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The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.

hnav 5mo ago
Almost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.
lbrito 5mo ago
This has been true for many years though
- iejwjw 5mo ago
  It’s been true since pre llm’s. In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.
cmiles8 5mo ago
This is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat. Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.
torben-friis 5mo ago
Have you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome. Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.
  - torben-friis 5mo ago
    Yeah, its basically a list of the subset of white collar busywork that was mechanical but for some reason not automatable with regular programming. Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey. I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.
- amazingamazing 5mo ago
  I didn't say anything about engineers. Big tech over employs across all professions. But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occupational-employment-projections-overview-and-highlights-2023-33.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
- frm88 5mo ago
  Broadcast announcers and radio discjockeys -20.8 - this doesn't sound like AI related, more like a social/political phenomenon. Same with sales engineers.
interstice 5mo ago
Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.
- winrid 5mo ago
  Yes because the most optimized company builds the most wealth and power and puts you out of business or destroys you.
  - mempko 5mo ago
    If this was true, the big tech companies would be the most optimized. Maybe efficiency isn't the biggest factor.
    - darth_avocado 5mo ago
      Most optimized company would have 0 employees and only shareholder value.
      - nradov 5mo ago
        In principle it's possible to have a company with no employees and all work done by vendors / contractors. But in practice this usually turns out to be less optimized than having at least some regular employees due to transaction costs. Organizational optimization is always a balancing act.
    - winrid 5mo ago
      Power is the biggest factor. Efficiency helps. I bet they're more efficient than most people think, it just doesn't scale linearly.
- buu700 5mo ago
  Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.
synergy20 5mo ago
h1b and outsourcing will also go down on the tech side. the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh
bobmarleybiceps 5mo ago
I think Jensen Huang said this recently, and I've had a similar opinion for a while, but a lot of companies seem uncreative with how they use their employees. like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects :shrug:
- overfeed 5mo ago
  I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  > like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/ https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects. Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.
  - bobmarleybiceps 5mo ago
    yeah I was being very hyperbolic (and am on the younger side, so tbh wasn't very aware of a lot the x projects... I think those are even riskier than I meant.) google was probably the worst example for me to use tbh, especially since it still has such a good culture of funding researchers. There was a "meme" a few years ago saying gmail's UI has dozens teams working on each of the different buttons, so that was why I said google/gmail. huang's original comment was referencing layoffs due to AI, and I think a lot of the "maintaining/replacing existing stuff" engineers are at the most risk atm. But why lay people off why they could be pushed to work on new risky projects :-/ I do sort of think the stereotype of killing projects is kind in the vein of what I meant. like idk, google has so much money I feel like they don't need ~everything to clearly and immediately fit into their ai / data / advertising / search stuff. earnings - expenses is so huge, I think it should be fine to just allow some things to stay "small" without being a more "distinguished" moonshot-style project.
fidotron 5mo ago
For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.
- nradov 5mo ago
  That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.
  - fidotron 5mo ago
    At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees. There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly. As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point > In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts. This is completely right.
    - nradov 5mo ago
      Even if your claim was true (and I don't really believe it) we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the overall tech labor market. The impact is insignificant.
hysan 5mo ago
I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.
- machinekob 5mo ago
  Dose AI really raise productivity floor that much? Do we have some good example of that?
  - iejwjw 5mo ago
    No because these people were held back by a lack of vision and poor project selection. Not this other stuff that people think. Vision cannot be bought (thankfully). A small team led by a real visionary can achieve much more than these bloated tech firms.
- bentt 5mo ago
  Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.
- matrix87 5mo ago
  I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective. Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership. This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
Timon3 5mo ago
I've been reading this same comment non-stop for the last five years.
- amazingamazing 5mo ago
  No surprise, it has been true for a while.
  - Timon3 5mo ago
    It actually makes me very skeptical of your thesis - broadly discussed facts don't usually need to be wrapped in "nobody wants to talk about this, but everyone knows it's true".
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
And yet up until a few years ago there were all these forecasts about how we would be short xxxx SWEs
sys_64738 5mo ago
I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I would care less to do the job and be less invested to go the extra yard. I feel there's goodwill in employees that will get sucked out the more AI intrudes into our daily lives.
- matrix87 5mo ago
  I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task. I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda

hnav 5mo ago

Almost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.

