The problem that software engineers and product teams often face is that the time from roadmap to feature is quite long, and AI has offered a clear, meaningful speedup to some parts, like writing tests and boilerplate. In many cases, the same ticket flow can be managed much faster with AI. So, what? We're not quite at the point where people have transitioned this into demand for more product deliveries faster. As soon as that occurs, it doesn't matter how great the AI is, because the current pace will be slow. Why stop at what the current roadmap is? Why not ask for double the features? When we gave everyone power tools that didn't dramatically make construction easier, it just enabled more complex buildings.

The misunderstanding is that people equate what these companies are saying and what they are doing. In reality this is the perfect time to fire people under cover. This happens every X years where as leadership you can say this tech is displacing you, when in truth its just that you arent needed anymore.

This is a capitalism functioning correctly as labor as in then moved to places it is needed more. Its sort of shocking to see devs complain about getting laid off. Thats the point of a high variance career. Great and terrible outcomes go hand in hand, if you want one you must expect the other.

These two ideas, that (1) AI is making people more productive and (2) we are laying off employees because AI replaces them. Those two ideas are mutually incompatible. When employees become more productive, you always always always want to hire more of them, because it’s a multiplier on your outputs and therefore an efficient use of resources.

That is why one of these narratives is total bullshit. Either “layoffs from AI” are layoffs for some other structural reason in the tech sector, or “AI makes employees way more productive” is total bullshit.

I don’t know which is the scarier lie tbh

Simply reality is very few companies are cutting because of AI. They’re just trimming bloat that’s been there the whole time. The AI narrative is broadly just PR spin and CEOs trying to look cool.

Which companies are cutting headcount for AI though?

You mean companies blaming AI or using it as an excuse?

The real answer is stop reading the headlines or the fake news.

> Not because they have fewer costs. Because they have more capability.

This kind of sentences are typically AI-generated. What’s the point of an article about AI generated by AI?

LOL who doesn't?

I don't know anyone who has been hiring in any kind of significant numbers. Everyone fires either because of alleged AI efficiencies or to pay for AI token shit or to just bla bla to investors how magically AI AI AI they are.

End result all the same. Massive job losses due to AI.

Greed is the underlining issue.

That's absolutely correct. I use LLMs heavily in my work and open source projects. These tools are effective, they can solve hard problems and they allow me to work on a wider range of tasks than could before.

But, they're also jagged in terms of functionality. When you work with a human, you can learn what their core competencies are, and then if you give them a task that falls within that domain, you can be reasonably sure they'll finish it correctly. That's not the case with LLMs. It might do one task brilliantly, and a next similar task, it just shits the bed on.

And since it has no understanding of the task in a human sense, it can't self correct, learn or improve. All its doing is stringing tokens together based on probability. So, you need a human in the loop to review what it's doing, to correct it when it makes mistakes, and to define the actual goals. My experience is that doing all that properly ends up taking up a lot of time, so your actual productivity gain per person aren't all that significant.

Companies that try to replace humans with LLMs will soon find that they end up with a whole bunch of code that doesn't actually work, and they have no hope of fixing. The double edge of LLMs is that they're really good at generating a lot of wrong code really fast.

This is a pro-AI piece. They realized they overplayed their hands when college graduates started booing them and their new line is "AI won't replace workers, it will make them more valuable!"

Another bury-your-head-in-the-sand article. It sucks but AI replacing coders is very real. I haven’t coded since last year but I’ve pushed more features at a rate faster than I ever could in my entire career. I pushed new code while chatting on WhatsApp with my friends yesterday using 2 prompts.

“Remove this old feature.” “Are you sure you didn’t break anything?”

That was it. Then I manually tested it to make sure nothing was broken. Then I did a brief review before posting it for code review and then pushed it. What would have taken me probably about 1 day to go through and figure out code changes and then actually change the code took me about 30 seconds.

