CEO to staff: You're not getting a raise. We're spending on AI instead

olsondv

“You” being the operative word. The writing is on the wall when an AI-centric cloud company with falling profits can’t compensate its workers in an age where other companies are scrambling to jam AI into everything. It reads as a last ditch effort to resuscitate the business.

SoftTalker

Next: Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mmmk… oh oh! and I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up.

caymanjim

It's not like their staff can quit in this job market.

rushingcreek

This seems like AI washing to me. If the company was already doing well, the AI investments should allow it to grow faster and therefore still be able to give employees bonuses. This announcement implies they view this as a zero-sum investment. Well-run businesses tend not to think this way.

serial_dev

I’m honestly wondering where this “win in the market with AI” goes for companies. It’s not unique to this place, it’s in every layoff tweet. What’s the strategy? Just “AI harder” than others? I’m working at an AI pilled company and I just don’t see the gigantic improvements. Not in my work, not in anyone else’s. It’s a great technology, we finish some tasks faster, some tasks really 100x faster, sure, but it’s a <2x improvement at an organization scale. It’s not like suddenly we cleaned out the defect list. It’s not like I can use any app without seeing 5 bugs in the first five minutes. It’s not like I got any meaningful new features.

OutOfHere

It won't be long before workers will be paid only to automate their job away. The profits of course will not go to the workers; they will be shown the door once their value has been extracted into the automaton.

helsinkiandrew

Not hiring replacements for the few percent of staff which churn every year would probably save the same amount of money without demoralising your staff. This looks like a simple cost cutting to boost earnings - their sales have been steadily decreasing over the past few years whilst EPS have been increasing, which isn’t a healthy look

sublinear

> The decision applies to employees in countries where regulators do not require market-aligned salary adjustments.