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The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have

The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make life better for people. What a crazy fucking concept right?

threatofrain 8mo ago
These are words without weights. At some point the put money into software option will max out. Perhaps what we should all be doing is hiring more lawyers, there's always more legal work to be done. When you don't have weights then you can reason like this.
- yoyohello13 8mo ago
  I don’t know what kind of software your used to but software is pretty much universally dog shit these days. I could probably count on one hand the number of programs that I actually like using. There is an astronomical room for improvement. I don’t think we are hitting diminishing returns any time soon.
  - laurentiurad 8mo ago
    I talk about this at length in one of my previous posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39963058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39963058. I definitely share your opinion and I think this will be exacerbated by vibe coding and having LoC as the main KPI for engineering teams.
throwaw12 8mo ago
> Just do more work, get more done That's one of the reasons why I am terrified, because it can lead to burn out, and I personally don't like to babysit bunch of agents, because the output doesn't feel "mine", when its not "mine" I don't feel ownership. And I am deliberately hitting the brake from time to time not to increase expectations, because I feel like driving someone else's car while not understanding fully how they tuned their car (even though I did those tunings by prompting)
- QuercusMax 8mo ago
  It feels very much like leading a team of junior engineers or even interns who are very fast but have no idea about why we're doing anything. You have to understand the problems you're trying to solve and describe the solutions in a way they can be implemented. It's not going to be written exactly like you would do it, but that's ok - because you care about the results of the solution and not its precise implementation. At some point you have to make an engineering decision whether to write it yourself for critical bits or allow the agent/junior to get a good enough result. You're reviewing the code and hand editing anyway, right? You understand the specs even if your agent/junior doesn't, so you can take credit even if you didn't physically write the code. It's the same thing.
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
    > It feels very much like leading a team of junior engineers or even interns who are very fast but have no idea about why we're doing anything Yes, yes! And this is problem for me, because of the pace, my brain muscles are not developing enough compared to when I was doing those things myself. before, I was changing my mind while implementing the code, because I see more things while typing, and digging deeper, but now, because juniors are doing things they don't offer me a refactoring or improvements while typing the code quickly, because they obey my command instead of having "aha" moment to suggest better ways
    - layer8 8mo ago
      There’s some hope that the industry will realize that managing clueless LLMs at high pace isn’t sustainable and leads to worse results, and some middle ground has to be found. Or we will reach AGI, so AI won’t be clueless anymore and really take your engineering job.
- ako 8mo ago
  I'm currently a product manager (was a software engineer and technical architect before), so i already lost the feeling of ownership of code. But just like when you're doing product management with a team of software engineers, testers, and UXers, with AI you can still feel ownership of the feature or capability you're shipping. So from my perspective, nothing changes regarding ownership.
afro88 8mo ago
This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough
- weatherlite 8mo ago
  I think it depends on: A) how old the product is: Twitter during its first 5 years probaby had more work to do compared to Twitter after 15 years. I suspect that is why they were able to get rid of so many developers. B) The industry: many b2c / ecommerce businesses are straightforward and don't have an endless need for new features. This is different than more deep tech companies
  - thewebguyd 8mo ago
    There’s a third one, and it’s non-tech companies or companies for whom software is not a core product. They only make in-house tooling, ERP extensions, etc. Similar to your Twitter example, once the ERP or whatever is “done” there’s not much more work to do outside of updating for tax & legal changes, or if the business launches new products, opens a new location, etc. I’ve built several of such tools where I work. We don’t even have a dev team, it’s just IT Ops, and all of what I’ve built is effectively “done” software unless the business changes. I suspect there’s a lot of that out there in the world.
- sdf2df 8mo ago
  Not moving fast enough.. sure. But to what direction? The direction and clarity of it is the hardest part.
ehnto 8mo ago
That was my insight also. As a manager, you already have the headcount approved, and your people just allegedly got some significant percentage more productive. The first thought shouldn't be, great let's cut costs, it should be great now we finally have the bandwidth to deliver faster. On a macro level, if you were in a rising economic tide, you would still be hiring, and turning those productivity gains into more business. I wonder what the parallels are to past automations. When part producing companies moved from manual mills to CNC mills, did they fire a bunch of people or did they make more parts?
- superfrank 8mo ago
  I'm an EM as well and I've been telling my teams for a while now that I think they really only need to start worrying once our backlog starts going down instead of up. Generally, I still agree with that (and your) sentiment when you look at the long term, but in the short term, I think all of the following arguments can be made in favor of layoffs: - AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget - We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else (PM or design or something) so we're cutting SWEs in anticipation of needing to move that budget elsewhere. - We anticipate the skillsets needed by developers in the AI world to be fundamentally different from what they are now that it's cheaper to just lay people off, run as lean as possible, and rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain. I don't necessarily agree with those arguments (especially the last one), but I think they're somewhat valid arguments
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