lbrito 5mo ago

This has been true for many years though

iejwjw 5mo ago
It’s been true since pre llm’s. In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.

cmiles8 5mo ago

This is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat. Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.

torben-friis 5mo ago

Have you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.

hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome. Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.
- torben-friis 5mo ago
  Yeah, its basically a list of the subset of white collar busywork that was mechanical but for some reason not automatable with regular programming. Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey. I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.
amazingamazing 5mo ago
I didn't say anything about engineers. Big tech over employs across all professions. But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occupational-employment-projections-overview-and-highlights-2023-33.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
frm88 5mo ago
Broadcast announcers and radio discjockeys -20.8 - this doesn't sound like AI related, more like a social/political phenomenon. Same with sales engineers.

interstice 5mo ago

Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.

winrid 5mo ago
Yes because the most optimized company builds the most wealth and power and puts you out of business or destroys you.
- mempko 5mo ago
  If this was true, the big tech companies would be the most optimized. Maybe efficiency isn't the biggest factor.
  - darth_avocado 5mo ago
    Most optimized company would have 0 employees and only shareholder value.
    - nradov 5mo ago
      In principle it's possible to have a company with no employees and all work done by vendors / contractors. But in practice this usually turns out to be less optimized than having at least some regular employees due to transaction costs. Organizational optimization is always a balancing act.
  - winrid 5mo ago
    Power is the biggest factor. Efficiency helps. I bet they're more efficient than most people think, it just doesn't scale linearly.
buu700 5mo ago
Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.

synergy20 5mo ago

h1b and outsourcing will also go down on the tech side. the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh

bobmarleybiceps 5mo ago

I think Jensen Huang said this recently, and I've had a similar opinion for a while, but a lot of companies seem uncreative with how they use their employees. like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects :shrug:

overfeed 5mo ago
I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.
hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
> like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/ https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects. Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.
- bobmarleybiceps 5mo ago
  yeah I was being very hyperbolic (and am on the younger side, so tbh wasn't very aware of a lot the x projects... I think those are even riskier than I meant.) google was probably the worst example for me to use tbh, especially since it still has such a good culture of funding researchers. There was a "meme" a few years ago saying gmail's UI has dozens teams working on each of the different buttons, so that was why I said google/gmail. huang's original comment was referencing layoffs due to AI, and I think a lot of the "maintaining/replacing existing stuff" engineers are at the most risk atm. But why lay people off why they could be pushed to work on new risky projects :-/ I do sort of think the stereotype of killing projects is kind in the vein of what I meant. like idk, google has so much money I feel like they don't need ~everything to clearly and immediately fit into their ai / data / advertising / search stuff. earnings - expenses is so huge, I think it should be fine to just allow some things to stay "small" without being a more "distinguished" moonshot-style project.

fidotron 5mo ago

For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.

nradov 5mo ago
That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.
- fidotron 5mo ago
  At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees. There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly. As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point > In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts. This is completely right.
  - nradov 5mo ago
    Even if your claim was true (and I don't really believe it) we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the overall tech labor market. The impact is insignificant.

hysan 5mo ago

I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

machinekob 5mo ago
Dose AI really raise productivity floor that much? Do we have some good example of that?
- iejwjw 5mo ago
  No because these people were held back by a lack of vision and poor project selection. Not this other stuff that people think. Vision cannot be bought (thankfully). A small team led by a real visionary can achieve much more than these bloated tech firms.
bentt 5mo ago
Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.
matrix87 5mo ago
I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective. Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership. This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable

Timon3 5mo ago

I've been reading this same comment non-stop for the last five years.

amazingamazing 5mo ago
No surprise, it has been true for a while.
- Timon3 5mo ago
  It actually makes me very skeptical of your thesis - broadly discussed facts don't usually need to be wrapped in "nobody wants to talk about this, but everyone knows it's true".

insane_dreamer 5mo ago

And yet up until a few years ago there were all these forecasts about how we would be short xxxx SWEs

sys_64738 5mo ago

I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I would care less to do the job and be less invested to go the extra yard. I feel there's goodwill in employees that will get sucked out the more AI intrudes into our daily lives.

matrix87 5mo ago
I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task. I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda