FallenWalnutMeta is planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount
kescusayAI expected to create efficiencies
Couldn’t help but chuckle at that bullet point. We should know by now that AI creates lots of cognitive debt and unstable, vibe-coded software, as well as making people stupid. But one thing it absolutely doesn’t seem to do is make things more efficient long term.
See we replaced people with costs to run virtual people that would make oracle blush. Are the virtual people any good? Goodness no.
Oh, but they provide hallucinations and bug-ridden, incomprehensible code faster than anyone! That’s progress, right? Right?
Through great effort we have molded this once analog curiosity into a digital ouroboros… to very nearly duplicate Kyle from accounting!
… Admittedly this would be the Kyle following the unfortunate kick to the head from that clydesdale.
Nevermind that! We’ve gone ahead and laid off the rest off accounting and now Kyle² is wielding immesurable power to… Oh. Oh dear.
AI creates efficiencies to unstable technical debt (what you just said).
It’s being relied on by reasonable engineers who have no choice in order to make deadlines or hit arbitrary ai usage policies and don’t have the time to review the output due to managerial pressures. And embraced by subpar engineers who don’t have the skill to properly vet the output.
Layoffs aren’t caused by AI efficiency.
Efficiency is how CEOs justify being still able to run (no, GROW) their company with 40% less people. Besides AI, there are the dear old “you have to work harder” efficiency (see: 996 culture) and the organizational efficiency where they are all “removing managerial layers, enabling quicker execution” (see Amazon for instance).
See how these things became all fashionable again at the same time with tech company CEOs? It’s because they are just excuses and hopes, at this point. And AI is the least bad-sounding of them, because it smells like progress, magic and automation (while even the most rabid of investors will recognize that working employees to death doesn’t scale beyond the limited numbers of hours there are in a day).
‘It’s culture’: Amazon CEO says massive corporate layoffs were about agility — not AI or cost-cutting
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s latest big round of layoffs — about 14,000 corporate jobs — wasn’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers, but rather a push to stay nimble.