    I see similar arguments and I don't agree as well, here is why: > rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain. before that future comes your company might become obsolete already, because you have lost your market share to new entrants > We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else I would love to tell them, hey lets leverage current momentum and build, when those times come, we offer existing people with accumulated knowledge to retrain to a new type of work, if they think they're not good fit, they can leave, if they're willing, give them a chance, invest in people, make them feel safe and earn trust and loyalty from them > AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget 1. Its not that expensive: 150$/seat/month -> 5 lunches? or maybe squeeze it from Sales personnel traveling with Business class? 2. By the time increased productivity is realized by others, company who resisted could be so far behind, that they won't be able to afford hiring engineers with those skillsets, if they think 150$ is expensive now, I am sure they will say "What??? 350k$ for this engineer?, no way, I will instead hire contractors"
arwhatever 8mo ago
I’ve been screaming this too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212237 It’s refreshing to see the same sentiment from so many other people independently here.
MattGaiser 8mo ago
You would need to expand your capacity to find and define the work. I imagine that would be a major challenge.
tkgally 8mo ago
I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally. To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc. Some of that work was already threatened by pre-LLM machine translation, despite its poor quality; context-aware LLMs have pretty much taken over the rest. Translators who were specialized in that type of work and too old or inflexible to move into other areas were hurt badly. The potential demand for translation between languages has always been immense, and until the past few years only a tiny portion of that demand was being met. Now that translation is practically free, much more of that demand is being met, though not always well. Few people using an app or browser extension to translate between languages have much sense of what makes a good translation or of how translation can go bad. Professional translators who are able to apply their higher-level knowledge and language skills to facilitate intercultural communication in various ways can still make good money. But it requires a mindset change that can be difficult.
- adelie 8mo ago
  I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech: 1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales. 2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.
  - thbb123 8mo ago
    It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail. After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.
crocowhile 8mo ago
Because hiring less while getting more done increases margins. Your company is not for profit so doesnt care about margins. Others do.
throw3847r7 8mo ago
You need certain company culture, to be able to scale up, and to capture this value. Most companies can not just add new developers. AI needs documentation, automation, integration tests... It works very well for remote first company, but not for in-face informal grinding approach. Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"!
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  >Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"! Why are you surprised customers don't like spending money on the items that don't add business value. Add to that QA, documentation, security audits, etc. They want to ship stuff that brings in customers and revenue day one, everything else is a cost.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago
    > integration tests, QA etc ... the items that don't add business value They absolutely do add value / prevent loss, but you need some understanding in order to see that. Not seeing it is a marker of not understanding.
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      >They absolutely do add value Not to the non-technical bean counters. When they allocate money they want to see you prove how that extra money translates to an immediate ROI, and it's difficult to prove that in an Excel sheet exactly what the ROI will be without making stuff up on vibes and feels. Like at one German company i was at ~15 years ago, all the devs wanted a second 19" monitor on our workstations for increased productivity, and the bean counters wouldn't approve that because they wanted proof of how that expense across hundreds of people will increase our productivity and by how much %, to see if that would offset the cost. This is how these people think. If you don't bring hard numbers on how much their "line will go up", they won't give you money. I know this is difficult to understand from the PoV of SV Americans where gazillions of dollars just fall from the sky at their tech companies.
svara 8mo ago
Yes, it's the lump of labor fallacy. Doesn't exclude the possibility of short term distribution, though.
zipy124 8mo ago
The problem becomes if you are a service like Youtube, where you already have capture almost the entire customer base.
RA_Fisher 8mo ago
Does that extra work bring in more revenue? I think that’s the key question.
- raphaelj 8mo ago
  Companies that do not reduce their workforce might outcompete you. It might not be about bringing more revenues but retaining market share.
  - Esophagus4 8mo ago
    If your barrier to being competitive is a slow, bureaucratic org, restructuring and laying off might actually help long term.
apercu 8mo ago
I think a lot of companies have ineffective ways to measure productivity, poor management (e.g., people who were IC's then promoted to management but have no management training or experience), incentives aren't necessarily aligned between orgs and staff, so people end up with a perverse "more headcount" means I'm better than Sandy over there. Leadership and vision have been rare in my professional life (though the corporate-owned media celebrates mediocrity in leadership all the time with puff pieces). Once you get to a certain size company, this means a lot of bloat. Heck, I've seen small(ish) companies that had as many managers and administrators as ICs. But You're not wrong, I'm just pointing out how an org that has 4k people can lay off a few hundred with modest impact of the financials (though extensive impact on morale).
anthonypasq 8mo ago
most businesses dont actually have an infinite amount of work that has extremely high ROI. every new project at google for example has to justify the engineering spend of developing a product that has comparable margin to the ad business. Why spend 10 million a year of engineering resources on a new product that might 1. completely fail or 2. be a decent product with 20% margins when they could do nothing and keep raking in 90% margins from the ads business.
sdf2df 8mo ago
Stop talking sense bro, you'll get downvoted. If you look at my post history I'm essentially saying the same stuff lol.
pllbnk 8mo ago
I have a hope that many of today's engineers working at various companies will start realizing that instead of employers receiving tools to get them laid off, it is they, the engineers, who received the tools to compete with said employers and outcompete them. If, and it's a big if, AI models really boost productivity by an order of magnitude (I personally, while being skeptical a year or two ago, am leaning towards this idea) then engineers have a chance to realize their ideas, improve current system design patterns and build successful companies, which will inevitably (hopefully) require hiring personnel to keep competing, bringing entire software engineering market to a newly balanced state.

