They and their assets could safely be liquidated, and placed under management by it.

The only thing that protects them from this is the social contract. If AI unravels the social contract for the rest of us, why should they survive unimpacted?

If this sounds cruel or unfair - remember that are always free to retain themselves to do a useful job.

That's hardly true. Nearly all companies are heavily resource constrained. They have limited capital, limited manpower, and limited expertise. There are things they would love to be working on, which they know would be immensely beneficial, but just are not in a position to tackle those challenges at the moment. Even with speculative investment, you're still limited to what you can convince someone else will be successful given your current situation.

Yes there exist some massive companies who do have essentially unlimited access to capital, and they can in theory engage in any endeavor with a sufficiently high ROI, although even then in practice they don't. Projects get canned because of office politics or to make quarterly figures look good.

You go to just about any company in the world and ask just about any employee "is what you are currently working on the thing that this company needs done the most" the answer will be just about universally "No!"

I feel like from about 1996-2012 was the golden years, everything got corporatized as the MBAs flooded in around 2013.

I’m talking about early Google, Netscape, early Facebook, Sun Microsystems, flurry of Web 2.0 companies etc

I view these types of articles as 2025’s version of the 2003 article below, which was very big news in its day.

Outsourcing didn’t cause all American programming jobs to go away but it did raise the bar. Expect the bar for “professional programmer” to go higher still. And expect to level up your skills if you haven’t already.

On the flip side, the number of amateur programmers is likely to increase a lot with improved tooling.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/

From what I’ve heard cream of the crop grads in hot fields are still getting huge offers and getting snapped up by the big names as well as smaller firms.

Some of those must be real positions doing promising work.

I've been feeling like this has been coming long before AI doomsayers were a thing.

The problem is that it's surprisingly difficult to judge candidates from the interview process, so the expectation value of a new hire has a lot of uncertainty. And while degrees from good schools are a good indicator, tech jobs perhaps unlike medical or legal fields, for example, are not the end all be all for success. It's entirely possible to be smart and self motivated and taught.

I would suggest 3 other forces:

- saturation: we don’t have any legacy fields left that aren’t yet digitized. If you I go from encyclopedia -> search engine or taxi -> uber you have a first mover green field market

- dominance games: VCs want scale, and scale is difficult with niche markets. Yet there are innovations there, but who cares? A new shitcoin has the potential to scale quickly, whereas startups in even energy seems to be a downer for them

- no manufacturing: long iteration cycles on anything that needs hardware. Plus, lower margins, and the Chinese will sell cheap knockoffs anyway if you’re successful, so bigger risk. Thus, more shitcoin and AI wrappers.

This, and it’s not getting enough attention.

Big Tech hasn’t had ideas other than acquisitions for decades. Startups aren’t inventing new things, just honing existing tech into an acquirable moat. Their big moonshots have failed one by one, with their two remaining ones - AI (current) and Quantum (next) - on their last legs of patience with shareholders. NFTs, Crypto, the “Metaverse”, Big Data, the Cloud, all of these have had varying degrees of initial success but now see scrutiny in the face of dwindling funds and rising costs, which is forcing Big Tech to try and adapt to being mature entities rather than startups.

It extends from B2B into the B2C realm as well. Yearly refreshes are increasingly underwhelming as components stop scaling like they did in the past, bumping up against physical limitations of materials that can’t be overcome without substantial R&D. R&D that they don’t want to pay for, because it’s high risk and high reward (a scenario tech isn’t really used to anymore). Nobody’s swinging for the fences, just incrementing very slowly over time until someone else does the heavy lifting who they can poach in an acquisition.

It’s bad, ya’ll.

Note how often product managers or engineering managers appear in layoffs.

Just happened to a neighbor.

Ignore all the talk about 'the flattening' . middle management is back with a vengeance, bigger than ever, at meta and airbnb.

A lot of the AI purging is a dressing up the ridiculous over hiring at these big companies and anticipating the economic malaise to come. This fall is going to be a bloodbath.

Thing is there are plenty of useless managers. There are also useless ICs and useless C-suite execs. GenAI might replace them all.

A good middle manager (any manager really) needs to have a degree of empathy to keep people motivated. They need to read beyond the status updates to understand what’s actually happening.

You can easily replace junior engineers with genAI because most of that role was automated training the models from all the stuff junior engineers read.

It’s going to be a disaster if you think posting status updates to a glorified slack bot is going to give you the same outcomes as a good manager who knows how to manage humans.

The big growth era is over. We’re entering an era of conglomerates and bullshit government back scratching. The big tech companies are going to be like 1960’s ITT, FMC, etc.