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Comment by GL26 | Hacker News Reader

Now is precisely not the time to cut jobs, but to invest in people's usage of AI. You have domain expertise, and you are going to burn tokens trying to replace people's jobs, but the AI revolution is not at all about people replacement, its about a change of paradigm. Watch them closely rehire thousands of new employees (who won't have the domain expertise) once they see that you actually need people to operate their company :)

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Oracle overcommitted on behalf of OpenAI, taking on debt to meet their obligations. Not that healthy companies are not also doing ridiculous layoffs, but in this case, Oracle does have to do some drastic things to get out of this tailspin.

Tailspin? Last quarter was their best quarter ever in terms of topline, and they cleared over $4B in profit.

Depends on which jobs; at a big enough scale you have people who are so deep in the hierarchy that their real connection to the domain is low.

Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.

That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.

> Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.

This definitely seems possible, but I've rarely seen it work. That being said, the follow on from any layoffs (reduced morale, more switchers) make it hard to be certain here.

What I don't get is why these companies are in all the rush to replace people with AI tools. Stuff is changing so fast that capital investment right now will just need to be reworked on after a few years when things settle down a little.

And that is not even considering how much it costs to run AI right now at scale AND retraining people to use the new tools AND possible disruption in existing workflows.

If I was running a large org I would actively try to slow down AI adoption in most areas until there are clear established solutions.

It's because these are public companies. Public companies are not in the business of developing good products and selling them to customers and having a sustainable long-term vision, they are in the business of selling their stock. Right now, thanks to a very effective marketing campaign driven by people who are invested in AI companies, the stock market wants to see stories about employees being replaced with AI, so that's what these companies are selling.

I easily do more than x 5 the workload I did in 2020. Replacing an employee with domain knowledge (only thing valuable now), with someone with zero domain knowledge is corporate suicide in 2026.

However, if you are oracle sending out consultants with zero domain knowledge around to help.... I would rather just use claude.

What type of work are we talking about here?

Generating PRs that can’t be tested or deployed. My team has collected a whole pile!

Ask AI to test and deploy them. /s

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