471–480 of 1001 posts
Obviously AI is just a excuse
I'm going to start calling these "Canary" moments. Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario: A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at…
"A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI" That is one possible interpretation, though I don't think it's supported by any facts. A competing explanation: companies are spending a ton of money on AI in search of efficiency, and then laying people off in order to offset these investments. That's certainly what's been happening at Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.
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So you suggest they give out free money to people they don't need? If you believe it negatively impacts Cloudflare, feel free to start a competing company and hire all those; it's free market after all, anyone can raise money if you can show there is any point in your vision. What's funny is software guys have forever automated jobs of others. Remember? Automating e-commerce logistics? Automating taxis? Automating va…
Correct. The laid off staff can now build a startup with the skills they have learned at Cloudflare and compete. AI exists now and there are no more excuses for them.
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In Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)
Yes, and that makes working for a Swedish company so much better. You know you can’t just be shown the door at any moment after years of service and you get a lot of peace of mind which is worth more than the inflated salaries in the US. There is still a way to get rid of people, of course, but that goes a little like the Japanese do: just don’t give any important work to the person, or give them a bad performance re…
If anything, AI makes each employee much more valuable because they can be much more productive and most big companies always have stuff that needs doing and opportunities for growth. So it's a sort of Jevons Paradox[1] situation but where human labour is the resource.
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Employees cost money. The ZIRP free-money era has ended. Companies have been laying off tech people for the last few years. Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
You couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.
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Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.
Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership. > noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human…
Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.
Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.
Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.
It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.
Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.
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At my last job, within our org, the director had 3 staff engineers building the same, but competing AI tool. At the last all hands other teams announced their own similar AI engineer productivity tools. I low-key regret now sticking around long enough to get a layoff package.
I suppose you meant 'not' not 'now' yeah?
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When someone has already demonstrated they can do the work, what additional value do you think them getting a degree will bring to a company?
Sometimes the degree is needed in order for the company to be allowed to pay him over a specific amount/scale.