[hysan]

I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

[matrix87]

I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.

Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.

This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable

[bentt]

Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.

[machinekob]

Dose AI really raise productivity floor that much? Do we have some good example of that?

[iejwjw]

No because these people were held back by a lack of vision and poor project selection. Not this other stuff that people think.

Vision cannot be bought (thankfully).

A small team led by a real visionary can achieve much more than these bloated tech firms.