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My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view: Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especi
by passive 5mo ago
My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view:
Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.
Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.
GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:
- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI
- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering
- They made sure to include a special section for investors
Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.
Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
- simianwords 5mo ago[flagged]
- NewJazz 5mo agoBut if you are the company delivering those productivity gains, why would you layoff and thus lose an opportunity to grow?
- protocolture 5mo agoALL evidence? I have seen data going both ways.
- sensanaty 5mo agoCan you link to any actual evidence about this 10-20% productivity increase? And I don't mean anecdata like "I'm totally like 8200% more productive!1" that the AI bros love to spew. From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.
- dgellow 5mo agoDoes that productivity increase translate into monetary gains for the company that are greater than the token+compute+other new inteoduced expenses? For smaller companies I can believe it, but massive orgs like Cisco I’m really not so sure. You can be extremely productive and not actually contribute to the company cash flow
- JSR_FDED 5mo agoAll the recent academic studies disagree with you.
- dgb23 5mo agoI think you make a point that is worthy of discussion, but the first sentence is unnecessarily hostile. The comment you responded to already made a caveat that they might be too cynical.
- simianwords 5mo agoFair
- Y-bar 5mo agoMaybe this is the reason why I will never be a C-suite person. But if my product/service workforce became 20% more productive I would direct my sales department that we have more capacity to overtake our competitors and/or deliver more from the backlog of requests from existing customers which we can invoice for. And at the end of the year celebrate a double-digit growth.
- hansmayer 5mo agoLol, so much "productivity" bullshit from the LLM-crowd but hardly any new innovations or products. Something is off here.
- hansmayer 5mo ago> all evidence points to AI bringing at least 10-20% more productivity. No, actually all evidence points exactly to a ~20% slowdown> https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... The "evidence" that you think about is probably that dopamine hit you felt when the shit-generator spat out a complete half-finished react app. But that's not evidence of increased productivity, unless we now measure productivity by the size of the codebase bloat.
- simianwords 5mo agoNewer evidence from same group invalidates the outdated claim https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/ https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/
- weakfish 5mo agoNo it doesn't - that data is self-reported, and the 2025 study explicitly compares _against_ self-reported data. Granted, I agree models have improved since then, but still. > Importantly, survey results are not necessarily grounded in reality. There are reasons to be skeptical of people’s responses to counterfactual questions such as about AI’s effect on productivity — for instance, our study in early 2025 found that people overestimated AI’s effect on their time spent on tasks by 40 percentage points on average. - your linked study
- simianwords 5mo ago> No, actually all evidence points exactly to a ~20% slowdown> It contradicts this
- weakfish 5mo agoNot really? I mean, the original study says this, in essence: 1. Developers _self_ report a 1.5-2x increase in productivity 2. Empirical measurements show 20% slowdown Now, that study is from 2025, so it may be outdated. The study you linked and claim contradicts the 20% slowdown is only _self reported_ data, which the original study proves is unreliable and overestimates productivity. In fact, the study _you linked_ says this: > In 2 of these 7 cases we were able to view public outputs from the work completed using AI. We are confident that in both cases the participants are overstating their change in value produced as we understand it; at least, the enormously more valuable work is not externally visible. > In 2 other cases, we are somewhat suspicious of large changes in the value of work produced because qualitative claims do not match our intuitive sense of agent capabilities. > There is 1 instance where our best sense is that the respondent does indeed have agents doing an impressive quantity of productive work, although we suspect that this work is better captured by improved speed or quantity of output, not improved value of output. > In the remaining 2 cases we lack sufficient qualitative information to meaningfully interpret. (edits for formatting)
- tragiclos 5mo ago> GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. I don't think they offer anything unique. Forgejo[1] offers a similar platform. [1] https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/
- allarm 5mo agoI don't think Fogejo offers CI/CD out of the box, for starters.
- pimterry 5mo agohttps://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/overview/ https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/overview/
- layoric 5mo agoIt absolutely does and a very good effort of compatibility with GitHub actions. It’s not perfect but migrating is far less of a pain than I experienced moving to others
- allarm 5mo agoOkay, missed that!
- throwaway7783 5mo agoWe use GitLab. They are no way in an incredible position to moonshot anything. They are yet another git provider with a management plane around it.
