Comment by 1970-01-01
Comment by 1970-01-01 4 days ago
AI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in every recession.
Comment by 1970-01-01 4 days ago
AI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in every recession.
Many of these announcements are bluffs as many users here have pointed out. But real LLM-driven layoffs do happen, and from what I have anecdotally seen, they follow a pattern: leadership assumes the new LLM service will make human workers redundant. They then make cuts before the evidence is in. What this means is that today, there are many LLM service deployments that replaced humans while their actual impact remains a mystery. Though it won't be a mystery to leadership forever.
One example client that shouldn't dox me: Odom Corporation, a beverage distributor. They purchased an LLM-driven purchasing solution and immediately laid off their entire purchasing team, save for a few members who exist on the periphery. A follow-up with them showed that the system was ordering summer beverages coming into the winter (among many other bad purchasing decisions) and causing a dramatic increase in unsold inventory. Since they believe that LLMs will exponentially improve, they're dismissing it as a one-off because this year's models "will be so much better". We attempted to advise differently, but stakeholders got extremely emotional at even small suggestions that there was a fundamental problem. Good luck to them.
I think the execs are either using it as an excuse to reduce opex to boost share prices or they're actually buying into this delusion that the productivity improvements are right around the corner. Though I don't really buy into that second option since any reasonably intelligent person would wait to see concrete evidence of said improvements before crippling your company based on some hope.
I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs).
Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.
It's also great at writing programs that kind-of, sort-of mostly work, just like human programmers: https://xkcd.com/2030/
I think AI is the scapegoat for the massive overhiring that happened in 2021 and 2022. These corporations kept thinking that the nearly-interest-free loans were going to keep on going forever, and since no one really knows how to grow a business they spent the money the only way they know how: hiring more people. It didn't really matter if they were filling jobs that were "necessary", just as long as they were filled.
Now, this is extremely short-sighted and frankly it makes me question the intelligence of these BigCos' executives, because unless they're utterly incompetent at this whole "business" and "living on the planet earth" thing they should have realized that the economy fluctuates and this infinite free money wouldn't last.
Now that AI is around, these companies finally have a way to do these layoffs while not looking quite as idiotic.
I have noticed this while working in a startup, how efficiency gains impacted work in the last 3 months with better coding models coming in. If you have someone senior that is effective at using these tools and can own the outputs and be capable of correcting things that are sloppy, you are immensely more valuable than 2-3 more developers in the same area of work. It's actually faster to empower fewer people than try to have 3 fast guys where there would be coordination overhead, which would become a bottleneck and bring down a lot of the efficiency gains. A good full stack engineer who can work with these tools at speed with caution is more valuable similarly as it requires less coordination. 3 junior devs shipping 90% good code and 10% slop would make the senior who is reviewing everything the bottleneck.
To help us use your anecdote, could you tell us what product area is your startup is working in?
AI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management. Probably displacing some of those jobs.