alt Hacker NewsAgreed. Consider that we're in a big tech bubble right now (AI) and have been for at least a couple years. And yet tech layoffs have been way up, and hiring way down. Part of that that could be attributable to 174, but there are other issues that contribute more. One would be that there are vanishingly few people with actual experience in this narrow part of AI (LLMs) - I know people working in AI that have been laid off in the last couple of years because they were in the wrong area of AI (vision & CNNs). Secondly, it turns out that not that many people are needed to work on this stuff (mostly concentrated in large companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft & Amazon). And thirdly, folks in the C suite became convinced that AI is going to replace software engineers so they've quite hiring them.
> And thirdly, folks in the C suite became convinced that AI is going to replace software engineers so they've quite hiring them.
I think this is the real reason for much of the layoffs.
The other reason is simply that the market isn't punishing layoffs. You get rewarded as a CEO for laying off employees and saying "It's because AI makes them obsolete"