Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
Why would there be a rug pull? Open models do seem to be giving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic some decent-ish competition, so if they try to increase prices too much then people can just leave them.
All LLM are heavily subsidized by investors. No one is paying the true cost of tokens at the moment.
The rug pull is to get as many people defendant on the tool before they have to massively increase prices.
That’s the thing - the FAFO is significantly dampened by the remaining grey beards nudging things back on track over time.
See this over and over on hn and Reddit - CEOs are stupid and don’t understand how much pain offshore/AI causes. No…they’re taking a calculated risk on the organisations resilience and know the people whining about CEOs being stupid will be the ones patching over the cracks
Not more than those of farmers who "lost their jobs" to tractors, switchboard operators to switching systems, brokers or postmen (and countless other jobs) to the Internet, etc. And why do we blame the innovators and not the government for not making up useless jobs to keep these people employed? It is just as responsible.
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, no matter how good you are, you could be obsolete and replaceable any day and the companies/corporations don't care. Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.
>Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.
Good advice regarding psychological investment.
Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.
I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.
It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.
I understand that aspect but when you treat your work as just a job, you actually live with the mentality that you could get fired tomorrow and that's okay and you're mentally and financially prepared for that.
Also a lot of tech workers earn a higher salary compared to most of other professions, so I'd expect people to put away some buffer for a rainy day.
We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.
Whether LLMs can successfully replace certain functions is a question of speculation and conjecture. Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question. When the incentives are what they are, there's little room for objectivity. Both those who stand to—or believe they stand to—benefit most and those who stand to be most harmed by copy-machines replacing humans will be inclined to think of "when it will" happen. Only one of those groups seem to be able to actively participate in asking "whether it should" happen.
> Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question.
It is also a political question, on which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, on agents they are bamboozled to depend.
It's sad to see people lose jobs because executives believe AI could replace them. If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.
BMW management believes they can get 30% workforce out and replace the jobs with AI. The executives will not be replaced. Peasants like me will.
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
Since long-term foresight beyond the next stock buyback doesn't seem to be materially required anymore for that role anyway, I'd wager they could already be replaced by AI, and with less consequence than any other company roles.
We have a machine that's really good at consuming text and summarizing it for someone else, with the caveat that it never really owns anything or is accountable for it.
Why do we have middle managers still, while we're replacing programmers? Really says a lot about how decisions are made, we're hierarchical monkeys at the core.
> CEO-Bench is an evaluation framework that measures how well AI agents perform executive leadership, long-horizon decision-making, and company management tasks
Sadly, it's working so far. Most companies only want a product that works. Best practices, algorithmic efficiency, or taste aren't really on their radar.
> These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making. It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
> It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
However, there's opportunity here. As the cost of building and maintaining software products collapses, taste and carefully choosing what to build becomes a major differentiator.
I just had a realization that the people who still have resources will need to invest their money to have any income. But it seems that Investment funds have been quite good in doing wealth transference, which basically means that overtime, any investment you do might have negative.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
Before I went to college, I worked as an electrician apprentice. One of the guys I worked with was 50+, and had worked many jobs over his life. He told me that from 18 to to his late 20s he worked a factory job. Then, one year, they stared rolling down production. The company had decided to move production to China.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
>Do you know how hard it is to sleep when all you can hear is your own heartbeat? Do you know how hard it is to function with four effective hours of sleep when you offer your body ten? It is rough.
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
For now, those with Capital will probably be ok. Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok. In the US? Who knows. In China, India, LATAM, Africa - who knows?
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
I do wonder what will happen to the outsourcing industry in India. In the UK at least it seems that most corporate development has been sent to Infosys, Wipro, etc.
> Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok.
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
Automation kills some jobs and creates more jobs. Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.
> Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.
Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).
i'm tired man. AI this, AI that, here's how we productmaxxed our deliveries, here's how many people we could remove, etc etc. Everyone is going crazy about ai, but no one is remembering the people affected.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
To be fair Zero notice terminations are illegal in many Countries. Furthermore I am yet to see solid evidence that replacing humans with AI is beneficial. Actual crazy times.