threatofrain 8mo ago

These are words without weights. At some point the put money into software option will max out. Perhaps what we should all be doing is hiring more lawyers, there's always more legal work to be done. When you don't have weights then you can reason like this.

yoyohello13 8mo ago
I don’t know what kind of software your used to but software is pretty much universally dog shit these days. I could probably count on one hand the number of programs that I actually like using. There is an astronomical room for improvement. I don’t think we are hitting diminishing returns any time soon.
- laurentiurad 8mo ago
  I talk about this at length in one of my previous posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39963058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39963058. I definitely share your opinion and I think this will be exacerbated by vibe coding and having LoC as the main KPI for engineering teams.

throwaw12 8mo ago

> Just do more work, get more done That's one of the reasons why I am terrified, because it can lead to burn out, and I personally don't like to babysit bunch of agents, because the output doesn't feel "mine", when its not "mine" I don't feel ownership. And I am deliberately hitting the brake from time to time not to increase expectations, because I feel like driving someone else's car while not understanding fully how they tuned their car (even though I did those tunings by prompting)

QuercusMax 8mo ago
It feels very much like leading a team of junior engineers or even interns who are very fast but have no idea about why we're doing anything. You have to understand the problems you're trying to solve and describe the solutions in a way they can be implemented. It's not going to be written exactly like you would do it, but that's ok - because you care about the results of the solution and not its precise implementation. At some point you have to make an engineering decision whether to write it yourself for critical bits or allow the agent/junior to get a good enough result. You're reviewing the code and hand editing anyway, right? You understand the specs even if your agent/junior doesn't, so you can take credit even if you didn't physically write the code. It's the same thing.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  > It feels very much like leading a team of junior engineers or even interns who are very fast but have no idea about why we're doing anything Yes, yes! And this is problem for me, because of the pace, my brain muscles are not developing enough compared to when I was doing those things myself. before, I was changing my mind while implementing the code, because I see more things while typing, and digging deeper, but now, because juniors are doing things they don't offer me a refactoring or improvements while typing the code quickly, because they obey my command instead of having "aha" moment to suggest better ways
  - layer8 8mo ago
    There’s some hope that the industry will realize that managing clueless LLMs at high pace isn’t sustainable and leads to worse results, and some middle ground has to be found. Or we will reach AGI, so AI won’t be clueless anymore and really take your engineering job.
ako 8mo ago
I'm currently a product manager (was a software engineer and technical architect before), so i already lost the feeling of ownership of code. But just like when you're doing product management with a team of software engineers, testers, and UXers, with AI you can still feel ownership of the feature or capability you're shipping. So from my perspective, nothing changes regarding ownership.

afro88 8mo ago

This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough

weatherlite 8mo ago
I think it depends on: A) how old the product is: Twitter during its first 5 years probaby had more work to do compared to Twitter after 15 years. I suspect that is why they were able to get rid of so many developers. B) The industry: many b2c / ecommerce businesses are straightforward and don't have an endless need for new features. This is different than more deep tech companies
- thewebguyd 8mo ago
  There’s a third one, and it’s non-tech companies or companies for whom software is not a core product. They only make in-house tooling, ERP extensions, etc. Similar to your Twitter example, once the ERP or whatever is “done” there’s not much more work to do outside of updating for tax & legal changes, or if the business launches new products, opens a new location, etc. I’ve built several of such tools where I work. We don’t even have a dev team, it’s just IT Ops, and all of what I’ve built is effectively “done” software unless the business changes. I suspect there’s a lot of that out there in the world.
sdf2df 8mo ago
Not moving fast enough.. sure. But to what direction? The direction and clarity of it is the hardest part.

ehnto 8mo ago

That was my insight also. As a manager, you already have the headcount approved, and your people just allegedly got some significant percentage more productive. The first thought shouldn't be, great let's cut costs, it should be great now we finally have the bandwidth to deliver faster. On a macro level, if you were in a rising economic tide, you would still be hiring, and turning those productivity gains into more business. I wonder what the parallels are to past automations. When part producing companies moved from manual mills to CNC mills, did they fire a bunch of people or did they make more parts?

superfrank 8mo ago
I'm an EM as well and I've been telling my teams for a while now that I think they really only need to start worrying once our backlog starts going down instead of up. Generally, I still agree with that (and your) sentiment when you look at the long term, but in the short term, I think all of the following arguments can be made in favor of layoffs: - AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget - We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else (PM or design or something) so we're cutting SWEs in anticipation of needing to move that budget elsewhere. - We anticipate the skillsets needed by developers in the AI world to be fundamentally different from what they are now that it's cheaper to just lay people off, run as lean as possible, and rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain. I don't necessarily agree with those arguments (especially the last one), but I think they're somewhat valid arguments
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  I see similar arguments and I don't agree as well, here is why: > rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain. before that future comes your company might become obsolete already, because you have lost your market share to new entrants > We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else I would love to tell them, hey lets leverage current momentum and build, when those times come, we offer existing people with accumulated knowledge to retrain to a new type of work, if they think they're not good fit, they can leave, if they're willing, give them a chance, invest in people, make them feel safe and earn trust and loyalty from them > AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget 1. Its not that expensive: 150$/seat/month -> 5 lunches? or maybe squeeze it from Sales personnel traveling with Business class? 2. By the time increased productivity is realized by others, company who resisted could be so far behind, that they won't be able to afford hiring engineers with those skillsets, if they think 150$ is expensive now, I am sure they will say "What??? 350k$ for this engineer?, no way, I will instead hire contractors"

arwhatever 8mo ago

I’ve been screaming this too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212237 It’s refreshing to see the same sentiment from so many other people independently here.

