[gilfoyle]

I think the role of AI in eliminating these jobs is overstated compared to the role of Cloud, Dev Ops automation and faster iteration cycles afforded by relatively better abstractions and tools for building software compared to 10-15 years ago.

A lot of these large IT companies relied on long term maintenance contracts for infrastructure and legacy software with unnecessarily large teams on self serving time and material (T&M) models. But these days, even large enterprises have to innovate to stay in the game and their experience with top end Agile consulting firms made them realize that you can do with much fewer people with automation and hiring better. On the other hand, the large IT companies got stuck with their old model and without training and experience on challenging projects, the talent atrophied even while having to eek higher salaries every year due to inflation and talent loss to startups and others.

However, the numbers being reported so far aren't huge compared to the employee sizes of these companies. For e.g. 5% layoff would actually be a reasonable trim on an annual basis. In that sense, the carnage hasn't started yet.

[thewhitetulip]

This is what should be in the newspapers rather than "AI and automation"

[humanrebar]

It's not really AI, but it is a kind of automation, right?

[thewhitetulip]

Yes, but automation alone isn't causing layoffs! Bad management is. They are just hiding their own failures on the pretext of "risk of automation and AI", it is nonsense!