8 ms·

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

by 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.
      - 6mo ago
- sulam 6mo ago
  Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.
  - mghackerlady 6mo ago
    the only thing I miss about stadia was the controller. Man, that was a nice controller. Also, playing games on a nest hub was a neat party trick
- konschubert 6mo ago
  > In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.
  - oblio 6mo ago
    1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere. 2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies. 3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.
    - konschubert 6mo ago
      I didn’t say that Waymo will be a commercial success or that there won’t be copycats more successful. But waymo created the category by showing it is possible.
- compounding_it 6mo ago
  > notable exception of Apple I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter. For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
- ninjagoo 6mo ago
  > here 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 Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? > speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.? > end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu. Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023. We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv [2] 6% employment decline in 22-25 year old workers https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
  - trgn 6mo ago
    agreed. zirp has become a meme, it does not really explain any current dynamics.
  - malfist 6mo ago
    How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.
- basisword 6mo ago
  Re: pandemic overhiring - haven't most of the big tech companies already corrected for that? Starting in 2022 we've seen very large rounds of layoffs multiple times a year. That's 3-4 years of layoffs now. Meta alone has laid off over 30k people since 2022, not to mention closing many open roles.
- canes123456 6mo ago
  It’s weird though because they could just cut the whole metaverse and it would matter exponentially more for profits and Wall Street. Maybe that is what this layoff is but I doubt it. They already laid off 10% of reality labs this year. Why do that if they were going to kill it completely. There also no financial reason to lay off people. The revenue and profit for employee is already way better than per 2020 levels. I suspect it really is to pour more money into AI capex.
- 52-6F-62 6mo ago
  But do you really think they accidentally over-hired to the tune of tens of thousands of individuals? Across these companies the numbers are close to 100,000 people. Maybe much more. That means that a large number of high ranking people in these companies projected they would need these people in the coming years, and then some. I think it may be darker than that, and the overhiring was a tentative measure to build up a charge, like electrons in a capacitor, to release a shock to the market that would achieve two aims: 1) drive salaries down through fear and contest 2) reduce the bargaining power of employees (software engineers were starting to look to unionizing in the past 5 years especially and that has gone deathly quiet even though working conditions have worsened and demands have increased on 'ICs') It's rudimentary electronics physics. Such physics is regularly applied to economic systems modelling to achieve predictable outcomes (usually making more money). Any objection as to whether these companies executive teams were collaborating should be seen as very empty by now, given we know they are all deeply circularly invested in each other and thus are bound to each other's success or failure.
  - ptdorf 6mo ago
    Keeping your employees on their toes can work in the short term. On the long term, prolonged stress kills innovation and engagement.
- ValentineC 6mo ago
  > Amazon's Alexa devices division Alexa devices had so much potential, if they'd only practised customer obsession like Amazon used to (still?) preach, and not stuff their products with ads.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
    How? Potential as cool devices, sure. Potential to make money though?? Nobody has really figured out how to make money from voice-only assistants.
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.".

by wisty 6mo ago

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.
    - 6mo ago
sulam 6mo ago
Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  the only thing I miss about stadia was the controller. Man, that was a nice controller. Also, playing games on a nest hub was a neat party trick
konschubert 6mo ago
> In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.
- oblio 6mo ago
  1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere. 2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies. 3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.
  - konschubert 6mo ago
    I didn’t say that Waymo will be a commercial success or that there won’t be copycats more successful. But waymo created the category by showing it is possible.
compounding_it 6mo ago
> notable exception of Apple I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter. For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
ninjagoo 6mo ago
> here 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 Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? > speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.? > end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu. Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023. We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv [2] 6% employment decline in 22-25 year old workers https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
- trgn 6mo ago
  agreed. zirp has become a meme, it does not really explain any current dynamics.
- malfist 6mo ago
  How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.
basisword 6mo ago
Re: pandemic overhiring - haven't most of the big tech companies already corrected for that? Starting in 2022 we've seen very large rounds of layoffs multiple times a year. That's 3-4 years of layoffs now. Meta alone has laid off over 30k people since 2022, not to mention closing many open roles.
canes123456 6mo ago
It’s weird though because they could just cut the whole metaverse and it would matter exponentially more for profits and Wall Street. Maybe that is what this layoff is but I doubt it. They already laid off 10% of reality labs this year. Why do that if they were going to kill it completely. There also no financial reason to lay off people. The revenue and profit for employee is already way better than per 2020 levels. I suspect it really is to pour more money into AI capex.
52-6F-62 6mo ago
But do you really think they accidentally over-hired to the tune of tens of thousands of individuals? Across these companies the numbers are close to 100,000 people. Maybe much more. That means that a large number of high ranking people in these companies projected they would need these people in the coming years, and then some. I think it may be darker than that, and the overhiring was a tentative measure to build up a charge, like electrons in a capacitor, to release a shock to the market that would achieve two aims: 1) drive salaries down through fear and contest 2) reduce the bargaining power of employees (software engineers were starting to look to unionizing in the past 5 years especially and that has gone deathly quiet even though working conditions have worsened and demands have increased on 'ICs') It's rudimentary electronics physics. Such physics is regularly applied to economic systems modelling to achieve predictable outcomes (usually making more money). Any objection as to whether these companies executive teams were collaborating should be seen as very empty by now, given we know they are all deeply circularly invested in each other and thus are bound to each other's success or failure.
- ptdorf 6mo ago
  Keeping your employees on their toes can work in the short term. On the long term, prolonged stress kills innovation and engagement.
ValentineC 6mo ago
> Amazon's Alexa devices division Alexa devices had so much potential, if they'd only practised customer obsession like Amazon used to (still?) preach, and not stuff their products with ads.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
  How? Potential as cool devices, sure. Potential to make money though?? Nobody has really figured out how to make money from voice-only assistants.

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.".