- passive 5mo agoI've built a developer platform around GitLab, and it's got some nice stuff, but it's not revolutionary. But that's not all that relevant to the opportunity in front of them. The opportunity, generally, exists because of their place in an industry that most folk believe will be very different a decade from now. That belief is going to lead a lot of CTOs to try new things. When a company tries something new, it almost always picks a new vendor to work with, rather than adding complexity or risk to an existing vendor engagement. Yes, there are other alternatives, but they are less well known, require self hosting, and/or are secondary products of companies with very broad focus. Atlassian might be another, given how much of the rest of the software development cycle they have their hooks in, but many tech leaders have unresolved JIRA trauma. :)
- throwaway7783 5mo agoI agree they probably have the opportunity (next biggest brand after GitHub), but nothing they are doing is looking like they are taking it. Duo seems to be their best effort so far to ride the AI wave, which everyone and their mother does already.
- anal_reactor 5mo ago>My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view 1. FAANG does something that's relevant to their company. 2. Everyone thinks that this is an universally good move because they're FAANG. 3. Market rewards copying FAANG regardless whether that strategy also applies to your company. Simple as that.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ranguna 5mo agoI agree with you. Putting myself in the shoes of a tech CEO, I see other companies laying off and saying that their AI strategy made them so productive that they don't need 20% of their employees anymore, I see investors flocking to that company, I look at my company and feel investor FOMO, I layoff as well. It's nothing personal, it's just how the US works. If this were to happen in Europe, your company would burn to the ground. The amount of compensation you'd have to do would eat your gains from the layoffs.
- pjc50 5mo agoMeanwhile in Korea: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-official-proposes-citizen-dividend-from-samsung-and-sk-hynix-tax-windfall-spooking-markets https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-offi... https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employees-could-receive-447000-bonuses-this-year https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employee... SK Hynix is making an absurd amount of money from the RAM shortage, and the employees are not unreasonably demanding their cut from it.
- api 5mo agoPeople forget that all the training data to make these things was harvested with little concern for copyright or proper licensing. A dividend or basic income or something funded by a tax on this stuff is not at all unreasonable. The technology is cool but it’s basically mass piracy.
- mathverse 5mo agoYeah but when you get old enough you get sacked and cant get employed anywhere and have to start frying chicken. So..
- monooso 5mo agoAs opposed to what happens in the US, you mean?
- 5mo ago
- misnome 5mo ago> to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become. GitLab has just as many outages, just nobody notices/cares so much
- lionkor 5mo agoOur GitLab has fantastic uptime, because it's self hosted
- misnome 5mo agoThen you should compare to self-hosted GitHub
- estimator7292 5mo ago[dead]
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoWhich has an uptime of 0 because it doesn’t exist
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoNot true. It exists, though I know someone who had to support it and it's apparently a real POS that not even Microsoft support is good at fixing.
- andsoitis 5mo ago> it doesn’t exist GitHub does provide self-hosting via GitHub Emterprise Server.
- somewhatgoated 5mo agowoops my bad ^^
- bravetraveler 5mo ago
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- delusional 5mo ago> But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get. I think it goes a little deeper than that. In ways that seem to echo in your description of GitHub vs GitLab too. Big Tech doesn't seem to attempt to generate value. The most positive attribute you can ascribe to a silicon valley startup is "disruptive" which in effect means eating somebody elses lunch. I think this is pretty natural for an industry that has pretty much achieved perfect penetration, but we're still dimensioning the industry for massive growth. In that framework, silicon valley startups have to identify some sort of frontier they can expand into, and with pretty much all productive enterprise already interfaced with technology. They have to expand into simply replacing labor.
- chrsw 5mo agoIt's not cynical, it's accurate. If you give corporations a free excuse for staff reductions most will grab it with both hands.
- vrganj 5mo agoIt's simpler than that. It is in their class interest to try and beat workers that have gotten too uppity down and AI is a tool they see fit for purpose.
- redwood 5mo agoI look at it a bit differently. I bet Cisco's overall employment will only rise over time maybe even this year but certainly in the years to come. But the point is they do need to rebalance the kind of focus area they have. In other words someone who's great at one part of the technology stack might not be who they need for a different part and the priorities change over time. The reality is Cisco does a huge amount of large acquisitions and this brings more and more people with specialized talent all the time and you can't just do that forever without removing focus elsewhere. Also if compensation has come down over the last couple of years sometimes you have to do this instead of lowering salary because for whatever reason our industry doesn't ever lower salary. I do personally believe it would be wonderful if companies invested more in helping people retool and move to new parts of the stack and where compensation becomes non-competitive it should be okay to at least give an employee an option of a lower salary to stay.
- eudamoniac 5mo agoI think the reason they don't do that is because in most cases, the employee will mentally check out and/or start looking for jobs immediately, so you're getting very little value from them after the salary reduction.