But the point about there being nothing new in the article still stands.
ETA: this is sometimes (though not always) very different for a mature company than an early stage startup.
Businesses are not magically efficient
Many businesses are not bottlenecked by processes that are computer based.
For example, looking through meta data in a SQL environment that you didn't know existed to troubleshoot an issue. And a million other things. The odds of any employee not knowing everything are very good, even when humanity as a whole had already discovered that thing.
Humans are accountable and act accordingly, models are not.
- AI pricing is variable, probably the cheapest it will ever be right now
- AI produces a lot more shit for humans to review, and you will always need humans. If you don’t focus on keeping things simple you will probably play yourself unless you’re good at separating out blast radiuses.
- I see a lot of super low quality work that doesn’t solve the problem but it’s like look that guy solved the problem in one day! Promote him! Everyone is happy except for the end users who for whatever reason are being totally ignored (whose problem it fails to appropriately solve) and I saw this in accounting software so…hello eventual lawsuits?
You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be.
It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy, so eventually when there are enough of those people on bench they have to find something else.
There is absolutely room for head count reduction while companies restructure around this.
How many engineers do you think that can pay for? At 100k/year that's a pretty huge team.
Also you need both now. It’s not enough to just have humans, and that OpEx needs to come from somewhere.
I’m not happy about it - just the way it is.
Investors like growth, not shrinkage. Claiming AI is replacing those jobs helps avoid the appearence of shrinkage, while also feeding the AI hype machine that many of these companies have invested heavily into.
Tech companies are bloated AF. Most of these people are not as crucial as it would seem.
Not that tech companies can't be bloated. But I think the bloat is far less obvious when viewed from more than one perspective. Ie. there's an enormous amount of wrongly placed "what do they even do here?" because we only see the individual from our seat at the company.
Along another vein, I guess I wonder with my limited knowledge of economics if the demand for programmers is elastic or inelastic.
Once software becomes cheap, the bottleneck to growth shift to product design, infrastructure/manufacturing, sales and support.
“Remove this old feature.” “Are you sure you didn’t break anything?”
That was it. Then I manually tested it to make sure nothing was broken. Then I did a brief review before posting it for code review and then pushed it. What would have taken me probably about 1 day to go through and figure out code changes and then actually change the code took me about 30 seconds.
To think that we need to maintain the post-Covid hiring bloat is nonsense. I’m not so arrogant to think that someone with an llm can’t replace me, if I survive a few more years in this industry I’ll be amazed and grateful.
And that is a problem. If you employ people whomlove to comlkain are basically minus 0.1 of regular employe (tolerable annoyance), they get power multiplier and instead of small rants at water cooler, will be able to file federal law suits under employers ass.
And they will also get way more ways to harrass productive employes.
internetguy•43m ago
feverzsj•39m ago
duskdozer•23m ago
antegugga•39m ago
airstrike•37m ago
jordanb•19m ago