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Comment by prymitive | Hacker News Reader

Obviously AI is just a excuse

The level of group think here is unbelievable. Any opinion other than this is down voted immediately. A whole page of people bargaining and not wanting to face reality.

At my work, our healthcare plan renewed May 1st. We have great insurance. The CEO told us that the healthcare premiums just went up 50% so enjoy this year because it is going to be less great next year.

It doesn't matter how many people have a type of religious faith that this has nothing to do with AI and is all posturing.

The reality is AI is going to get cheaper in the future and I am just going to keep getting more expensive as an employee as we circle the drain in this health care and debt death spiral that everyone is also in complete denial of with no political will to do anything about.

S&P 500 is at an all time high. The real layoffs haven't even started yet.

Yeah, I just don't understand the thinking here on HN anymore. (My account is 15 years old)

It was clear to me even before ChatGPT arrived that software was eventually going to go the same way agriculture went. We will simply need fewer people to do the job than before.

I don't buy that AI will completely automate away all software engineering. I think if you're not in the top ~40% skill wise, you're in serious trouble and have a bleak future.

I think we're probably past peak employment for software engineers, but I'd also be surprised if these layoffs were directly related to Cloudflare thinking they can replace their engineering teams with AI agents.

Ranking software engineers is famously hard. What does "top 40%" even mean ? Skills/Experiences/Productivity in that sector are not some Gaussian Distribution of trivially-measurable output. But even if measurable, they're not gaussian distributed for sure. My mum won't make a software engineer anyone would hire no matter how much AI you gave her to assist. If you fire all your developer staff other than the "10x-ers" who with AI assistance have gamed your metrics^W^W^Wboosted their skills to become 100x-ers then you rip the floor from your company; noone to question or review the golden code, 100% trust into something you barely understand and cannot question, and you pay for it. Maybe little now while you're being fixed on. Once AI operators try to get their "money back", there's the sucking sound of a few trillion moving from AI users to ... somewhere. Not your share price, though.

AI is a great tool. Including for software engineers to train with and learn new skills, find new application areas, build new products. It's not doing it justice to call it "autocomplete on steroids". If these five "100x-ers" leave a year in to found their own company, not the least because they've become aware of the size of the mess, then good luck swinging your product strategy to "hey AI, sell this product I'm going to tell you to build".

Eh... Are you claiming the dollar inflation is caused by AI?

Or rather, are you claiming it's caused by productivity gains from AI?

It’s not like this is a factory floor where you process something coming in and AI suddenly makes the process more efficient and people are idle. Every team in tech world has infinite backlog, you don’t fire 20% the minute someone manages to close a few tickets.

why not? isn't the implication of your point that companies should just hire infinitely so long as there's work to be done?

Companies never want to reduce productivity unless they need to cut spending or increase profits. In other words, if AI increases productivity that’s a direct win they can use to beat their competitors. You can’t spend money you don’t have, but you want to spend the money you do have as point at there work to do, which there always is.

> unless they need to cut spending or increase profits

yes, so basically always? the situations where companies don't want to do this are very rare.

I understand your broader point that doubling down on productive things is useful. But there's no limiting principle to that idea.

The obvious reality is that businesses are trying to find a sweet spot between expenses and productivity. It's not always the case that slashing spending is worth it. But it's equally naive to act like being able to do more with less shouldn't make you want... less

> Every team in tech world has infinite backlog

I have non-tech friends who struggle to understand this, because they literally clear their entire backlog of work every single day they're at work.

then they basically don't do knowledge work

Some of them yeah, they do jobs involving physical work, but some of them are office works — their jobs/companies are just set up so that they've got a defined set of tasks/responsibilities, and they're able to complete them all every day. (Or some/most days.)

They find the idea of an infinite task queue horrifying.

Many CxO made a decision to spend $$$$ on AI; that's their bet and they're are adamant about it. Money should come from somewhere and layoffs is the easiest way to free some budget in a software company. Was it a good bet only time will tell.

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