alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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I’ve never worked anywhere where lack of work or projects was the bottleneck. Time, headcount, and budget were always the constraints.
Even in cost centers like IT or ops, there’s usually an endless backlog of work, technical debt, support requests, and improvements that never get prioritized because resources are limited.
> 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.
Eh, are they doing that though?
Anecdotally, firing people “on the bench” isn't whats happening.
Read the tweets. Listen to people still working at these big corps. They are gutting teams and pushing more work onto people because they believe they can be more productive, not because they are.
Lets that sink in.
People are being made redundant on the basis that leadership believes that in the future they will have an over capacity and theyre cutting early to avoid the bench scenario.
It is speculative.
What this article is arguing, is that, that is stupid.
If, in the future, you need to spin up new initiatives, youve screwed yourself by disposing of your excess capacity in the magical hope that your current capacity will magically increase itself by … spending more money on tokens.
Its just nonsense.
AI is just an excuse for poor historical decisions and unfortunate global economic conditions.
The “cuts due to AI” will be real. There will be people sitting idle as the models improve and people learn to use them better.
… but right now?
they're not. Im not. My friends arent. My former work mates arent. The people left at these companies arent. The people being cut werent (except perhaps, at meta)
Its stock price hype theatre.
If you're increasing productivity, you should be doing more and growing, yes? If you're cutting payroll costs and trying to have the same level of capacity...your business sucks and you deserve your stock tanking.
Layoffs are a strong signal that a business is not investing in growth and is just trying to wring more profit from the same thing. If investors were rational, they'd walk away.
Maybe replacing the expensive C-suite with an LLM would help make better, growth-oriented decisions.
This sounds like an attempt to rationalize the fact that your business isn't that effective, otherwise adding more people would result in making more money.
> It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy
I've never worked at any company where there was any limit to the work to be done. Sales people don't give a shit what your product can do, only what they can sell, and they never sleep.