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Comment by pir8life4me | Hacker News Reader

Big company layoffs are probably more aligned with offshoring than AI, but they'll never admit it.

Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?

Last time I checked AI isn't killing jobs if the other news is to be believed.

OP here, and I agree it's probably not AI directly and more of dealing with the post Covid overhiring, and CAPEX for AI investments.

Enterprise adoption is definitely not happening as fast as the AI proponents (startups, frontier labs, big tech) would like people to believe (probably the reason why frontier labs are going the FDE/consulting path). So it's unlikely that the impact on productivity is enough to produce the alleged impact.

It's a combination of Covid over hiring, CapEx for AI hardware, AND you don't need as many software developers anymore per product.

I doubt very much that COVID over-hiring has any relevance today.

COVID is now ancient history and there have already been several years of big layoffs when every time I hear the attempt of explaining them through COVID over-hiring.

That may have been right a couple of years ago, but since then every company that had over-hired must have already disposed of the surplus.

The mad rush and overhiring didn't stop immediately after Covid. I know of cases where experienced software engineers were getting picked up by big tech with huge increments as late as end of 2023.

My impression is that the current trend for layoffs only really began around early 2025. For reference, the layoffs during the dotcom bubble I was told took around 2 years to plateau

We’re going to be well into the Diamond Age before people stop attributing layoffs to ‘Covid overhiring.’

Big tech employee counts are still nearly 2x higher now than 2019.

And big tech market cap is 5x what it was in 2019, yes. I’m not hearing wild overhiring in these numbers, quite the opposite.

In 2019 I bet they were more than 2x what they were in 2012.

So then why aren't bad decision making execs being let go?

If they can't forecast demand or headcount they should be replaced by confident sounding AI.

It certainly is killing jobs in agency work, plenty of stuff that used to be done by content teams like translations or image assets, now are 100% AI generated.

Also delivery teams have been decreased, as now there is more that can be done with less folks.

Which started with move to cloud, focus on SaaS ready made products instead of custom development, serverless instead of microservices, low code/no code tooling, and now AI agents for SaaS product integrations.

This is the usual meme only happens when it comes to me kind of thing.

The lady in the article was a $500k/yr exec, not an illustrator.

Neither was her husband iirc.

Layoffs are usually across teams not "illustrators and translators".

AI isn't killing jobs.

Offshoring is passé. If you want to give out a set of written instructions, get back something which literally meets the spec but is otherwise inadequate, and babysit overseeing trying to get the results you actually wanted, you can feed it to an LLM for a lot less a lot quicker.

Zuck has spent more than 8 billion on the metaverse

By literal order of magnitude

How much? I think I got 8 bill from AI so ....

> Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?

I believe that was an investment into controlling the next platform, so what happened on iOS with could never happen to them again.

What's far crazier and more applicable to the current balance sheet is the $14.3B acqui-hire of Alexandr Wang. But, what do I know?

Offshore engineers tend to require just as much micromanagement and perfect clarification as an LLM, so if anything I would expect the demand for offshore engineers to fall much faster than for local talent.

That's quite the interesting assumption. As an "offshore" engineer, I have worked with hundreds of US engineers and none of them were significantly more competent than me if they were. No micromanagement required.

Bad offshore engineering teams may need that. The other teams that work as you should you just don't hear about.

I find it more similar to LLM use and prompting style, I’ve taken many teams that Product Managers and non technical founders considered to be bad, and spoke a more universal programming and system architecture language with clearer scope and continuity of tasks to unlock their capabilities

Or my personal favorite - offshore teams being confidently wrong after having asked AI

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