Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive.
This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics.
My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks.
My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling.
The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it.
To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.
