At least within my circle, that’s not really the case. Instead, what I’m seeing is more of a hiring freeze, with the budget being used to empower existing employees through AI. Which I think is a more reasonable take.
Instead you can do layoff by attrition, you stop hiring, and you don't backfill seats, as people naturally leave or get pip-ed, the team shrink, you don't rehire into the position, and in a year or two, you cut down by 10%.
Also, I wouldn't trivialize a freeze in hiring growth, it means to get a job you have to wait for someone to retire, and also wait for people looking for jobs with more experience as they're more likely to fill the roll to also retire. Basically there's now way more demand for jobs than hiring, so that will drive compensation down for those currently employed.
We can't hire or give anyone raises, but we will expect you to be more productive via throwing money into the slop void.
i see your point and i want to tell you it's pretty much the same with cloud computing, which is so much more expensive than running your own hardware... and yet nobody's really questioning cloud computing (except the oxide people, but they're still tiny)
the company i work for could probably spent half its yearly cloud bill in hardware and be fine for 3-5 years.
guess who discovered the same thing and booted google cloud off their books? dhh
that guy is simply enlightened.