delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?

historically speaking, efficiency has always won out

for example, the last obvious inefficiency i remember was sys admins. the most worthless, self aggrandizing group of people at any company. got wiped out mostly (the best work for the cloud engineering companies), and i think it was for the better!

engineers today handle deployments, and it is far better.

> historically speaking, efficiency has always won out

Too bad AI is not about efficiency. It's about headcount reduction, which is exactly what Coinbase is doing here. AI just gives them plausible cover.

If it was about efficiency, they would be moving faster, not cutting headcount…

Surely there are some insanely smart people amongst the 100s of thousands of laid off supposedly god tier software engineers and adjacent who will start new companies maybe even spawn a new industry?

Feels like a problem that will solve itself. There are more cars today than people ever had horses.

Cars were more efficient horses. AI is not more efficient people. It's an excuse to reduce payroll. Capital is fundamentally antagonistic to labor, because labor is an eternal cost center that until AI, never had a solution.

Really? I mean to be honest you can do a lot more with less people now with AI.

I’ve worked with many mids but most people were really good. They’re all even better now.

In both technical and non technical roles.

I think people who are average skill at their jobs are about to be rocked if I’m honest.

The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.

They can start their own companies though.

Not if they don't have the capital to do so.

No problem if you split the gains 50-50. 2.5x raise for the one person.

Why though? That’s wasteful. If I could run my business more efficiently for the same spend that’s great.

Then you're going to get called a greedy bastard.

Not by me. I know you'll go out of business if you pay employees 2.5x your competition.

It will even turn out ok if the other 4 people find new work that pays the same. But if everyone fires 4 out of 5 employees because they're focused on "run my business more efficiently" to the exclusion of everything else...it's not going to end well for any society.