I don’t think the blame belongs with corpo culture. It belongs with engineering culture. Engineers have always been at the forefront of technological disruption, and for the most part they’ve been spared its consequences. The people displaced by those efficiency and productivity gains stayed invisible to them, or were written off as a necessary sacrifice for progress. Those people lost the old way of doing things and were told to keep up or get left behind. The irony is that now it’s engineers getting hit hard, facing the threat of being made obsolete in the name of efficiency and productivity. They’re finally going through what so many others went through before them. And they can’t expect any compassion or help from their own kind.
We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.
Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.
The world where programmers and frankly most intellectual workers enjoyed privileged position and high salaries is ending. Some will survive most will have to adjust, start new careers, possibly never come close to income levels they enjoyed.
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5 . Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc. There is still reasons why FAANGS are so big.
Sure you can, as long as nobody complains too much about problems during night if those 2 people can work overtime every now and then.
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
If you think AI can replace experienced engineers you're not working on anything complicated. If your product is a web app, sure, maybe. If you're working on actually difficult problems, then people who know what they're doing are irreplaceable. AI can supplement them and make them more productive, sure. AI does not know what NOT to build.
That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
>That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the required value that expandable.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
Even if they had, doesn't mean it's a good idea to flood the product with changes, nor it's necessary that the market has the capacity to asborb and expand your sales, or that the existing customer base will appreciate it.
Well I did say "good", which excludes things that don't fit in the context of the wider business.
I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons:
They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas.
They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times
Even if the idea fits the context of the wider business, there's such a thing as too much change "just because you can", which alienates users and can make the end product an unfocused mess.
If it's easier for startups, it's for the same reason doing a "pivot" is easier: they usually don't have much of a product or revenue or customer base to begin with, they throw things out there and see what sticks.
AI is a slopening of everything that makes us humans. If we cant see it that is only because the last 30-40 years have been a constant assault on human intelligence. we became dumb and sloppy as well. peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time. Everything went downhill as technology progressed and people thoughts could be controlled and manipulated in ways where intelligence and curiosity were not seen as relevant skills to acquire and nurture.
"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice."
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
My last job I was notified via text message on a Saturday that I didn't need to come back into the office Monday. The USA has basically zero protections for employees.
Yep. My company, based in the US, did that to most of our US team. Being somewhere with decent employment regulation meant that they kept us and not the US guys.
The good US workplaces will give you a few months of severance, but you can still expect to receive an email late Friday night that says "don't come in on Monday". They typically don't want fired/laid-off employees in the office at all (in theory for "security", but mostly to prevent labour organisation)
That's fine - being paid for your time in lieu of notice is practiced even in countries with very strong employee protections. That's still "notice" as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah well in the US employees can be fired at will. However in the post it seems the author didn't tell his reports they risked/were about to getting fired. I don't understand that kind of loyalty to your employer, esp. when, as is the case here, the employer has zero obligations towards their staff.
To be fair, what is often called "zero notice" actually means "you are fired, this is your notice, and for the next N weeks until your employment ends, you don't need to come in anymore as we have already revoked your access, but of course we pay you the salary that you are entitled to." That us just much longer to say and less catchy too.
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.
i sympathise with the individual of course, and i wish they did not have the experience they wrote about. it makes me feel quite bad to read it actually.
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
At least offshoring was seemingly stable. Here we're all waiting for the rug pull.
Why would there be a rug pull? Open models do seem to be giving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic some decent-ish competition, so if they try to increase prices too much then people can just leave them.
All LLM are heavily subsidized by investors. No one is paying the true cost of tokens at the moment. The rug pull is to get as many people defendant on the tool before they have to massively increase prices.
That's not the rug pull.
The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.
Serious question, what sort of FAFO timelines did you see?
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
That’s the thing - the FAFO is significantly dampened by the remaining grey beards nudging things back on track over time.
See this over and over on hn and Reddit - CEOs are stupid and don’t understand how much pain offshore/AI causes. No…they’re taking a calculated risk on the organisations resilience and know the people whining about CEOs being stupid will be the ones patching over the cracks
This post is so sad it makes me wonder how many suicide notes Amodei and Altman had on their doormats, or will in the future.
Not more than those of farmers who "lost their jobs" to tractors, switchboard operators to switching systems, brokers or postmen (and countless other jobs) to the Internet, etc. And why do we blame the innovators and not the government for not making up useless jobs to keep these people employed? It is just as responsible.
It's a price they're willing to pay.
Pretty sure they're not the ones paying the price.
