>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess.
Ofcourse, AI does have an impact. We can't close our eyes to that. Atleast, it created a belief that massive layoffs are affordable now without affecting productivity.
Anecdotally, I didn't see more safety for engineers working on cash cows. Quite the contrary, if a product is already bringing revenue, it is an easy decision for the business to squeeze a bit more margin by letting people go. Stable, cash-generating projects are often first to be put into efficiency/maintenance mode.
This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years.
Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
> The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations.
Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...
It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?
I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!
Gravity is coming back to Silicon Valley: workers are realizing that the Bell Labs image they were sold was mostly innovation theater and hoarding talent for websites overstuffed with ads designed to manipulate users into buying junk
I am about to give my take on software development:
Most [sane] software out there, but not all, has a main development time which is ridiculous compared to its life cycle (you could code in binary machine code, for several ISAs, it would not even matter).
Then, it is extremely hard to justify _HONESTLY_ a permanent income in software development. Really, really hard.
The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
Not so much AI itself, but the billions invested into it and the hardware required - anything you invest billions into but that doesn't have similar return on investment is a fast track to an economic crash / correction. The Y2K tech companies are a previous example, investors were champing at the bit to invest in uh, pets.com or whatever but turns out it didn't / wouldn't earn enough money to earn it back.
> Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it.
Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents).
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time.
Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway.
I remember after the Brexit vote (i.e. years before anything actually changed) there was a rash of British companies who clearly would have gone bankrupt anyway blaming their ailing fortunes on Brexit.
There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful.
The Brexit vote is nothing like this though. AI is probably the biggest corporate gaslighting exercise I've ever seen in my entire life.
From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth.
Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this.
I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative that make this worse for the employer by ultimately requiring more people who average lower confidence and lower capabilities than without, but I say that with a huge caveat.
The deeper problem is not market effect or panaceas like AI. The deeper problem is poorly qualified workers and hard to identify talent. It’s easy to over hire, and then fire, when everyone generally sucks and doesn’t matter. If the average employed developer is excellent at what they deliver these people would be easy to identify and tough to fire like engineers, doctors, and lawyers. If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative.
AI and these market shifts thus hide a lower level problem nobody wants to solve: qualification.
How exactly are good doctors easy to identify and hard to fire? And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do?
If people can't identify qualified professionals without relying on credentials, they probably aren't qualified to be hiring managers.
> And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do?
Simple, the 80% of code monkeys who are not good at what they do will cause way more damages than the "professionals who are excellent at what they do". And out fo tech I can guarantee you the vast majority of people use llms to do less, not to do more or do better
It's also easily verifiable, supposedly AI makes everyone a 10x developer/worker, it's been ~3 years now, where are the benefits ? Which company/industry made 10x progress or 10x revenue or cut 90% of their workforce ?
How many man hours are lost on AI slop PRs? AI written tickets which seem to make sense at first but fall apart once you dig deep? AI reports from mckinsey&co which use fake sources?
It wasn't covid - it was the post-covid coming down from all the free stimulous and ZIRP. The Russian war in the Ukraine is a much closer market to when the economy started tanking for devs.
Qualification is a very difficult problem, but I think everyone resents the characterization of "bad devs". Things like the Metaverse failure - apparently $70bn spent for no results - are primarily management failures. Like the Cybertruck, they succeeded 100% at building a product that the CEO wanted. The problem is that the CEO is basically the only person that wants that product.
There's also the thought nobody wants to examine: what if the consumer market total spend is kind of tapped out?
I think we'll see something counterintuitive happen where hiring picks up dramatically. Companies are willing to overspend and over-hire to automate everything away once and for all.
>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess.
Traditional factories do make wrong guesses about the future and overhire all the time. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off...
Sure, factories also overhire sometimes or shrink their businesses but not at the scale or frequency we see in tech.
There is some fat in the system that likely needs to cut off.
Here is Google complaint about not serving lobster biscue:
https://x.com/Andercot/status/1768346257486184566?s=20
Zero interest rate phenomenon.
Ofcourse, AI does have an impact. We can't close our eyes to that. Atleast, it created a belief that massive layoffs are affordable now without affecting productivity.
