- bopbopbop7 9mo agoWell you would think if there is increased productivity there would be at least a couple studies, some clear artifacts, or increased quality of software being shipped. Except all we have is "trust me bro, I'm 100x more productive" twitter/blog posts, blant pre-IPO AI company marketing disguised as blog posts, studies that show AI decreases productivity, increased outages, more CVEs, anecdotes without proof, and not a whole lot of shipping software.
- bluGill 9mo agoEconomic headwinds are rarely used. There is always something else they blame it on. It has been this way for the 30 years I've been old enough to pay attention - and those older than me report it has been even longer. There are downturns every few years, in turn meaning layoffs - and they always blame something other than the downturn. They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
- micromacrofoot 9mo agoThey're increasingly intertwined these days, so it's not much of a lie