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0 pointssuperfrank2mo ago0 comments

I'm an EM as well and I've been telling my teams for a while now that I think they really only need to start worrying once our backlog starts going down instead of up. Generally, I still agree with that (and your) sentiment when you look at the long term, but in the short term, I think all of the following arguments can be made in favor of layoffs:

- AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget

- We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else (PM or design or something) so we're cutting SWEs in anticipation of needing to move that budget elsewhere.

- We anticipate the skillsets needed by developers in the AI world to be fundamentally different from what they are now that it's cheaper to just lay people off, run as lean as possible, and rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain.

I don't necessarily agree with those arguments (especially the last one), but I think they're somewhat valid arguments

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throwaw122mo ago

I see similar arguments and I don't agree as well, here is why:

> rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain.

before that future comes your company might become obsolete already, because you have lost your market share to new entrants

> We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else

I would love to tell them, hey lets leverage current momentum and build, when those times come, we offer existing people with accumulated knowledge to retrain to a new type of work, if they think they're not good fit, they can leave, if they're willing, give them a chance, invest in people, make them feel safe and earn trust and loyalty from them

> AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget

1. Its not that expensive: 150$/seat/month -> 5 lunches? or maybe squeeze it from Sales personnel traveling with Business class?

2. By the time increased productivity is realized by others, company who resisted could be so far behind, that they won't be able to afford hiring engineers with those skillsets, if they think 150$ is expensive now, I am sure they will say "What??? 350k$ for this engineer?, no way, I will instead hire contractors"

ehnto2mo ago

Your last point I think is the crux for now, if you can get so much more value out of talent then the market will eventually price that into wages. I think the idea some have instead is that I can use cheap, unskilled people to get the same value as before, which is probably true for some aspects of the industry. My experience of that so far for boutique software is AI propels unskilled employees at light speed into dead ends, similar to how a junior would spend two weeks following ideas from stack overflow and being unable to execute on it.

However AI definitely is capable of lower end software tasks and really well trodden ground, especially when managed by a developer, so perhaps what we will see is a bigger gap in pay and talent not too different from the off-shore vs on-shore market comparisons.

The key for me though for me is that, if AI makes your employees 20% more valuable, that will either get priced into their wage or captured by the business, but it still doesn't replace the need for good talent (software engineer, agent handler, whatever it will get called).

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