To think that we need to maintain the post-Covid hiring bloat is nonsense. I’m not so arrogant to think that someone with an llm can’t replace me, if I survive a few more years in this industry I’ll be amazed and grateful.

Has this ever happened? Companies are just keep going along. There's these consequences for things that hurt people

Capitalists usually recoup gains rather than re-investing in people or working in new verticals. This gels with companies who would rather do anything else than grow.

I once was the final step in an interview process. My flag to the team was that this person had been laid off something like four times in a row. I said, layoffs don’t cut the great people, so it says something about the applicant.

The team insisted this person had a big heart, a lot of passion, and they’d make a difference. We extended an offer and they accepted.

They ended up being unremarkable in every way. It was a drag on the company. We let them go a year later and set ourselves back on a topic our customers cared about.

Anyway, some people are great. Some are not. The idea that there’s this hidden special knowledge trapped inside teams, if only the executives would unleash it, is nonsense. I personally feel for anyone who loses their job, but companies will always pick the most productive and efficient path to a result.

Also so does the labor market. How many people, when given the option for more pay and benefits, decline out of loyalty to their employer? At least in tech, this is almost never the case.

I think we’re a bit lost. On one hand, certain people don’t trust these big employers and think they’re evil, and on the other hand really really want their job at said evil megacorp.

Companies are cutting headcount to fund AI projects, not necessarily because of the gains they are getting from it. And frankly in many companies, cutting layers and reducing team handoffs will be a net gain - even if AI didn't exist.

Two things:

1) Unlimited PTO is a scam. Ask anyone who ever got paid out six weeks salary when they changed jobs.

2) “the craft” is doing some heavy lifting here. I happen to enjoy AI-assisted dev, but it is nothing like the work that drew me to the industry.

Otherwise agreed on all counts.

> The upside is that it will cull those in it just for the money/lifestyle, and concentrate it down to those in it for the love of the craft.

Is that what you see at your uncle's boiler company? People who are truly in it "for the love of the craft"?

That is a SV thing, in many places it is a regular office job.

You are already in a treat if having free coffee and fruit.

You don't need to look at other engineering jobs, just look at software engineers out side the US. We make decent money compared to the local market, but we've never had the royal treatment that US devs seem to get.

> Unlimited PTO takes a liability off the company’s books, and makes every time off request a negotiation.

This is 100% it.

algorithm, tracking, bypassing adblocker, reports, moderation and backoffice tools I think

They do A/B tests all day

Well they keep breaking main FB page with additions or redesigns nobody asked for.

I am in Europe but I must be some test bunny that made some personal enemy there somehow, since beginning (cca 2008) FB was by far the buggiest site ever. Uploads of images didn't work, sometimes it uploaded twice. Uploading album of 30-50 pics took on average maybe 10 attempts in the past. Comments didn't work, or twice again. many similar behaviors. Ie since cca 2 weeks now if I click on some picture to have it full screen, clicking close after 1-2 mins ends up in FB error page instead of returning to main feed. I keep seeing FB error page a LOT considering infrequent use.

Horrible, terrible engineering.

> I find that hard to believe. Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform..., they had a good revenue growth in the early ‘10s.

So, how they hired salespeople was based on revenue per head. If there wasn't enough revenue in a particular part of the business, no new hires for you. Obviously, that's gonna be a lagging indicator.

And they were honestly leaving a lot of money on the table there, but honestly not as much as they were leaving on the table by having a really, really, really bad and buggy self-serve interface that made it hard for small advertisers to spend money.

When they fixed that, the small businesses all got good results (e.g. hairdressers etc) and those people then convinced all the agency people to put more money into the platform.

Up till 2015 or so, it was a real struggle to convince people to even try FB ads, but after that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

> I find that hard to believe. Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform..., they had a good revenue growth in the early ‘10s.

Also, up to 2013 or so (when feed ads became a thing), most of that money was coming from payments for f2p games, so they had lots of partner managers there, but not enough ads sales people.

