Hacker News Reader

"over-hired" seems like mostly copium of engineers being very afraid that their company will discard them like this and are trying to rationalize why they won't follow.

View on HN

There was obvious over-hiring in the couple years after COVID while interest rates were low. A lot of companies corrected and laid off staff when that stopped.

This was before LLMs writing code was a daily discussion topic. Blaming every layoff on AI is mostly people connecting trending headlines together.

I don't think it's copium because it doesn't really matter if it's due to AI or COVID-era ZIRP-infused overhiring. If your company hasn't done multiple rounds of layoffs since 2022, they're going to come.

It depends. Maybe constant escalations at customers with unmaintainable products comes first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com