And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-isnt-killing-software-cod...
The only way I can rationalize that so many people refuse to believe this is happening is that they are on the seller side and not the buyer side of engineering labor. This means they have blind sides to the buyers view of the market (some sort of information asymmetry), and secondly they exhibit cognitive dissonance to protect their self-esteem as a seller.
This is an interesting response when faced with concrete data that the buy-side of engineering is actively heating up in direct correlation with LLM adoption.
An alternative interpretation of your observation is that perhaps your company has particular traits that are helped more by LLMs than the average eng org. There's a growing SWE consensus that LLMs boost productivity by 10-20%. However, there are contributing factors that can make LLMs much more of a human replacement:
* Selling labour & services, rather than engineered software. ie an agency that builds customized versions of well-understood software, rather than net new capabilities.
* Selling software that has a low ceiling of complexity and a short half-life, such that LLMs can realistically architect & maintain it over its useful lifetime.
It is perfectly plausible that hiring would be much more without LLMs so that data is not proof of what the article pretends it to be.
Execution of unrelated ideas seems like a natural follow on, and having managed several such "labs" efforts, it's actually a good idea but it inevitably grinds up against the lack of will to continue investing in the face of headwinds, especially since the main business line is several orders of magnitude larger than anything labs can deliver in a foreseeable timeframe.
They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
