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Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and ta

• eru 5mo ago
  On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.
  • skinfaxi 5mo ago
    The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?
    • apothegm 5mo ago
      Because you don’t have enough work that really needs doing, at least in that particular area. You cut engineers because the bottleneck to increased revenue isn’t software features or bugs, it’s marketing/sales; human beings’ limited attention for which there is now more competition than ever; and customers’ available funds. ETA: this is sometimes (though not always) very different for a mature company than an early stage startup.
      • otikik 5mo ago
        That is a very convenient message for marketing and sales people. The fact that their whole job is crafting messages shouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
        • mattkrause 5mo ago
          Ha! I’d never thought about it like that but…yeah. I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale. You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.
        • eru 5mo ago
          I took 'engineer' vs 'marketing' and 'sales' as just examples in the grandfather message. The essence was about bottlenecks to revenue.
    • thfuran 5mo ago
      Because the entire structure of the business is designed for approximately the amount of work it currently does and likely has no particular immediate use for twice as much work in most departments.
      • sumeno 5mo ago
        In 20 years I have never been on a team that didn't have twice as much work as we had people to do it. Businesses are not magically efficient
        • hilariously 5mo ago
          Your experience of how the world works is usually because of what work you have done. You can't grow twice as many crops, sell twice as many groceries, drive twice as many busses, because of AI - fundamentally there's a consumption problem as well. Many businesses are not bottlenecked by processes that are computer based.
          • deleted 5mo ago
            [deleted]
          • cootsnuck 5mo ago
            But the firms in the headlines doing layoffs after layoffs aren't growing crops, selling groceries, or driving busses... They're knowledge work roles in companies selling intangible products and services. It's large corporations doing this much more than SMBs.
            • mattkrause 5mo ago
              And I’m sure those companies also have “backlogs" due to limited labor/labor costs. There are always shelves to face, vehicles with deferred maintenance, and so on. Obviously, there are limits: I’m not sure what my local grocery store or bus line would do with 100 new workers, but I have no doubt they could put a few people to work right away.
    • asdfologist 5mo ago
      Diminishing returns on additional labor.
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    • yababa_y 5mo ago
      There's only so much to do and coordination costs (already burdensome) become overwhelming.
    • csoups14 5mo ago
      I think you're viewing this from the perspective of someone who has a functioning brain and plentiful concepts and ideas that aren't being built because you're labour-constrained. Companies like Meta simply don't have productive uses for all of that human + AI labour. Meta spends tens of billions a year paying people to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. If the idea well you're going to is running dry, AI with a smaller number of humans can slop out the stuff you do want to build more efficiently is their implicit argument, especially when you don't care about quality (as is the case with Meta). Layoffs are also being used to tell a story around efficiency to investors while companies wait for the billions they're plowing in AI actually show profit.
    • avereveard 5mo ago
      The demand doesn't necessarily double.
    • LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
      Except that comforting C-suite narrative does not reflect reality. 2026 agents both increase productivity by knocking clearly specified but error-prone and tedious tasks out of the park whilst simultaneously vexing and annoying their users with hallucinations and downright lies on tasks with intrinsic ambiguity. This is made worse by the token providers with their constant tweaks to their deployments to cut costs w/o losing accuracy which flat doesn't work out well for the end user.
    • bregma 5mo ago
      If one woman can produce a baby on 9 months, why can't you get 9 women pregnant and produce a baby in one month?
      • eru 5mo ago
        That works for throughput just fine. And if you have a bit of an inventory, you can hide the latency. That's also how CPUs are made and sold: it takes a few months to make a physical CPU, but you can just go into a shop and buy one whenever you feel like it.
  • trimethylpurine 5mo ago
    That's not always the case. Augmenting certainly can mean that, but it can also mean doing something that people couldn't do before. For example, looking through meta data in a SQL environment that you didn't know existed to troubleshoot an issue. And a million other things. The odds of any employee not knowing everything are very good, even when humanity as a whole had already discovered that thing.
  • nutjob2 5mo ago
    When the AI models hallucinate up a catastrophe, managers will reevaluate that calculus. Humans are accountable and act accordingly, models are not.
    • disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
      Yeah, it's probably be something like: 2025: agents are the future! 2026: we don't need any new employees _stuff gets real_ 2027: wow, employees are actually pretty good value.*
    • eru 5mo ago
      Not all humans act like they are accountable.
  • hmmokidk 5mo ago
    I think there are risks: - AI pricing is variable, probably the cheapest it will ever be right now - AI produces a lot more shit for humans to review, and you will always need humans. If you don’t focus on keeping things simple you will probably play yourself unless you’re good at separating out blast radiuses. - I see a lot of super low quality work that doesn’t solve the problem but it’s like look that guy solved the problem in one day! Promote him! Everyone is happy except for the end users who for whatever reason are being totally ignored (whose problem it fails to appropriately solve) and I saw this in accounting software so…hello eventual lawsuits?
