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This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing

This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.

riteshnoronha16 6mo ago
Yup feels like it.
wisty 6mo ago
3 and a half ways AI takes jobs: 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) 2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else. 3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway. Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...
- Wololooo 6mo ago
  4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
  It's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name. So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.
  - givemeethekeys 6mo ago
    Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
    - baxtr 6mo ago
      Other industries and other countries. Until recently, other industries were struggling very hard to find developers for example.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
      These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas. But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
      - AbbeFaria 6mo ago
        My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway. Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
- netcan 6mo ago
  Meta basically "pivoted." The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot. That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.
  - AdamN 6mo ago
    Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.
    - NickC25 6mo ago
      >Meta is fundamentally a media company You were soooooo close. Meta is fundamentally a targeted advertising company, not a media company.
      - alex1138 6mo ago
        Are they even that? Their modus operandi has been to steal user credentials. Ads (which aren't targeted at all, the ads aren't even good, according to what people have said) are just an excuse to gather more data (Facebook syncs with your phone, it wipes out addresses in your phone book). It comes down to Zuck and who he is
        netcan 6mo ago
        The ads are effective, and the way they are effective is via targeting. From the customer perspective, it works. The main problem is price competition for access to audiences. That's why fb revenues are what they are. The ads work, largely because ofntracmjng/targeting.
      - jimbokun 6mo ago
        What is a modern media company if not a targeted advertising company? The amount of subscription driven media today is relatively a very small part of the industry.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  Why is #1 hypothetical? If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees. In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets. Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
  - bandrami 6mo ago
    Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated
    - Barbing 6mo ago
      I wonder what proportion[1] of knowledge workers believe they have at least one colleague who the business would be better off replacing with software and how many of them are totally wrong, or right about it! [1] and how it might be changing with new generations of models
      - bandrami 6mo ago
        I think the bigger issue is employees who can largely just not be replaced. For all the hype about the 1X vs 10X distinction the real stumbling block is how many 0Xes there are out there and how frequently they tend to make it through hiring.
    - DonsDiscountGas 6mo ago
      Pretty sure it has for coding
      - oytis 6mo ago
        Personally, no, haven't seen it in professional settings. Colleagues using AI heavily did not show any superhuman development speed, but definitely increased review burden compared to writing code by hand.
      - 6mo ago
- DonsDiscountGas 6mo ago
  They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  1 is certainly happening in agency delivery work. Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven. In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.
- pelasaco 6mo ago
  > 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.
- lumost 6mo ago
  Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept". The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
  - jimbokun 6mo ago
    The network effect is still there, they have billions of users who are on Facebook because friends and family are on Facebook.
    - lumost 6mo ago
      Are they really? perhaps it is just my social circle - but I've observed most of the group traffic having moved to SMS and WhatsApp. While WhatsApp is a meta product, the economics are extremely different. There are really just a handful of people from my extended social circles still actively posting to FB/Instagram and that traffic is mostly drowned out by slop content.
- maerF0x0 6mo ago
  Also investors are currently more interested in hearing "Business is booming and we handled it all with AI+Robotics+Automations" than "We hired people". The sentiment is that the latter is more expensive and less flexible than the former... which seems backwards to me. (AI is expensive, robots are mostly not that adaptable to new tasks, automations only really help the most repetitive tasks and they must be rewritten/updated when the task changes)
- throwaway894345 6mo ago
  At my company, the executives have been saying things like "AI will let us do more with less", so they preemptively encourage attrition. Now the people with the skills to potentially automate away work (including via AI) can't get to it because they are now backlogged by doing the manual work themselves that they might otherwise be automating away. What's more: the way they "force attrition" aren't directly via layoffs which might let them target the lowest performers, but rather they give shitty pay raises across the board, which means the top performers leave as they have the most incentive to leave (they're the most able to get higher paying jobs elsewhere). I'm not one to invoke "incompetence" willy-nilly, but I'm having a hard time explaining these policies apart from it. Anyway, I bring this up because it didn't quite fit into your 3.5 rubric.
