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Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

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Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

#11
Doesn't pass the smell test as someone who has been on boards that made these decisions.

This would be like saying cloud spend was circular because F1000 tech companies represent the majority of cloud spend from a revenue perspective, but tend to sell or partner with those same organizations. For example, AWS and Zscaler, or GCP and Broadcom.

Reality is, a lot of product lines were formed or overhired with little-to-no business justification during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Most of us are now cleaning shop and axing those product lines and features that cannot be attached to tangible revenue generation. Inevitably this leads to ICs getting axed.

If you want to blame someone, blame EMs, PMs, Principal SWEs, and VPs who decided to launch product lines and features for their resume instead of for business justification. (Edit: that said, BeFlatXIII is right that we probably won't have hired most people if this didn't happen at all)

Additionally, comp expectations just got too high - most new grads are not worth $150k-200k TC (some absolutely are though)

Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

#16

While there are points here that I agree with, I do not agree with the premise that they are firing people to fund AI. Funding of AI (keyword funding, not usage) I would say is an adjacent relation, but not the reason people are being let go. I think it's a combination of factors including: - Overhiring in the past, most of these companies were/are still employing way above the pre-pandemic numbers when overhiring wa…

Elon wrote "The Mythical Man Month" 21thC edition..

Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

#17

The "spending money on each other" part is untrue. It is mostly going in one direction, towards Nvidia, and that's the reason they crossed $5 Trillion in market cap recently.

Also Broadcom - most enterprises with significant ML compute needs are working building their own custom ASICs, and it's Broadcom that owns the entire custom market.

Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

#18
I remember watching the firings of people right before the dot com bubble burst. Instead of pay employee's, companies thought they could double down and started putting MORE money into vaporware companies that eventually folded up and went bankrupt. I'm guessing were almost to that last stage again...

Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

#19

The "spending money on each other" part is untrue. It is mostly going in one direction, towards Nvidia, and that's the reason they crossed $5 Trillion in market cap recently.

I found John Gruber's roundup of tech company profits (not revenue) interesting: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/30/apple-q4-result...

- Google (a.k.a. Alphabet): $35B

- Microsoft: $27.7B

- Apple: $27.5B

- Nvidia: $26.4B

- Amazon: $21.5B

Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

#20

The "spending money on each other" part is untrue. It is mostly going in one direction, towards Nvidia, and that's the reason they crossed $5 Trillion in market cap recently.

Then Nvidia is turning around and investing back in the AI companies so they can in turn buy Nvidia chips...
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