For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.

That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.

At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees.

There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly.

As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point

> 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.

This is completely right.

Even if your claim was true (and I don't really believe it) we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the overall tech labor market. The impact is insignificant.

I think Jensen Huang said this recently, and I've had a similar opinion for a while, but a lot of companies seem uncreative with how they use their employees. like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects :shrug:

I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.

> like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects

Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects.

Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.

yeah I was being very hyperbolic (and am on the younger side, so tbh wasn't very aware of a lot the x projects... I think those are even riskier than I meant.)

google was probably the worst example for me to use tbh, especially since it still has such a good culture of funding researchers. There was a "meme" a few years ago saying gmail's UI has dozens teams working on each of the different buttons, so that was why I said google/gmail.

huang's original comment was referencing layoffs due to AI, and I think a lot of the "maintaining/replacing existing stuff" engineers are at the most risk atm. But why lay people off why they could be pushed to work on new risky projects :-/

I do sort of think the stereotype of killing projects is kind in the vein of what I meant. like idk, google has so much money I feel like they don't need ~everything to clearly and immediately fit into their ai / data / advertising / search stuff. earnings - expenses is so huge, I think it should be fine to just allow some things to stay "small" without being a more "distinguished" moonshot-style project.

This is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat.

Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.

Have you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.

Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome.

Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.

Yeah, its basically a list of the subset of white collar busywork that was mechanical but for some reason not automatable with regular programming.

Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey.

I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.

I didn't say anything about engineers. Big tech over employs across all professions.

But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...

Broadcast announcers and radio discjockeys -20.8 - this doesn't sound like AI related, more like a social/political phenomenon. Same with sales engineers.

Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.

Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.

Yes because the most optimized company builds the most wealth and power and puts you out of business or destroys you.

If this was true, the big tech companies would be the most optimized. Maybe efficiency isn't the biggest factor.

Most optimized company would have 0 employees and only shareholder value.

In principle it's possible to have a company with no employees and all work done by vendors / contractors. But in practice this usually turns out to be less optimized than having at least some regular employees due to transaction costs. Organizational optimization is always a balancing act.

Power is the biggest factor. Efficiency helps. I bet they're more efficient than most people think, it just doesn't scale linearly.

Adds more coordination…

IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.

Maybe a reasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and government-funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.

One reason would be that if they can create more value in another industry

What is "shareholder greed"? They're not running a charity.

This a ridiculous view. It’s literally everywhere. Wanting to make money is one thing. Complete disregard for how you make it is another.

They're not doing anything illegal.

Naive at best; Your statement doesn’t exclude greed as a driving factor. The legality of actions have nothing to do with the morality underlying them.

There's nothing immoral here. Shareholders aren't morally obligated to provide extra jobs for people who aren't adding value.

Great strawman; keep trucking

I never said anything about obligation. Of course they’re not obliged to provide extra jobs, but it is a moral obligation to treat those whom you employ with dignity. I would love to understand what you actually define as a moral obligation considering your vacuous response.

There's nothing undignified about terminating excess at-will employees.

Another great sidestep of actual discussion. A real master class in cowardice.

If your only guide to ethics is the law, you have utterly failed at ethics.

As usual, there is a level of disconnect given the complexity and anonymity of the financial system.

"Shareholders" are often people who invested in fonds which invested in fonds and they are thus several steps of separation from the final invested corporation. They only want their pensions to be stable, and de-facto own tiny slivers of hundreds of corporations, maybe not even exactly knowing which ones.

That detaches them mentally from those corporations, much like when you go to a restaurant and eat the food without being particularly bothered whether the cilantro in your soup, supplied by a large-scale supplier and imported from another country, didn't originate in conditions worse than typical for that developing country.

Modern civilization is so complex that if you wanted to check conditions of every vendor of everything you consume, you'd simply not have enough time and energy to do so.

I am typing this on a Dell laptop; should I be particularly interested in what happens in every Dell supplier which contributed to building of that laptop? Are you? I just bought it and started working on it; we may certainly call this "complete disregard".

Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2].

The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.

[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).

[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).

[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.

I like your take and ideas. Not sure about capped income because that seems like a reward for the capital owning class.

I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.

An alternative to a capped income, would be that every income gets "inflated" by as much as needed until it reaches parity with big-tech incomes, which would require a kind of transnational union, but would have the effect of reversing the direction of extraction. Also, printing that money to inflate the income, would also cause asset-inflation, which also benefits people who own a life-changing amount of capital/assets. But _if_ you could cap asset-prices, then the inflation strategy might work. Note that I have not modeled this particular scenario yet.

This has been true for many years though

It’s been true since pre llm’s.

In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.

Almost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.

h1b and outsourcing will also go down on the tech side.

the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I've been reading this same comment non-stop for the last five years.

No surprise, it has been true for a while.

It actually makes me very skeptical of your thesis - broadly discussed facts don't usually need to be wrapped in "nobody wants to talk about this, but everyone knows it's true".

And yet up until a few years ago there were all these forecasts about how we would be short xxxx SWEs

I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I would care less to do the job and be less invested to go the extra yard. I feel there's goodwill in employees that will get sucked out the more AI intrudes into our daily lives.

I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.

I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda