alt Hacker NewsCutting 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-tunes currently.
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we're not taking into consideration the new bottleneck: product growth. imo it's the growth/expansion of the product that creates new work and opportunities for more work. at the moment, product growth is human-driven--because it's a risk to take a product in any direction, and whoever makes it has to bear the full responsibility. ideas that cause product growth are still generated by humans (and rightly so), perhaps also augmented by ai.
there's also what the market is ready for. we've said that some products failed because they were ahead of their time. it's even more true now where the power of ai, ai productivity, etc could take the product far beyond the markets expectation. what does that lead to? the deliberate slow rate of growth means power/potentials have to be controlled somewhat. so even without hiring, if ai is adopted as a first-class tool within the organization, there will be surplus resources that need to be shed somehow.
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.
Because they aren't getting cut cause of AI. They are getting cut cause of the uncertainty re: future revenue streams AI is bringing. These layoffs are driven by fear and leadership lacking any vision for how the post AI world looks for their company. Their solution is to tighten the belts, which of course opens the window further for the AI companies to actually write software and make them obsolete.
If you freeze the over-hiring, you'll still get people complaining about how there's no entry-level jobs anymore.
I disagree. Lots of people are so laser focussed at only the close to the code aspects of programming they are unable to leverage the enormous increase in scope it can offer them.
There is absolutely room for head count reduction while companies restructure around this.
> Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them!
You can't put "undocumented knowledge" into a spreadsheet.
The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required.
You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be.
It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy, so eventually when there are enough of those people on bench they have to find something else.