It is a Shrek meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roNlgIY9QKw
Thanks. I didn't know this one.
It's à joke. Shrek reference: https://youtu.be/hiKuxfcSrEU?si=anKoBVyhRIegW_X4
That's the joke.
Or they tell themselves the usual stuff - if they didn't do it then someone else would, technological progress is inevitable, etc.
>> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
And they're doing it for your own good!
"just accept that bad things will happen to you peasant"
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, no matter how good you are, you could be obsolete and replaceable any day and the companies/corporations don't care. Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.
>Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.
Good advice regarding psychological investment.
Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.
I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.
It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.
I understand that aspect but when you treat your work as just a job, you actually live with the mentality that you could get fired tomorrow and that's okay and you're mentally and financially prepared for that.
Also a lot of tech workers earn a higher salary compared to most of other professions, so I'd expect people to put away some buffer for a rainy day.
> Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question.
It is also a political question, on which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, on agents they are bamboozled to depend.
It's sad to see people lose jobs because executives believe AI could replace them. If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.
BMW management believes they can get 30% workforce out and replace the jobs with AI. The executives will not be replaced. Peasants like me will.
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
Good job adjusting quickly.
I used to repair cars. I guess if nothing else works, I can do that until EVs take over that.
Since long-term foresight beyond the next stock buyback doesn't seem to be materially required anymore for that role anyway, I'd wager they could already be replaced by AI, and with less consequence than any other company roles.
We have a machine that's really good at consuming text and summarizing it for someone else, with the caveat that it never really owns anything or is accountable for it.
Why do we have middle managers still, while we're replacing programmers? Really says a lot about how decisions are made, we're hierarchical monkeys at the core.
Given the level of compensation of US CEOs, it's obvious they should be first in line to be replaced by machines.
> CEO-Bench is an evaluation framework that measures how well AI agents perform executive leadership, long-horizon decision-making, and company management tasks
https://ceobench.com/
Not only CEOs. Companies themselves can be replaced by AI. What do I need Adobe for, if I can build me a Photoshop application using AI?
Sadly, it's working so far. Most companies only want a product that works. Best practices, algorithmic efficiency, or taste aren't really on their radar.
I don't want anybody to be replaced by AI :/
> These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making. It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
All the while Karpathy talking about how only a fraction of people understand the capability of (frontier) AI models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047422.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
[dead]
> It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
However, there's opportunity here. As the cost of building and maintaining software products collapses, taste and carefully choosing what to build becomes a major differentiator.
> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.
This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.
I just had a realization that the people who still have resources will need to invest their money to have any income. But it seems that Investment funds have been quite good in doing wealth transference, which basically means that overtime, any investment you do might have negative.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
What will break first? The people or the system.
> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.
Before I went to college, I worked as an electrician apprentice. One of the guys I worked with was 50+, and had worked many jobs over his life. He told me that from 18 to to his late 20s he worked a factory job. Then, one year, they stared rolling down production. The company had decided to move production to China.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
What's the hmmm-hmmm part about? I didn't get that reference.
>Do you know how hard it is to sleep when all you can hear is your own heartbeat? Do you know how hard it is to function with four effective hours of sleep when you offer your body ten? It is rough.
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
For now, those with Capital will probably be ok. Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok. In the US? Who knows. In China, India, LATAM, Africa - who knows?
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
I do wonder what will happen to the outsourcing industry in India. In the UK at least it seems that most corporate development has been sent to Infosys, Wipro, etc.
Reminds me of The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin.
> Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok.
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
Automation kills some jobs and creates more jobs. Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.
> Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.
Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).
> Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
In a word, bleak.
Am I the only one who's having a hard time reading white text on a brown background?
It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.
Just enable reader view in Firefox. Makes reading half of peoples personal blog post viable, since often they have weird font size choices etc.
Any chance you have astigmatism? Some people's eyes don't respond well to dark mode.
“AI makes features not software.” - MM
i'm tired man. AI this, AI that, here's how we productmaxxed our deliveries, here's how many people we could remove, etc etc. Everyone is going crazy about ai, but no one is remembering the people affected.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
To be fair Zero notice terminations are illegal in many Countries. Furthermore I am yet to see solid evidence that replacing humans with AI is beneficial. Actual crazy times.
