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#more#making#teams#covid#tech#something#workers#class#big#layoffs

Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pir8life4meabout 20 hours ago
Big company layoffs are probably more aligned with offshoring than AI, but they'll never admit it.

Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?

Last time I checked AI isn't killing jobs if the other news is to be believed.

nlpnerdabout 20 hours ago
OP here, and I agree it's probably not AI directly and more of dealing with the post Covid overhiring, and CAPEX for AI investments.

Enterprise adoption is definitely not happening as fast as the AI proponents (startups, frontier labs, big tech) would like people to believe (probably the reason why frontier labs are going the FDE/consulting path). So it's unlikely that the impact on productivity is enough to produce the alleged impact.

aurareturnabout 19 hours ago
It's a combination of Covid over hiring, CapEx for AI hardware, AND you don't need as many software developers anymore per product.
lux-lux-luxabout 11 hours ago
We’re going to be well into the Diamond Age before people stop attributing layoffs to ‘Covid overhiring.’
adrian_babout 16 hours ago
I doubt very much that COVID over-hiring has any relevance today.

COVID is now ancient history and there have already been several years of big layoffs when every time I hear the attempt of explaining them through COVID over-hiring.

That may have been right a couple of years ago, but since then every company that had over-hired must have already disposed of the surplus.

pir8life4meabout 12 hours ago
So then why aren't bad decision making execs being let go?

If they can't forecast demand or headcount they should be replaced by confident sounding AI.

pjmlpabout 17 hours ago
It certainly is killing jobs in agency work, plenty of stuff that used to be done by content teams like translations or image assets, now are 100% AI generated.

Also delivery teams have been decreased, as now there is more that can be done with less folks.

Which started with move to cloud, focus on SaaS ready made products instead of custom development, serverless instead of microservices, low code/no code tooling, and now AI agents for SaaS product integrations.

This is the usual meme only happens when it comes to me kind of thing.

pir8life4meabout 12 hours ago
The lady in the article was a $500k/yr exec, not an illustrator.

Neither was her husband iirc.

Layoffs are usually across teams not "illustrators and translators".

AI isn't killing jobs.

pjc50about 12 hours ago
Offshoring is passé. If you want to give out a set of written instructions, get back something which literally meets the spec but is otherwise inadequate, and babysit overseeing trying to get the results you actually wanted, you can feed it to an LLM for a lot less a lot quicker.
consumer451about 10 hours ago
> Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?

I believe that was an investment into controlling the next platform, so what happened on iOS with could never happen to them again.

What's far crazier and more applicable to the current balance sheet is the $14.3B acqui-hire of Alexandr Wang. But, what do I know?

vovaviliabout 10 hours ago
Offshore engineers tend to require just as much micromanagement and perfect clarification as an LLM, so if anything I would expect the demand for offshore engineers to fall much faster than for local talent.
Daishimanabout 6 hours ago
Bad offshore engineering teams may need that. The other teams that work as you should you just don't hear about.
yieldcrvabout 6 hours ago
I find it more similar to LLM use and prompting style, I’ve taken many teams that Product Managers and non technical founders considered to be bad, and spoke a more universal programming and system architecture language with clearer scope and continuity of tasks to unlock their capabilities
Havocabout 9 hours ago
Or my personal favorite - offshore teams being confidently wrong after having asked AI
yieldcrvabout 17 hours ago
Zuck has spent more than 8 billion on the metaverse
blitzarabout 14 hours ago
By literal order of magnitude
steve-atx-7600about 10 hours ago
“…who had worked on well-being and safety issues for Meta” Never saw that one coming.
Suzuranabout 11 hours ago
CLOSED WONTFIX Working as intended
kotaKatabout 15 hours ago
"Tech workers"?

"a salary of more than $500,000 in her most recent position, as a mid-tier executive at Meta"

I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside as an overpaid executive.

How many actual tech workers (the ones making under $100k, lol) are facing even harder financial security than the first-world-problems of some Facebook exec who could afford two nannies?

branonabout 12 hours ago
My thoughts were along this line too. Being laid off is unfortunate, but being laid off after making $500k/yr for a mid-level managerial position is a karmic self-correction.

The opening sentence of the article even tacitly admits this - "Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery" - the operative word here is "lottery" and I am not altogether surprised the type of person to coast on Facebook money for decades found themselves hard up after it got cut off.

NewCzechabout 13 hours ago
One of the things that surprised me in Silicon Valley is that my colleagues who were making $500K-$1M a year levered up their lives and saved surprisingly little. Multiple houses, $200K cars, nannies, very expensive vacations, you name it.
bumbleheanabout 9 hours ago
Many people across all income levels are really bad at dealing with personal finances and long-term financial planning.
blitzarabout 13 hours ago
People are yet to realise that the "tech bro" genome isn't different from the "finance bro" genome.
0xmattfabout 11 hours ago
>I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside

Seriously. It boggles my mind how people can earn this much money, yet face difficulties when they lose their job. I guess they're people who didn't grow up poor and/or are too hungry for material things.

There's very little I want or need in this world; if I were making $500k, I'd be able to somewhat retire within 2-3 years.

ElevenLatheabout 9 hours ago
Americans' political education has been deliberately hobbled. An educated person (let alone a journalist) in most of the rest of the developed world (and lots of the developing world) would know instinctively not to call an executive a "worker".

That said, I believe there probably are workers (in the sense of having the same class interests as other workers rather than the owners, like an executive does) in the Bay Area that earn these kinds of numbers. Again, this is something that a proper political education would make very clear, but anything that smacks of a materialist or class-based analysis is now completely verboten at most levels of the education system because it is considered "Marxism," an enemy ideology.

SpicyLemonZestabout 8 hours ago
The class division you're inferring just doesn't exist within Silicon Valley tech companies. Mid-level executives are overwhelmingly people who started as what you'd consider a worker and grew into that role. (There is something of a class divide between Silicon Valley companies, although not one that aligns well with typical Marxist analysis.)
ElevenLatheabout 7 hours ago
Being promoted to management doesn't make you not management, if I'm understanding what you're saying. That's how most (middle) managers are minted in every industry I'm aware of: promoting line workers. That doesn't mean those newly-promoted managers have the same class interests as the people they manage. I work in tech but only in big firms and never in the Bay Area, so perhaps there is some nuance I'm missing?