From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans)
reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs.
reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that
reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
There's little to no evidence that companies are actually doing layoffs to focus on "AI-enabled" work.
All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
Mangers and executives have better tools now to track a tech workers output/performance, they will cut the useless/low performers/in over their head people who were hired during preceding years. A small tech team with proficient intelligent devs augmented with AI can replace 100's of duds.
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2020 and 2023 both had serious layoff spikes, but the 2023 spike trailed off to an asymptote that we're still hovering around.
https://layoffs.fyi/
I'm sure some underreporting occurs, but what evidence is there that underreporting is worse this year than last year or the year before?
Apparently 20% to be laid off soon.
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning...
reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans)
reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs.
reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that
reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
Calls locked in.