I don’t think the blame belongs with corpo culture. It belongs with engineering culture. Engineers have always been at the forefront of technological disruption, and for the most part they’ve been spared its consequences. The people displaced by those efficiency and productivity gains stayed invisible to them, or were written off as a necessary sacrifice for progress. Those people lost the old way of doing things and were told to keep up or get left behind. The irony is that now it’s engineers getting hit hard, facing the threat of being made obsolete in the name of efficiency and productivity. They’re finally going through what so many others went through before them. And they can’t expect any compassion or help from their own kind.
The severance is your notice.
We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.
Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.
I'm not just talking about the post though. In many places it IS legal to remove someone zero notice with or without a severance package.
If you think AI can't get so good that it is a superset of Human capabilities, there's a good news.
We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.
The world where programmers and frankly most intellectual workers enjoyed privileged position and high salaries is ending. Some will survive most will have to adjust, start new careers, possibly never come close to income levels they enjoyed.
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
Wait until the ceo finds out all his business secrets are sold to his competitors.
> The frontier models are not good enough to replace an experienced engineer.
Yeah they are.
Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5
Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).
This is a fundamentally different game now.
I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.
Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5 . Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc. There is still reasons why FAANGS are so big.
Sure you can, as long as nobody complains too much about problems during night if those 2 people can work overtime every now and then.
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
>Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5
Almost all 24/7 on call is support theater anyway.
>Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc.
Not if a newcomer can be assisted by the other person or even just by AI in understanding the codebase.
depends where you work. on a tiny team the 3am page is usually real and its usually you
Ok, three persons.
It's a game where you are obsolete, unless you are independently rich, so not much to cheer about
If you think AI can replace experienced engineers you're not working on anything complicated. If your product is a web app, sure, maybe. If you're working on actually difficult problems, then people who know what they're doing are irreplaceable. AI can supplement them and make them more productive, sure. AI does not know what NOT to build.
Had to Google "two pizza team". On what planet does 2 large pizzas feed 5-10 people? One pizza barely feeds me.
That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
>That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the required value that expandable.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
> That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
That requires having enough good new ideas for everyone to work on, and sadly a lot of companies don't have those
Even if they had, doesn't mean it's a good idea to flood the product with changes, nor it's necessary that the market has the capacity to asborb and expand your sales, or that the existing customer base will appreciate it.
Well I did say "good", which excludes things that don't fit in the context of the wider business.
I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons: They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas. They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times
Even if the idea fits the context of the wider business, there's such a thing as too much change "just because you can", which alienates users and can make the end product an unfocused mess.
If it's easier for startups, it's for the same reason doing a "pivot" is easier: they usually don't have much of a product or revenue or customer base to begin with, they throw things out there and see what sticks.
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AI is a slopening of everything that makes us humans. If we cant see it that is only because the last 30-40 years have been a constant assault on human intelligence. we became dumb and sloppy as well. peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time. Everything went downhill as technology progressed and people thoughts could be controlled and manipulated in ways where intelligence and curiosity were not seen as relevant skills to acquire and nurture.
"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice."
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
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My last job I was notified via text message on a Saturday that I didn't need to come back into the office Monday. The USA has basically zero protections for employees.
Yep. My company, based in the US, did that to most of our US team. Being somewhere with decent employment regulation meant that they kept us and not the US guys.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/TerminationOfEmployment.pdf
So, USA is the answer?
The good US workplaces will give you a few months of severance, but you can still expect to receive an email late Friday night that says "don't come in on Monday". They typically don't want fired/laid-off employees in the office at all (in theory for "security", but mostly to prevent labour organisation)
That's fine - being paid for your time in lieu of notice is practiced even in countries with very strong employee protections. That's still "notice" as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah well in the US employees can be fired at will. However in the post it seems the author didn't tell his reports they risked/were about to getting fired. I don't understand that kind of loyalty to your employer, esp. when, as is the case here, the employer has zero obligations towards their staff.
To be fair, what is often called "zero notice" actually means "you are fired, this is your notice, and for the next N weeks until your employment ends, you don't need to come in anymore as we have already revoked your access, but of course we pay you the salary that you are entitled to." That us just much longer to say and less catchy too.
The most outrageous sentence frankly is
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.
i sympathise with the individual of course, and i wish they did not have the experience they wrote about. it makes me feel quite bad to read it actually.
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.