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Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

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Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#21

Post by whobre »

nis0s wrote: 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…

The thing is: it’s nothing new. In early 2000s there was a wave of outsourcing that caused panic in the US. Back then, the difference in salaries was even higher than nowadays. In some cases it worked out well for the employers, but in many cases it did not for various reasons.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#22

Post by agentcoops »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #16
agentcoops wrote: post #7

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 India…

I’m not describing what’s happening right now — I’m saying the data shown in the article is insufficient to ground what it claims. The testimony you mention better supports the argument, but also is insufficient to show that this shift to H1-B is not in addition to a reduction of overall projected headcount due to AI.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#23

Post by steveBK123 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #9

You also need to consider the impact of offshoring. Accenture's layoffs of 11,000 workers is listed in the chart, but a few days earlier they announced they were opening a new campus in India and hiring 12,000.

Corporate America really thinks we are that stupid

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#24

Post by huijzer »

rv3392 wrote: post #19
huijzer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Without that data you can't really draw any conclusion can you?

We're not dealing with software here. It's not black and white. We can try to make best guesses and then try to support it by evidence or reject it by evidence. A theory that is presented is that H1-B appear to replace US workers, but you are encouraged to provide another theory by using evidence.

> 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.

And why do you think that's not suitable evidence for the given theory? Another possible point of data that seems to point in the same direction could be the US Employment-Population Ratio, which, apart from some ups and downs, seems to have been steadily going down since 2000 [1]. More specifically, California's unemployment rate seems to go up since 2021 [2]. But these two data sources are way more broad than just big tech of course.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO

[2]: https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/top-statistics.html

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#25

Post by dzonga »

worrying about H1B is looking at the wrong metric. Most companies are past H1B - the game is now offshore stuff.

Look at the data: e.g a company like Rippling where a good portion of Software engineering jobs are in India. then Senior / Staff Roles are in the US. Most scale ups startups have similar dynamics. It could be India or Eastern Europe.

That's the A.I eating software jobs.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#28

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

XorNot wrote: post #14
nis0s wrote: 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…

Came in to say this.

The level of confidence my fellow Americans have in their understanding of the rest of the world without knowing anything about the rest of the world is always hilarious to watch.

Even India has a vast network of completely free government provided healthcare. Of course, the quality leaves a lot to be desired but bit beats walking into the ER to receive basic care and bankruptcies due to medical debt, which must be a uniquely American phenomenon.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#30

Post by pj_mukh »

I don’t know about people’s anecdata but this data does not support the claim it makes.

Skills aren’t interchangeable and there is no universal hiring pool called “IT” under which you can hire anyone with an engineering degree and so an H1B swap becomes the only answer.

There are a large number of pools of specializations that fall into and out of favor with time, with people transitioning between them (as they should!). AI has fallen into favor and some frontend/backend jobs have fallen out. Is this what this data shows? Maybe? We’d never know.

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