  - mancerayder 6mo ago
    I am seeing this first hand. A light year for layoffs (below 5 percent), a couple of months after a universally unpopular end of year comp, where exceeding expectations meant you get a raise right around inflation (3 ish percent). Good people are leaving, people who can't, don't. It's hard not too see how it dilutes talent. One of the consequences of having bean counters run tech companies.
- silveira 6mo ago
  And sometimes 3 can be "every other CEO is doing it, let's do it too. At least we already have the narrative.".
loeg 6mo ago
Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.
- NewJazz 6mo ago
  Doing slightly less than 150b looks bad to investors. Or at least it looks small.
- fmbb 6mo ago
  Imagine the productivity gains if they just spent $150B on booze and cake for employees!
  - whatsupdog 6mo ago
    And coke. Not the cold drink.
    - blitzar 6mo ago
      you get another taste of coke every time you clear 100 tickets. not the cold drink.
  - mrweasel 6mo ago
    That is one of my huge complaints about the current levels of AI investments. You can do pretty much anything you want if you got $150B to spend, and then you go burn it on being uncompetitive in the AI space. Then you have the $80B Metas Reality Labs spend on a failed virtual reality and a pair of Ray-Bans. It's not like Meta has nothing to show for the money it spend, but it seems like they could have spend that money on improving Facebook or Instagram, not that I think Zuckerberg really cares about those product anymore.
    - sleepybrett 6mo ago
      he doesn't but increasingly people don't care about facebook, and that will come for instagram as well. These social apps seem to be .. generational. Boomers use facebook and they are dropping like flies. Twitter has it's own cohort, instagram it's own. I don't expect these products to last forever, tiktok took a huge bite out of instagram. These are fad products. Mark is just looking for the next fad.
glouwbug 6mo ago
Funny how AI took all the jobs, but not from automation
xg15 6mo ago
I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
  Absolutely. Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.
  - paodealho 6mo ago
    > execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas. In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?" Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.
DarkNova6 6mo ago
In other words: Nothing has changed. Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.
- NickC25 6mo ago
  The desire for financial hyper-optimization has been killing the economy for a very long time, not just recently due to AI. That said, AI isn't helping.
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
I mean AI was auto-warning me for a Facebook comment I made, which was a somewhat widely known internet meme. Long story short, video of a young girl (maybe 8 or 9 idr) with a GIANT spider on her hand. I wrote the words "Put that spider down, we have to burn down the house" and Facebook's AI flagged it, I tried to appeal, a human allegedly reviewed it and denied it, because they didn't understand a subtle meme. That's when I knew, I had to stop logging on to Facebook altogether. This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.
ljm 6mo ago
The WWeWork model of being in real estate and not tech, I guess. Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.
- bandrami 6mo ago
  It's weird though: everybody wants to be seen to be building data centers but nobody is actually willing to put down the money to do this (except Oracle and I think it's universally agreed they're probably going to be destroyed by this). Half of the deals announced to begin in 2025 still haven't started yet, and that's with a very generous definition of "started" that basically just means "broke ground". Now some of that is an unexpected wave of populist datacenter opposition gumming the works (though I would argue that should have been expected and mitigated), but a lot of it is just a plain old lack of steel, engineers, and power, which are things everybody knew about before these deals got inked.
dheera 6mo ago
> not because AI is doing the work they used to do No, it's absolutely happening that way. I work in tech in a senior IC role. I'm now expected to single-handedly do the work that I would previously have led a team of 5-10 people to do. The junior ICs, we aren't really hiring for. This is not specific to my company, it's like this across the board.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
There is only one reason to terminate large numbers of employees at the same time 1. Cut costs There are multiple reasons companies may need to cut costs. Generally, historically, they are not positive One of them is that, internally, the business is not doing well or the company believes there are problems on the horizon Perhaps a company that is healthy and optimistic about the future could at the same time be conducting successive rounds of layoffs But are there many examples of healthy, shrinking companies from history Usually company growth is taken as a sign of prosperity. Multiple rounds of layoffs are not. More like survival mode But of course this time it will be different and the remaining employees after the layoffs have nothing to worry about

riteshnoronha16 6mo ago

Yup feels like it.

wisty 6mo ago

3 and a half ways AI takes jobs: 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) 2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else. 3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway. Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...

