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Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

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11–20 of 186 posts

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#11
I don't see how the data presented necessarily leads to anything remotely close that conclusion with any real confidence.

If anything the biggest H1B user - amazon - seems to have done negligible layoffs.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#12
post #8

The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons: 1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitiv…

Go ahead and hire exclusively cheap foreign engineers. See where it gets you.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#13
post #8

The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons: 1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitiv…

Go ahead and hire exclusively cheap foreign engineers. See where it gets you.

How about this: hire 25% less engineers in Europe but use the same wage as in US.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#14
post #8

The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons: 1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitiv…

> 3) The most expensive thing on the U.S. budget books for employers, employees and the government is social security and Medicare. Some countries simply deny their citizens and workers social security and access to welfare programs, which helps keep the cost of employing them down.

Holy cope batman!

A whole bunch of countries...just provide those things as government services too! You can employ whoever you want and not become a health insurer and the taxes that employee pays will fund a very large risk pool, what a concept!

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#15

Association is no proof of cause. How many h1b were issued the years before AI? Has there been an increase? My bet is: no.

This is also assuming that 100% of layoffs are American citizens. A huge chunk of those layoffs are H1B workers themselves.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#16

I think this interpretation of the data rests on a misunderstanding of how a firm conceives of headcount. You saw this a lot during Covid layoffs when the press tried to point out the contradiction between hiring X number of people at the same time as firing Y number of people. Wasn't the firm just staying in place? Yet, in fact, the firm had planned to hire Z people that year, a number much greater than X, greater s…

What you describe is certainly possible, but it's not what's happening. You can go on Blind, Fishbowl, any work related subreddit, etc. and hear the same story over and over and over - "My company replaced half my department with H1Bs or simply moved it to an offshore center in India, and then on the next earnings call announced that they had replaced all those jobs with AI". There's a reason why "AI = Actually Indians" is a meme everywhere on the internet, and it isn't racism, it's just people observing the reality around them.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#17
post #8

The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons: 1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitiv…

Go ahead and hire exclusively cheap foreign engineers. See where it gets you.

I think it depends on what you mean by "cheap foreign engineers." I am born and raised Canadian. I make a decent chunk less than my American counterparts, even when working for the same company. Not because they are necessarily better suited for the job, but literally because of the country I live in. The same is true for engineers all over the world.

So yes, companies absolutely can get cheap(er) labour and have the same, or at least similar, quality.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#18
post #8

The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons: 1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitiv…

No, the top "cost" problems with hiring Americans are America's out-of-control costs for education, health care, and housing. Those industries (or existing homeowners, for housing) are growing obscenely fat and rich. And really don't care if they destroy America's economic future as a side-effect.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#19
post #10

I think this interpretation of the data rests on a misunderstanding of how a firm conceives of headcount. You saw this a lot during Covid layoffs when the press tried to point out the contradiction between hiring X number of people at the same time as firing Y number of people. Wasn't the firm just staying in place? Yet, in fact, the firm had planned to hire Z people that year, a number much greater than X, greater s…

> It requires an accounting perspective on the inflows and outflows of an ongoing process and not just a small slice of data. Correct, but we don't have that information so we have to rely on a best guess. We're not dealing with code here where everything is known exactly. > Yet, the main question for actually measuring the (firm and investor expected) impact of AI is whether that rate of headcount growth has changed…

> Yes, this is something concrete that I can agree on. But how would you prove that given that we don't have access to that data?

Without that data you can't really draw any conclusion can you? For all we know companies are hiring a higher percentage of American workers now. All we know from the data shown is that companies are hiring some new H1-B holders and retaining a lot of existing H1-B holders.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#20
post #8

The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons: 1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitiv…

Go ahead and hire exclusively cheap foreign engineers. See where it gets you.

Customers keep buying slop, no loss in revenue, profits go up.
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