4 ms·

Excuse 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.

Excuse 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 ago
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
- bopbopbop7 9mo ago
  Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?
  - medvezhenok 9mo ago
    What 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 ago
      Well 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.
    - bwestergard 9mo ago
      "What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix. I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).
      - no_wizard 9mo ago
        There are two sides to this that I see: First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology that purports to be the next big revolution in computing to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the expansive use of desktop computing and productivity increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following >Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3] Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with around 2-2.5% annual gain. Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in productivity they are having is not driving overall costs down relative to the gains, in large part because you aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of productivity. [0]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-2008/reports/03-26-labor.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-... [1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to show up, particularly in the software field (in fact, GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance) [2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew up the awareness of LLMs [3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-gains https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-g...
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- mrwaffle 9mo ago
  Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?
- miltonlost 9mo ago
  Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?
  - chankstein38 9mo ago
    Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and 1000 npm dependencies!
    - chasd00 9mo ago
      and 2+2 will output 4 almost all the time.. just like a human would.
- chankstein38 9mo ago
  If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit. I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
  - moshegramovsky 9mo ago
    > I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product. I feel the same. They're better at some things yes, but also worse at other things. And for me, they're worse at my really important use cases. I could spend a month typing prompts into Codex or AntiGravity and still be left holding the bag. Just yesterday I had a fresh prompt and Geminin bombed super hard on some basic work. Insisting the problem was X when it wasn't. I don't know. I was super bullish but now I'm feeling far from sold on it.
culi 9mo ago
> Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance. I think you also underestimate how much hiring gives these large companies political leverage. A town can be completely destroyed when one of these companies threatens to move a factory or office
- DiggyJohnson 9mo ago
  how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?
  - culi 9mo ago
    as a response to "Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.". I've edited the comment to make it clear, thanks
- rich_sasha 9mo ago
  Right - true. So hiring people is ditching this political leverage. If that was the original driver, what's changes to make it not worth it anymore?
ceejayoz 9mo ago
> 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-cannes open source projects. Given how much of these companies runs on such projects, it really shouldn't be surprising. It's a numbers game for them; Facebook doesn't mind if 300 little OSS initiatives fail if it gets them React.
rob74 9mo ago
...or 2 years ago they agreed that employees should return to the office for at least 3 days per week, of course only as a temporary measure before full RTO?
nicoburns 9mo ago
> Global economy doesn't look that terrible. It doesn't? I was born in the 90s (so admittedly 2008 was before I started working), but the economy is looking the worst it's been in my lifetime to me.
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  The economy is currently great if your income is from your investments rather than from your labor. The relative comfort and power of the capital class vs. labor class has never been farther apart in my lifetime.
- jeffbee 9mo ago
  Yeah, that's one perspective :-) Objectively, the global labor market is the hottest it has been in modern history.
  - eli_gottlieb 9mo ago
    Which is why governments and firms in the capitalist core are trying to cool it down?
    - jeffbee 9mo ago
      There is a case to be made that wage spirals are bad, actually.
  - loeg 9mo ago
    Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard from a year before 2020, yeah.
- bdamm 9mo ago
  2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think you're as qualified as most of us.
  - hajile 9mo ago
    Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the farce and everything collapsed. I believe that's what we have today. The economic indicators are all worse than they were in 2008. Our economy is Wile E Coyote running at full speed in midair until he realizes the truth then falls.
antonvs 9mo ago
> Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? This is quite likely a big part of it. There's a lot of herd behavior in the financial markets. A few companies fire a bunch of people, stock price goes up, others follow suit. Also, in many cases, this isn't something that anyone pays attention to on an ongoing basis, because very few execs have the mandate to do it at a large scale, and their attention is scarce. So in practice, it tends to be done at intervals, and doing it when other companies are also doing it gives cover.
paxys 9mo ago
The reason is the same as always - they want to cut costs and increase profits. And there are no laws in America that prevent them from indiscriminate firing.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
JeremyNT 9mo ago
> 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. I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products! It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.
pibaker 9mo ago
It is an open secret among the ownership class that the labor market got too good for the workers around 2021-2022 especially for tech. What you are seeing now is a possibly colluded squeeze on tech employment to keep the workers on their toes and stay docile and servile.
John23832 9mo ago
> 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-cannes open source projects. The same way they hire so many people for so much money to work on AI projects and build datacenter which haven't produced actual revenue for any customers (corporate or otherwise). I'd rather light money on fire to employ people tbh. I say this as someone who has the 200 dollar Claude sub.
themafia 9mo ago
The value of money halved in the past 5 years. Salaries did not double in that same time. That's why they're doing this. They can. Laissez-faire is the current regime of capitalism we live in.
oblio 9mo ago
Your comment is wildly out of context. This specific company is now the 5th most profitable company on the planet and its FOSS projects are pitiful and 99% fully self serving.
aprilthird2021 9mo ago
The US economy is struggling heavily. Population shrank for the first time in a long time that will reduce economic demand. The USD has gotten a lot weaker in the past few years. The regulatory environment is unpredictable and so risk being priced in is high. Every company is chasing scarcer and scarcer energy and chip resources. And then add on top irrational and constantly changing tariffs. This causes companies to constantly review costs and look for ways to trim, which they're doing.