MattGaiser 8mo ago

You would need to expand your capacity to find and define the work. I imagine that would be a major challenge.

tkgally 8mo ago

I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally. To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc. Some of that work was already threatened by pre-LLM machine translation, despite its poor quality; context-aware LLMs have pretty much taken over the rest. Translators who were specialized in that type of work and too old or inflexible to move into other areas were hurt badly. The potential demand for translation between languages has always been immense, and until the past few years only a tiny portion of that demand was being met. Now that translation is practically free, much more of that demand is being met, though not always well. Few people using an app or browser extension to translate between languages have much sense of what makes a good translation or of how translation can go bad. Professional translators who are able to apply their higher-level knowledge and language skills to facilitate intercultural communication in various ways can still make good money. But it requires a mindset change that can be difficult.

adelie 8mo ago
I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech: 1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales. 2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.
- thbb123 8mo ago
  It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail. After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

crocowhile 8mo ago

Because hiring less while getting more done increases margins. Your company is not for profit so doesnt care about margins. Others do.

throw3847r7 8mo ago

You need certain company culture, to be able to scale up, and to capture this value. Most companies can not just add new developers. AI needs documentation, automation, integration tests... It works very well for remote first company, but not for in-face informal grinding approach. Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"!

joe_mamba 8mo ago
>Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"! Why are you surprised customers don't like spending money on the items that don't add business value. Add to that QA, documentation, security audits, etc. They want to ship stuff that brings in customers and revenue day one, everything else is a cost.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago
  > integration tests, QA etc ... the items that don't add business value They absolutely do add value / prevent loss, but you need some understanding in order to see that. Not seeing it is a marker of not understanding.
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    >They absolutely do add value Not to the non-technical bean counters. When they allocate money they want to see you prove how that extra money translates to an immediate ROI, and it's difficult to prove that in an Excel sheet exactly what the ROI will be without making stuff up on vibes and feels. Like at one German company i was at ~15 years ago, all the devs wanted a second 19" monitor on our workstations for increased productivity, and the bean counters wouldn't approve that because they wanted proof of how that expense across hundreds of people will increase our productivity and by how much %, to see if that would offset the cost. This is how these people think. If you don't bring hard numbers on how much their "line will go up", they won't give you money. I know this is difficult to understand from the PoV of SV Americans where gazillions of dollars just fall from the sky at their tech companies.

svara 8mo ago

Yes, it's the lump of labor fallacy. Doesn't exclude the possibility of short term distribution, though.

zipy124 8mo ago

The problem becomes if you are a service like Youtube, where you already have capture almost the entire customer base.

RA_Fisher 8mo ago

Does that extra work bring in more revenue? I think that’s the key question.

raphaelj 8mo ago
Companies that do not reduce their workforce might outcompete you. It might not be about bringing more revenues but retaining market share.
- Esophagus4 8mo ago
  If your barrier to being competitive is a slow, bureaucratic org, restructuring and laying off might actually help long term.

apercu 8mo ago

I think a lot of companies have ineffective ways to measure productivity, poor management (e.g., people who were IC's then promoted to management but have no management training or experience), incentives aren't necessarily aligned between orgs and staff, so people end up with a perverse "more headcount" means I'm better than Sandy over there. Leadership and vision have been rare in my professional life (though the corporate-owned media celebrates mediocrity in leadership all the time with puff pieces). Once you get to a certain size company, this means a lot of bloat. Heck, I've seen small(ish) companies that had as many managers and administrators as ICs. But You're not wrong, I'm just pointing out how an org that has 4k people can lay off a few hundred with modest impact of the financials (though extensive impact on morale).

anthonypasq 8mo ago

most businesses dont actually have an infinite amount of work that has extremely high ROI. every new project at google for example has to justify the engineering spend of developing a product that has comparable margin to the ad business. Why spend 10 million a year of engineering resources on a new product that might 1. completely fail or 2. be a decent product with 20% margins when they could do nothing and keep raking in 90% margins from the ads business.

sdf2df 8mo ago

Stop talking sense bro, you'll get downvoted. If you look at my post history I'm essentially saying the same stuff lol.

pllbnk 8mo ago

I have a hope that many of today's engineers working at various companies will start realizing that instead of employers receiving tools to get them laid off, it is they, the engineers, who received the tools to compete with said employers and outcompete them. If, and it's a big if, AI models really boost productivity by an order of magnitude (I personally, while being skeptical a year or two ago, am leaning towards this idea) then engineers have a chance to realize their ideas, improve current system design patterns and build successful companies, which will inevitably (hopefully) require hiring personnel to keep competing, bringing entire software engineering market to a newly balanced state.