I don't see people complaining about the repetition of the dozens of daily topics about how LLMs will replace software engineers.

My experience has been that this is not unique to tech, and is common in all large enough industries. I think it's just the natural emergence of reward hacking i.e. if you're an executive at Pepsi and your job is largely to increase the stock price, and you know that you can do something to change the way your numbers are presented such that Wall St will like it, you'll likely do it.

I do think tech certainly has its own flavor though, particularly because of how differently it is treated by investors.

I don't think it's that unique but Engineering type people might be more optimisation minded and see total comp as something to optimise.

Europe. 100k USD is about 75k GBP, which deducting National Insurance (our social security program) and pension brings you to a salary of £63k roughly. You can easily hire good devs for this amount (especially outside of london).

Try consulting agencies, or freelancing as external contractor.

In consulting firing people “on the bench” happens regularly if the sales pipeline cannot keep everyone busy, there is only so much agencies pay from their own pocket if there are no outsourcing deals landing.

In some of those well known offshoring companies, being on bench automatically means a downcut on the salary as cost measure.

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.

Why wouldn’t inference just keep getting better and cheaper as hardware and algorithms improve?

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.*

> Layoffs are a strong signal that a business is not investing in growth and is just trying to wring more profit from the same thing. If investors were rational, they'd walk away.

Not always. A buggy whip maker in 1920 should be laying off people. No amount of investment in buggy whips will bring that market back.

A layoff is saying that the investment will not pay off. So long as the company is cutting the right things they are good. Many layoffs are not done with a proper cut of the work do be done and so are bad, but that doesn't mean they are always bad.

I think the issue is that at any given point the work required to fire a 100-200k engineer is less than making that engineer do work to make you that much.

If you're growing obviously it's stupid to fire but if you have plateau'd the easiest gain is to trim the fat, so to speak. Also once a company is acquired by a private fund, everyone becomes a title and a number in a spreadsheet, that's all.

In consulting you don't make magically customers out of nowhere, and there is a limited pool of customers to feed from.

The rational thing is to analyze the opportunity cost of the investment, which is dependent on the always fluctuating prices.

Some businesses can grow, some cannot grow, some grow at different rates. The risk adjusted (subjective) prices determine whether or not an investor should walk away.

Perhaps you've heard of Mitsubishi, Toyota Group or Samsung? Notably, Mitsubishi is involved in making cars, HVAC and heavy equipment.

Or, for that matter, Apple. If they subscribed to that philosophy, the iPhone wouldn't exist. Honestly, they would have kept trying to make the Apple II.

You can always find things to do but how much of that work has a positive ROI, or contributes to your business? You always have some bottlenecks, let's say implementing features was your bottleneck before AI, and you had a team of 15 product engineers with a 1y roadmap. With Claude Code a team of 5 was able to get that done in let's say 3 months. You don't magically come up with 9 months of work for 15 people right away. And your bottleneck will now be sales or something else, but your engineers won't convert to becoming sales people (or at least not all of them), and you might only need 1-2 more sales people, not 15.

>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.

> 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.

Yes, or that businesses are expecting a slow down in the economy that hinders their ability to sell (i.e. their customers are going to cutback on spending)

This was the case last year (or maybe it was the year before) where technology companies saw their customers reducing spend and tightening belts.

The current economy feels hard to figure out, in that the market keeps going up but so is inflation and the struggle of the everyday American at least.

Perhaps that is leading technology companies to be more conservative in how much they produce.

So you never worked at a consulting agency working on bids for outsourced development.

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.

> This sounds like an attempt to rationalize the fact that your business isn't that effective,

That's actually it. The part that can be sped up with AI don't change how slow everything else still takes. If you need 2 weeks to see the results of a change before AI, you still need that after AI.

Basically, your business is not keeping pace with development.

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.

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.

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.

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?

There's only so much to do and coordination costs (already burdensome) become overwhelming.

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.

The demand doesn't necessarily double.

Diminishing returns on additional labor.

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.