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by thisisit 312 days ago
There has been convergence of many events:

1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.

2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.

3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.

etc.

AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.

And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.

Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.

What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?

For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.

3 comments

AI is on the top of rumors, but it's not a real cause of layoffs, just a nuance. And a great excuse. "Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work" is highly exaggerated. Only AI tools approved for employee are Gemini, NotebookLM, Cursor, Warp 2, plus a few other. AI generated github PR review is a joke most of the times, and Slack AI is like a slot machine: sometimes got right, mostly not.
When the article mentions "tech-adjacent," I think it is worth keeping in mind that this includes a broad swath of jobs that would never had qualified for amortizing salaries as R&D. For example, I'm skeptical that the tax change will have an impact on the number of television and film producers that are currently unemployed due to a huge slowdown in greenlighting projects from streaming services. I feel there is a contraction happening (though, practically, it doesn't always appear that way) that is a greater source of consternation than amortizing developer salaries will alleviate.
AFAIKT 1. was reverted in the OBBB. And I suspect my recent influx of recruiter outreaching email is related to that. Give it 3 more months and things may trend upward.
Tbf, tfa only gave it an even chance. He's not saying things are gonna turn bad, he merely observes multiple issues which could create an anti-synergy which would likely end badly if realized.