Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

libertas.software

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 218 posts

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

#121

Post by bluGill »

redwall_hp wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In consulting you don't make magically customers out of nowhere, and there is a limited pool of customers to feed from.

Again, shortsighted. There's no reason a business has to have a single product. If you run out of customers for cars, you make HVAC and front end loaders. A lot of companies simply have no direction and aren't looking to build new products. They had a success, rotated in some myopic execs, flipped into rent-seeking mode and are trying to wring more cash out of the same progressive enshittified product.

That dilutes your experience and risks losing focus on the customers you already know how to serve well and in turn can destroy your company.

It works for some it fails for others.

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

#122

Post by titanomachy »

WarmWash wrote: post #104
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Th…

> 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.

Is that what you see at your uncle's boiler company? People who are truly in it "for the love of the craft"?

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

#123

Post by pj_mukh »

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.

And moreover,

The headline is backwards, the companies cutting headcount for AI have already lost, that's why they're cutting. Most of these companies are losing market share or are in dying markets and need to cut headcount. They're just blaming AI because it's convenient and forward-looking.

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

#124

Post by zozbot234 »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #68
valvar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t inference just keep getting better and cheaper as hardware and algorithms improve?

The typical playbook for a VC funded startup is to race to a monopoly where the company can have higher margins. Prices continuing to go down for the consumer over time would require competition to stay high in the long term, and even then it’s not clear if even current prices are profitable.

The current level of AI has plenty of inherent competition from local models. In the long term, most of the profit will probably be from very smart models that run at something closer to datacenter scale over long inference loops - where local inference can't do much and even third-party inference/small neoclouds will be severely challenged. That is a very natural "moat" and has natural cross-efficiencies with AI model training, which requires a similar scale.

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

#125

Post by gruez »

titanomachy wrote: post #122
WarmWash wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

> 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. Is that what you see at your uncle's boiler company? People who are truly in it "for the love of the craft"?

Yeah wtf? If programming becomes a generic white collar job, it's not really accurate to characterize the people as "those in it for the love of the craft". After all, do you think the average accountant or analyst is doing it "for the love of the craft"?

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

#126

Post by zipy124 »

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…

I don't think it's that unique but Engineering type people might be more optimisation minded and see total comp as something to optimise.

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

#127

Post by rimeice »

> It is the knowledge they carry. How the business actually operates. Where the edge cases live. Why certain decisions get made the way they do. What customers really mean when they complain about a specific issue. The context that never makes it into a process document because it does not need to — because the right person already knows.

I get this is about the immediate firing of people and losing knowledge quickly but there’s no reason this this knowledge can’t be captured actively and passively over the next year or so now there’s a massive incentive to do so. In fact using AI to capture this knowledge is a huge opportunity tons of startups are working on.

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

#128

Post by elktown »

calebkaiser wrote: post #109
elktown wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do think there's a certain level of vagueness and lack of rigor that permeate throughout (software) tech that enables self-serving to a greater extent than usual. I agree though that it's to be expected in most corps at a certain level where that vagueness also starts to appear.

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

#129

Post by spamizbad »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #119
yojo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: 1) Unlimited PTO is a scam. Ask anyone who ever got paid out six weeks salary when they changed jobs. 2) “the craft” is doing some heavy lifting here. I happen to enjoy AI-assisted dev, but it is nothing like the work that drew me to the industry. Otherwise agreed on all counts.

Unlimited PTO works great for someone like me who regularly takes half day and full day PTO every quarter for various commitments/life stuff. But I’m also a guy and I have no problem asserting myself/spending my benefits. People who are a little less comfortable with that end up just parking on it and would do a lot better if they were given a set number of PTO days. The ambiguity hurts them in the same way not havin…

You have it backwards. You’d benefit tremendously from fixed PTO that pays out because you’re taking fewer than 10 days a year. Its biggest benefactors are low-seniority employees who take 20-30 days annually.

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

#130

Post by elktown »

gruez wrote: post #115
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.

>which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve. Seems questionable to compare the valuation of a public company vs a private one, with the latter being marked to market rarely, if ever.

This was in relation to employee count, not valuation.
Post reply on HN