Anecdotally, I didn't see more safety for engineers working on cash cows. Quite the contrary, if a product is already bringing revenue, it is an easy decision for the business to squeeze a bit more margin by letting people go. Stable, cash-generating projects are often first to be put into efficiency/maintenance mode.
This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years.
Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
> The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations.
Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...
It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?
I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!
Gravity is coming back to Silicon Valley: workers are realizing that the Bell Labs image they were sold was mostly innovation theater and hoarding talent for websites overstuffed with ads designed to manipulate users into buying junk
I am about to give my take on software development:
Most [sane] software out there, but not all, has a main development time which is ridiculous compared to its life cycle (you could code in binary machine code, for several ISAs, it would not even matter).
Then, it is extremely hard to justify _HONESTLY_ a permanent income in software development. Really, really hard.
The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
Not so much AI itself, but the billions invested into it and the hardware required - anything you invest billions into but that doesn't have similar return on investment is a fast track to an economic crash / correction. The Y2K tech companies are a previous example, investors were champing at the bit to invest in uh, pets.com or whatever but turns out it didn't / wouldn't earn enough money to earn it back.
Computers are a lever, a force multiplier. If your process is shit, you can shit faster with a computer.
LLMs are another force multiplier. If your computerized process is a disaster … well, you said it and you’re right.
> Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it.
Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents).
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time.
Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway.
You are being scammed without knowing it.
> Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
You seem to forget that AWS exists.
I remember after the Brexit vote (i.e. years before anything actually changed) there was a rash of British companies who clearly would have gone bankrupt anyway blaming their ailing fortunes on Brexit.
There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful.
The Brexit vote is nothing like this though. AI is probably the biggest corporate gaslighting exercise I've ever seen in my entire life.
This is a symptom of a shifting media landscape. The tech industry press and the American press generally speaking are stunningly corrupt.
>Europe just became a lower-cost extension of Silicon Valley.
Stay away from europe while you can.
From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth.
Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this.
I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative that make this worse for the employer by ultimately requiring more people who average lower confidence and lower capabilities than without, but I say that with a huge caveat.
The deeper problem is not market effect or panaceas like AI. The deeper problem is poorly qualified workers and hard to identify talent. It’s easy to over hire, and then fire, when everyone generally sucks and doesn’t matter. If the average employed developer is excellent at what they deliver these people would be easy to identify and tough to fire like engineers, doctors, and lawyers. If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative.
AI and these market shifts thus hide a lower level problem nobody wants to solve: qualification.
How exactly are good doctors easy to identify and hard to fire? And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do?
If people can't identify qualified professionals without relying on credentials, they probably aren't qualified to be hiring managers.
> And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do?
Simple, the 80% of code monkeys who are not good at what they do will cause way more damages than the "professionals who are excellent at what they do". And out fo tech I can guarantee you the vast majority of people use llms to do less, not to do more or do better
It's also easily verifiable, supposedly AI makes everyone a 10x developer/worker, it's been ~3 years now, where are the benefits ? Which company/industry made 10x progress or 10x revenue or cut 90% of their workforce ?
How many man hours are lost on AI slop PRs? AI written tickets which seem to make sense at first but fall apart once you dig deep? AI reports from mckinsey&co which use fake sources?
This argument works until you realize that Claude Code is AGI.
A code monkey with AGI is better than 10 "excellent professionals" without AGI.
Better get used to the future, buddy.
It wasn't covid - it was the post-covid coming down from all the free stimulous and ZIRP. The Russian war in the Ukraine is a much closer market to when the economy started tanking for devs.
Qualification is a very difficult problem, but I think everyone resents the characterization of "bad devs". Things like the Metaverse failure - apparently $70bn spent for no results - are primarily management failures. Like the Cybertruck, they succeeded 100% at building a product that the CEO wanted. The problem is that the CEO is basically the only person that wants that product.
There's also the thought nobody wants to examine: what if the consumer market total spend is kind of tapped out?
Everyone works with bad devs, and they're addicted to AI.
I think we'll see something counterintuitive happen where hiring picks up dramatically. Companies are willing to overspend and over-hire to automate everything away once and for all.