Wololooo 6mo ago
4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.
hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
It's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name. So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.
- givemeethekeys 6mo ago
  Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
  - baxtr 6mo ago
    Other industries and other countries. Until recently, other industries were struggling very hard to find developers for example.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
    These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas. But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
    - AbbeFaria 6mo ago
      My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway. Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
netcan 6mo ago
Meta basically "pivoted." The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot. That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.
- AdamN 6mo ago
  Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.
  - NickC25 6mo ago
    >Meta is fundamentally a media company You were soooooo close. Meta is fundamentally a targeted advertising company, not a media company.
    - alex1138 6mo ago
      Are they even that? Their modus operandi has been to steal user credentials. Ads (which aren't targeted at all, the ads aren't even good, according to what people have said) are just an excuse to gather more data (Facebook syncs with your phone, it wipes out addresses in your phone book). It comes down to Zuck and who he is
      - netcan 6mo ago
        The ads are effective, and the way they are effective is via targeting. From the customer perspective, it works. The main problem is price competition for access to audiences. That's why fb revenues are what they are. The ads work, largely because ofntracmjng/targeting.
    - jimbokun 6mo ago
      What is a modern media company if not a targeted advertising company? The amount of subscription driven media today is relatively a very small part of the industry.
aurareturn 6mo ago
Why is #1 hypothetical? If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees. In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets. Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
- bandrami 6mo ago
  Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated
  - Barbing 6mo ago
    I wonder what proportion[1] of knowledge workers believe they have at least one colleague who the business would be better off replacing with software and how many of them are totally wrong, or right about it! [1] and how it might be changing with new generations of models
    - bandrami 6mo ago
      I think the bigger issue is employees who can largely just not be replaced. For all the hype about the 1X vs 10X distinction the real stumbling block is how many 0Xes there are out there and how frequently they tend to make it through hiring.
  - DonsDiscountGas 6mo ago
    Pretty sure it has for coding
    - oytis 6mo ago
      Personally, no, haven't seen it in professional settings. Colleagues using AI heavily did not show any superhuman development speed, but definitely increased review burden compared to writing code by hand.
    - 6mo ago
DonsDiscountGas 6mo ago
They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.
pjmlp 6mo ago
1 is certainly happening in agency delivery work. Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven. In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.
pelasaco 6mo ago
> 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.
lumost 6mo ago
Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept". The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  The network effect is still there, they have billions of users who are on Facebook because friends and family are on Facebook.
  - lumost 6mo ago
    Are they really? perhaps it is just my social circle - but I've observed most of the group traffic having moved to SMS and WhatsApp. While WhatsApp is a meta product, the economics are extremely different. There are really just a handful of people from my extended social circles still actively posting to FB/Instagram and that traffic is mostly drowned out by slop content.
maerF0x0 6mo ago
Also investors are currently more interested in hearing "Business is booming and we handled it all with AI+Robotics+Automations" than "We hired people". The sentiment is that the latter is more expensive and less flexible than the former... which seems backwards to me. (AI is expensive, robots are mostly not that adaptable to new tasks, automations only really help the most repetitive tasks and they must be rewritten/updated when the task changes)
throwaway894345 6mo ago
At my company, the executives have been saying things like "AI will let us do more with less", so they preemptively encourage attrition. Now the people with the skills to potentially automate away work (including via AI) can't get to it because they are now backlogged by doing the manual work themselves that they might otherwise be automating away. What's more: the way they "force attrition" aren't directly via layoffs which might let them target the lowest performers, but rather they give shitty pay raises across the board, which means the top performers leave as they have the most incentive to leave (they're the most able to get higher paying jobs elsewhere). I'm not one to invoke "incompetence" willy-nilly, but I'm having a hard time explaining these policies apart from it. Anyway, I bring this up because it didn't quite fit into your 3.5 rubric.
- mancerayder 6mo ago
  I am seeing this first hand. A light year for layoffs (below 5 percent), a couple of months after a universally unpopular end of year comp, where exceeding expectations meant you get a raise right around inflation (3 ish percent). Good people are leaving, people who can't, don't. It's hard not too see how it dilutes talent. One of the consequences of having bean counters run tech companies.
silveira 6mo ago
And sometimes 3 can be "every other CEO is doing it, let's do it too. At least we already have the narrative.".

loeg 6mo ago

Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.

