The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
bayramovanar.substack.com
The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
1–10 of 230 posts
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#2[deleted]
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#3[dead]
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#4From 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.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#5This 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.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#6From 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…
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.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#7> 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.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#8From 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…
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.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#9From 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…
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.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#10I 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.