The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

internetguy

It is a little ironic that this article reads so much like an AI-generated one.

haburka

Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.

embedding-shape

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 take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tunes currently.

tristanj

One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. These data centers are not going to pay for themselves.

CivBase

I still think AI is just a cover story for these job cuts. Tech companies are still "rightsizing" after unsustainable growth during the pandemic. At the same time we're clearly headed into a recession. Investors like growth, not shrinkage. Claiming AI is replacing those jobs helps avoid the appearence of shrinkage, while also feeding the AI hype machine that many of these companies have invested heavily into.

Shank

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.

glouwbug

Relatively speaking, a company could obtain AGI first merely by just by keeping their critical thinkers while the rest of the industry offloads their thinking to LLMs. It wouldn’t be AGI, just GI, like we’ve always had before before GPT arrived

jordanb

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!"

koe123

My pet theory is that AI enables programmers to be relatively more productive than other roles. So, if I want to grow my company, shouldn't I hire MORE programmers? Anyone know a good counterargument? Along another vein, I guess I wonder with my limited knowledge of economics if the demand for programmers is elastic or inelastic.

reenorap

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.

jdidrirjrjo

> AI Does Not Replace Judgement. It Multiplies It. And that is a problem. If you employ people whomlove to comlkain are basically minus 0.1 of regular employe (tolerable annoyance), they get power multiplier and instead of small rants at water cooler, will be able to file federal law suits under employers ass. And they will also get way more ways to harrass productive employes.

fred_is_fred

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.

chank

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.

elktown

I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.

nalekberov

> 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?

pech0rin

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.

TeriyakiBomb

In reality there are two kinds of layoff going on. Idiots who truly believe that AI will actually replace a significant amount of the workforce (Long term, it will not but some jobs displaced) and those who have internalised that ZIRP is over, they need to be more lean as VCs have closed their wallets and saying "We've revolutionised our workflow with AI" than "We haven't turned huge investment debt into profit in 5 years and we need to reduce headcount for even the slightest chance of that happening, or at least raise again by saying 'AI' over and over" has far better optics.

austin-cheney

I agree with the article in its entirety, but its just so easy to play devil's advocate here. There might actually be a large value add to companies who replace poor performing employees with AI. So, who are the low versus high performing employees? The largest problem with software employment is defining software developer performance. There is no industry baseline for defining or measuring this. Its so easy for a person to be that 10x (or much greater) developer in a compatible team or be a complete failure on the wrong team.

tayo42

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

whazor

A friend of mine works at big corporate. He is in meetings all the time and barely codes. For him a 20$ AI subscription is more than enough. I'm personally at a fintech startup and have a 100$ subscription. Our org is much leaner and its much faster to ship stuff. What used to be entire departments or teams can now be done by two or three people. Three people to ensure we share context and have a decent tram factor.