NewJazz 6mo ago
Doing slightly less than 150b looks bad to investors. Or at least it looks small.
fmbb 6mo ago
Imagine the productivity gains if they just spent $150B on booze and cake for employees!
- whatsupdog 6mo ago
  And coke. Not the cold drink.
  - blitzar 6mo ago
    you get another taste of coke every time you clear 100 tickets. not the cold drink.
- mrweasel 6mo ago
  That is one of my huge complaints about the current levels of AI investments. You can do pretty much anything you want if you got $150B to spend, and then you go burn it on being uncompetitive in the AI space. Then you have the $80B Metas Reality Labs spend on a failed virtual reality and a pair of Ray-Bans. It's not like Meta has nothing to show for the money it spend, but it seems like they could have spend that money on improving Facebook or Instagram, not that I think Zuckerberg really cares about those product anymore.
  - sleepybrett 6mo ago
    he doesn't but increasingly people don't care about facebook, and that will come for instagram as well. These social apps seem to be .. generational. Boomers use facebook and they are dropping like flies. Twitter has it's own cohort, instagram it's own. I don't expect these products to last forever, tiktok took a huge bite out of instagram. These are fad products. Mark is just looking for the next fad.

glouwbug 6mo ago

Funny how AI took all the jobs, but not from automation

xg15 6mo ago

I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.

HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
Absolutely. Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.
- paodealho 6mo ago
  > execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas. In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?" Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.

DarkNova6 6mo ago

In other words: Nothing has changed. Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.

NickC25 6mo ago
The desire for financial hyper-optimization has been killing the economy for a very long time, not just recently due to AI. That said, AI isn't helping.

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

I mean AI was auto-warning me for a Facebook comment I made, which was a somewhat widely known internet meme. Long story short, video of a young girl (maybe 8 or 9 idr) with a GIANT spider on her hand. I wrote the words "Put that spider down, we have to burn down the house" and Facebook's AI flagged it, I tried to appeal, a human allegedly reviewed it and denied it, because they didn't understand a subtle meme. That's when I knew, I had to stop logging on to Facebook altogether. This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.

ljm 6mo ago

The WWeWork model of being in real estate and not tech, I guess. Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.

bandrami 6mo ago
It's weird though: everybody wants to be seen to be building data centers but nobody is actually willing to put down the money to do this (except Oracle and I think it's universally agreed they're probably going to be destroyed by this). Half of the deals announced to begin in 2025 still haven't started yet, and that's with a very generous definition of "started" that basically just means "broke ground". Now some of that is an unexpected wave of populist datacenter opposition gumming the works (though I would argue that should have been expected and mitigated), but a lot of it is just a plain old lack of steel, engineers, and power, which are things everybody knew about before these deals got inked.

dheera 6mo ago

> not because AI is doing the work they used to do No, it's absolutely happening that way. I work in tech in a senior IC role. I'm now expected to single-handedly do the work that I would previously have led a team of 5-10 people to do. The junior ICs, we aren't really hiring for. This is not specific to my company, it's like this across the board.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

There is only one reason to terminate large numbers of employees at the same time 1. Cut costs There are multiple reasons companies may need to cut costs. Generally, historically, they are not positive One of them is that, internally, the business is not doing well or the company believes there are problems on the horizon Perhaps a company that is healthy and optimistic about the future could at the same time be conducting successive rounds of layoffs But are there many examples of healthy, shrinking companies from history Usually company growth is taken as a sign of prosperity. Multiple rounds of layoffs are not. More like survival mode But of course this time it will be different and the remaining employees after the layoffs have nothing to worry about