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The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

libertas.software

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Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#101

Post by iridione »

The companies cutting headcount because of AI often just aren’t creative enough to expand their portfolio. There, I said it.

Today, even someone with minimal context can ship end-to-end prototypes. That means existing employees, the people with actual domain knowledge should be able to innovate faster than ever. Anthropic has shipped one of the best coding agents on the market and still has hundreds of engineering roles open.

High-agency people with company context and ideas within each company should be getting amplified right now, not laid off. Instead they're stuck figuring out how to "tokenmaxx" because leadership mandated it and they are forced to ship software no one will use in order to keep their jobs.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#102

Post by gentlemanJosh »

whazor wrote: post #85

A friend of mine works at big corporate. He is in meetings all the time and barely codes. For him a 20$ AI subscription is more than enough. I'm personally at a fintech startup and have a 100$ subscription. Our org is much leaner and its much faster to ship stuff. What used to be entire departments or teams can now be done by two or three people. Three people to ensure we share context and have a decent tram factor.

Its a little odd that you think these two examples are comparable. How many customers does his product have and how many does yours?

Of course a leaner team can ship faster. But your stakes are much lower. A production bug has less visibility and impact. Limited revenue means less stakeholders, and less opinions about how and what to do in a startup. Less customers means less customer support and feedback. The differences go on and on. I'm not sure you can attribute all of that to AI assistance.

Good luck with your fintech startup. I'm in that space too and its a bear.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#103

Post by sph »

haburka wrote: post #6

Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.

The AI slop articles about AI will continue until morale improves.

Flag and move on. Too bad the HN audience eats this shit up by the spoonful.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#104

Post by WarmWash »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #74
elktown wrote: post #59

I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.

> I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. It's funny to me that everyone talks about pandemic over-hiring, as if this hadn't been a thing for a decade before that. Like, when I started at FB in 2013, they…

AI aside, if we just look at other engineering disciplines in mature sectors, the future is not bright(er).

No fully paid golden cadillac benefits packages (for your dog too!), no twice daily uber eats comps, no $150k entry level, no unlimited PTO, no 6 months leave.

If you go to your uncles engineering department at the boiler company, these guy's engineering roles are about as pampered as the warehouse managers.

The upside is that it will cull those in it just for the money/lifestyle, and concentrate it down to those in it for the love of the craft.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#105

Post by aidenn0 »

elktown wrote: post #59

I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.

A lot of places did over-hire, but I'm suspicious that those places will successfully cut the fat rather than the muscle.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#106

Post by CuriouslyC »

hmmokidk wrote: post #37
eru wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.

I think there are risks: - AI pricing is variable, probably the cheapest it will ever be right now - AI produces a lot more shit for humans to review, and you will always need humans. If you don’t focus on keeping things simple you will probably play yourself unless you’re good at separating out blast radiuses. - I see a lot of super low quality work that doesn’t solve the problem but it’s like look that guy solved t…

AI is definitely not the cheapest it will ever be right now. The frontier is getting more expensive, but the same capability will get cheaper over time.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#107

Post by chank »

jdidrirjrjo wrote: post #57
chank wrote: post #53

Capitalists usually recoup gains rather than re-investing in people or working in new verticals. This gels with companies who would rather do anything else than grow.

We need stronger goverment and socialist revokution! Strong socialist goverment invest it to people! Socialist goverment would not starve people, torture, or just send them somwehere else (those examples do not count)

Wasn't really trying to take the socialist view. Merely stating what usually happens. Grow the business usually means make more money in the easiest way possible (cost cutting usually) rather than invest in future gains.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#108

Post by zozbot234 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #8

Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…

If you freeze the over-hiring, you'll still get people complaining about how there's no entry-level jobs anymore.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#109

Post by calebkaiser »

elktown wrote: post #97
zipy124 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's largely also down to management hierachy. Valve and Jane street for example both have semi-anarchist managment structures. In normal companies like GitLab, your worth as a manager and compensation is usually tied directly to the hierarchiecal structure. This incentivises you to create a project to hire a team and so on.

Yup, it's certainly a mix. I think the stock market incentive is most obvious for the usual VC-style "this must look presentable to the stock market before IPO"-spiel. After that I'd expect management/corp politics incentives to play a larger part indeed. But isn't tech a bit unique in how accepted this kind of self-serving corruption is at pretty much all levels? From the "This might require a few extra folks, but I…

My experience has been that this is not unique to tech, and is common in all large enough industries. I think it's just the natural emergence of reward hacking i.e. if you're an executive at Pepsi and your job is largely to increase the stock price, and you know that you can do something to change the way your numbers are presented such that Wall St will like it, you'll likely do it.

I do think tech certainly has its own flavor though, particularly because of how differently it is treated by investors.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#110

Post by arttaboi »

I don't think any company is cutting headcount because of AI. I think that's just what they say. The reality is that they're facing a cash crunch due to a bad economy. And if you state a cash crunch as the reason, your stock will fall or VCs will run away. But surprisingly, if you state AI as the reason for layoffs, your stock will rise or VCs will get excited. Same thing, just different clothes, and it works.
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