What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
Why do we have middle managers still, while we're replacing programmers? Really says a lot about how decisions are made, we're hierarchical monkeys at the core.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.
Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.
It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).
In a word, bleak.
We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
What will break first? The people or the system.
Good advice regarding psychological investment.
Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.
I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.
It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.
Also a lot of tech workers earn a higher salary compared to most of other professions, so I'd expect people to put away some buffer for a rainy day.
We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.
It is also a political question, to which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, on agents they are bamboozled to depend.
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
If it's easier for startups, it's for the same reason doing a "pivot" is easier: they usually don't have much of a product or revenue or customer base to begin with, they throw things out there and see what sticks.
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the required value that expandable.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
I used to repair cars. I guess if nothing else works, I can do that until EVs take over that.
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
echelon•38m ago
Yeah they are.
Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5
Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).
This is a fundamentally different game now.
I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.
antupis•25m ago
potatoproduct•19m ago
coldtea•17m ago
Almost all 24/7 on call is support theater anyway.
>Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc.
Not if a newcomer can be assisted by the other person or even just by AI in understanding the codebase.
magnusokik•5m ago
whizzter•13m ago
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
throwawayy6767•22m ago
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
robbie-c•17m ago
That requires having enough good new ideas for everyone to work on, and sadly a lot of companies don't have those
coldtea•12m ago
robbie-c•4m ago
I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons: They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas. They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times
coldtea•17m ago
broodbucket•10m ago
m4tthumphrey•8m ago