It makes no sense to do broad layoffs during sweeping technical change that affects you, your customers and your competitors all at once. Makes way more sense to cling to your best people and re-train them in order to preserve your soul and institutional knowledge. I think deep layoffs + regret as opposed to re-training is actually uniquely American culturally and not a thing elsewhere.

Yeah - most of the layoffs were really just pointing to AI but it had nothing to do with it - it was all for a stock bump, which worked every time that I saw. Unfortunately its a short term gain and a bad look when people realize that's what it was. Outside of big tech companies that did this, I see most other companies very carefully dipping their toes in AI and not doing broad layoffs. At most, slower new hires.

"75% of AI projects fail to deliver promised ROI"

I went to high school with someone who is almost completely non-technical, but was a business major. The latest updates I see on Linkedin, is that he now an 'expert AI engineer' and just got hired at a startup.

I hope these kinds of people get pushed out of all of these positions when companies finally see it's a waste of money and resorces.