    • valvar 5mo ago
      Why wouldn’t inference just keep getting better and cheaper as hardware and algorithms improve?
      • MobiusHorizons 5mo ago
        The typical playbook for a VC funded startup is to race to a monopoly where the company can have higher margins. Prices continuing to go down for the consumer over time would require competition to stay high in the long term, and even then it’s not clear if even current prices are profitable.
        • zozbot234 5mo ago
          The current level of AI has plenty of inherent competition from local models. In the long term, most of the profit will probably be from very smart models that run at something closer to datacenter scale over long inference loops - where local inference can't do much and even third-party inference/small neoclouds will be severely challenged. That is a very natural "moat" and has natural cross-efficiencies with AI model training, which requires a similar scale.
    • CuriouslyC 5mo ago
      AI is definitely not the cheapest it will ever be right now. The frontier is getting more expensive, but the same capability will get cheaper over time.
• pjmlp 5mo ago
  The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required. You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be. It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy, so eventually when there are enough of those people on bench they have to find something else.
  • ambicapter 5mo ago
    This sounds like an attempt to rationalize the fact that your business isn't that effective, otherwise adding more people would result in making more money. > It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy I've never worked at any company where there was any limit to the work to be done. Sales people don't give a shit what your product can do, only what they can sell, and they never sleep.
    • actionfromafar 5mo ago
      Only if all roles in a company are bottlenecked in the same way. Example: natural monopoly in some geographically-locked domain. Just to grab an example. You have 150 people in the field, can't let them go because the company still needs hands and eyes on the ground. You have 15 people in some other, paper-pushing department. Thanks to AI advances, you only need 10 of those now.
    • mk89 5mo ago
      >I've never worked at any company where there was any limit to the work to be done. Sales people don't give a shit what your product can do, only what they can sell, and they never sleep. The issue is how much of that work is "valuable" in the sense = makes money. I have both been in projects and seen projects which were canceled once it turned out they didn't make money (bad sales? bad product? bad market fit? a bit of everything?). This you can only afford when you have money to spare (= with debts? high profits...?). With the interest rates so high, how can a company justify hiring dozens/hundreds of people more? It's a risk, and what I am seeing now is that companies are shrinking left and right to focus on the business that makes money and reduce headcount on what they believe doesn't make money at all, or it's a cost too high for their "long term strategy" or whatever. Right now the only metrics that they are caring about is EBIDTA. They don't even care anymore about ARR, they are becoming irrelevant as long as they stay within a range (we want 20% increase, but we're ok with 5%). The AI will replace everything and everyone is working out pretty well for Anthropic/OpenAI, though.
• __alexs 5mo ago
  I disagree. Lots of people are so laser focussed at only the close to the code aspects of programming they are unable to leverage the enormous increase in scope it can offer them. There is absolutely room for head count reduction while companies restructure around this.
• religio 5mo ago
  we're not taking into consideration the new bottleneck: product growth. imo it's the growth/expansion of the product that creates new work and opportunities for more work. at the moment, product growth is human-driven--because it's a risk to take a product in any direction, and whoever makes it has to bear the full responsibility. ideas that cause product growth are still generated by humans (and rightly so), perhaps also augmented by ai. there's also what the market is ready for. we've said that some products failed because they were ahead of their time. it's even more true now where the power of ai, ai productivity, etc could take the product far beyond the markets expectation. what does that lead to? the deliberate slow rate of growth means power/potentials have to be controlled somewhat. so even without hiring, if ai is adopted as a first-class tool within the organization, there will be surplus resources that need to be shed somehow.
• fullshark 5mo ago
  Because they aren't getting cut cause of AI. They are getting cut cause of the uncertainty re: future revenue streams AI is bringing. These layoffs are driven by fear and leadership lacking any vision for how the post AI world looks for their company. Their solution is to tighten the belts, which of course opens the window further for the AI companies to actually write software and make them obsolete.
• mschuster91 5mo ago
  > Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! You can't put "undocumented knowledge" into a spreadsheet.
• zozbot234 5mo ago
  If you freeze the over-hiring, you'll still get people complaining about how there's no entry-level jobs anymore.
• marcosdumay 5mo ago
  The AI story is a cover for the companies becoming less profitable in a bad economy, less able to invest because of the end of ZIRP, not capable of finding new markets, and developers becoming more expensive due to changes in accounting laws on the US. People keep trying to make sense from the official story told by professional liars.