101–110 of 156 posts
AI is taking jobs but for a different reason. Big Tech is in an AI race so they will shrink their staff or move jobs to India as much as possible to free capital for GPU datacenters. To hell with the consequences. Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle are even issuing almost $60 billions in bonds. Unheard of.
I was under the impression Big Tech is cutting jobs across the board, all regions.
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> the biggest companies despite profits are laying off large amounts of people. Hi is the need for employees related to profit?
The decision to layoff has side effects beyond net income on a balance sheet.
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Security products and practitioners are the classic snake oil salesmen. They are actually sales and marketing roles for help closing deals by emphasizing some security aspect. True security comes from general IT practices followed by engineers themselves.
I'm a bit amazed you consistently get downvoted while you seem to speak the truth. So much gray in your comments.
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The decision to layoff has side effects beyond net income on a balance sheet.
What's your point? If there's no work for 10k people to do, should companies just continue employing them to do... nothing?
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I think that's an over-simplistic view - at the moment there are many, many software engineers hired by companies who are betting on AI being madly profitable. If those expectations change, we could see more cascading layoffs, which will mean those engineers will go looking at more traditional places like banks, which means they'll stop hiring, which means it'll be harder to someone who is looking for a new job to fi…
True, besides actual software engineering is small part of overall IT/computer related work. There are far more analysts, managers(project, program, IT, agile etc), QA, operations and so on. So engineers who employers think are capable of leveraging AI and do 20 s/w engineer worth of work with 5 people will remain in demand for time being. Even without outright layoffs one can see how fast leverage of average IT engi…
Quality of those graduates is not always great. A talented and passionate SWE will always make a good living.
I've been getting lots of value out of AI coding tools; especially in the last few months. My assessment is that this will lead to more work to do, not less. It's not a zero sum game. More of what I do is baby sitting AIs. But together we do more than me with my team before. It will reflect in my hiring decisions as well. I want people that can do this responsibly (are able to tell good from bad code, are able to thi…
to play devils advocate when a company is faced with increasing pnl ( reducing headcount) or trying new ideas why won't they take the former since it is guaranteed
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What's your point? If there's no work for 10k people to do, should companies just continue employing them to do... nothing?
One of SV's strengths is cutting your highly qualified and experienced staff loose to go do something else.
Nobody seems to want to answer the question so I assume nobody wants to confront that a company isn't the bad guy when it fires people it doesn't need. And, if it turns out it did need them, the company will suffer. Usually that doesn't happen though and so I tend to trust that these companies understand their business needs more than I do.
It sucks when people lose their jobs but if there's no job at their company for them anymore, their employer isn't a charity. Just like if a company could no longer afford to pay they employees, the employees shouldn't hang around and work for nothing. You might as well be demonizing people who file for divorce for making their partner single.
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One of SV's strengths is cutting your highly qualified and experienced staff loose to go do something else.
Is there something the the SV charter that says companies operating there must do that? Nobody seems to want to answer the question so I assume nobody wants to confront that a company isn't the bad guy when it fires people it doesn't need. And, if it turns out it did need them, the company will suffer. Usually that doesn't happen though and so I tend to trust that these companies understand their business needs more…
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"Slop" suggests that the only difference is in quality, but the definition of engineer says nothing of quality. Perhaps you might consider using an LLM to build a system that creates a response that is more coherent?
> the definition of engineer says nothing of quality The definition you used makes someone who maintain a twitter account or use a coffee machine an "engineer"... everyone is an engineer by that definition really
And yes, someone who builds a system to generate Twitter content or maintains a coffee machine are definitely engineers.
Professional engineering societies don't like that fact and often try to usurp the term for their own financial gain, but that's not how English works. Definitions derive from use, not what a small group of people wish were so, and the record that keeps track of use is abundantly clear how the word is most commonly used.
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The decision to layoff has side effects beyond net income on a balance sheet.
What's your point? If there's no work for 10k people to do, should companies just continue employing them to do... nothing?
Then your company has a reputation for being unreliable for stable employment and people that can pick where they want to go will go else where. It also kills morale and remaining high performers will go somewhere else. Now the company laying off is stuck with low performers that don't have other options.