computerphage 9mo ago

Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive

bopbopbop7 9mo ago
Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?
- medvezhenok 9mo ago
  What 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 ago
    Well 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.
  - bwestergard 9mo ago
    "What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix. I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).
    - no_wizard 9mo ago
      There are two sides to this that I see: First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology that purports to be the next big revolution in computing to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the expansive use of desktop computing and productivity increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following >Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3] Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with around 2-2.5% annual gain. Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in productivity they are having is not driving overall costs down relative to the gains, in large part because you aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of productivity. [0]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-2008/reports/03-26-labor.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-... [1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to show up, particularly in the software field (in fact, GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance) [2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew up the awareness of LLMs [3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-gains https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-g...
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
mrwaffle 9mo ago
Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?
miltonlost 9mo ago
Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?
- chankstein38 9mo ago
  Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and 1000 npm dependencies!
  - chasd00 9mo ago
    and 2+2 will output 4 almost all the time.. just like a human would.
chankstein38 9mo ago
If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit. I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
- moshegramovsky 9mo ago
  > I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product. I feel the same. They're better at some things yes, but also worse at other things. And for me, they're worse at my really important use cases. I could spend a month typing prompts into Codex or AntiGravity and still be left holding the bag. Just yesterday I had a fresh prompt and Geminin bombed super hard on some basic work. Insisting the problem was X when it wasn't. I don't know. I was super bullish but now I'm feeling far from sold on it.

culi 9mo ago

> Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance. I think you also underestimate how much hiring gives these large companies political leverage. A town can be completely destroyed when one of these companies threatens to move a factory or office

DiggyJohnson 9mo ago
how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?
- culi 9mo ago
  as a response to "Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.". I've edited the comment to make it clear, thanks
rich_sasha 9mo ago
Right - true. So hiring people is ditching this political leverage. If that was the original driver, what's changes to make it not worth it anymore?

ceejayoz 9mo ago

> 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-cannes open source projects. Given how much of these companies runs on such projects, it really shouldn't be surprising. It's a numbers game for them; Facebook doesn't mind if 300 little OSS initiatives fail if it gets them React.

rob74 9mo ago

...or 2 years ago they agreed that employees should return to the office for at least 3 days per week, of course only as a temporary measure before full RTO?

nicoburns 9mo ago

> Global economy doesn't look that terrible. It doesn't? I was born in the 90s (so admittedly 2008 was before I started working), but the economy is looking the worst it's been in my lifetime to me.

ryandrake 9mo ago
The economy is currently great if your income is from your investments rather than from your labor. The relative comfort and power of the capital class vs. labor class has never been farther apart in my lifetime.
jeffbee 9mo ago
Yeah, that's one perspective :-) Objectively, the global labor market is the hottest it has been in modern history.
- eli_gottlieb 9mo ago
  Which is why governments and firms in the capitalist core are trying to cool it down?
  - jeffbee 9mo ago
    There is a case to be made that wage spirals are bad, actually.
- loeg 9mo ago
  Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard from a year before 2020, yeah.
bdamm 9mo ago
2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think you're as qualified as most of us.
- hajile 9mo ago
  Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the farce and everything collapsed. I believe that's what we have today. The economic indicators are all worse than they were in 2008. Our economy is Wile E Coyote running at full speed in midair until he realizes the truth then falls.

antonvs 9mo ago

> Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? This is quite likely a big part of it. There's a lot of herd behavior in the financial markets. A few companies fire a bunch of people, stock price goes up, others follow suit. Also, in many cases, this isn't something that anyone pays attention to on an ongoing basis, because very few execs have the mandate to do it at a large scale, and their attention is scarce. So in practice, it tends to be done at intervals, and doing it when other companies are also doing it gives cover.

paxys 9mo ago

The reason is the same as always - they want to cut costs and increase profits. And there are no laws in America that prevent them from indiscriminate firing.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

JeremyNT 9mo ago

> 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. I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products! It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.

pibaker 9mo ago

It is an open secret among the ownership class that the labor market got too good for the workers around 2021-2022 especially for tech. What you are seeing now is a possibly colluded squeeze on tech employment to keep the workers on their toes and stay docile and servile.

John23832 9mo ago

> 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-cannes open source projects. The same way they hire so many people for so much money to work on AI projects and build datacenter which haven't produced actual revenue for any customers (corporate or otherwise). I'd rather light money on fire to employ people tbh. I say this as someone who has the 200 dollar Claude sub.

themafia 9mo ago

The value of money halved in the past 5 years. Salaries did not double in that same time. That's why they're doing this. They can. Laissez-faire is the current regime of capitalism we live in.

oblio 9mo ago

Your comment is wildly out of context. This specific company is now the 5th most profitable company on the planet and its FOSS projects are pitiful and 99% fully self serving.

aprilthird2021 9mo ago

The US economy is struggling heavily. Population shrank for the first time in a long time that will reduce economic demand. The USD has gotten a lot weaker in the past few years. The regulatory environment is unpredictable and so risk being priced in is high. Every company is chasing scarcer and scarcer energy and chip resources. And then add on top irrational and constantly changing tariffs. This causes companies to constantly review costs and look for ways to trim, which they're doing.