This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true.
But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around.
(That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)
What has changed?
I haven’t noticed a speed up in my own org though the feeling of engineers rushing to implementation has become more pronounced. Team members no longer understand what others are doing and siloing has become intense even within my team.
Good metrics is difficult, but sometimes a simple comparison like that is enough.
If effective AI enhanced SWEs can ship features in a week, the guys who ship 1 feature a quarter stand out more?
If it takes 2 weeks to ship a feature and a developer ships in 1 then yeah, I'm highly suspicious of that.
- This is NOT performance related.
- This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
They say both things explicitly. What they don't say very clearly is what the layoffs ARE about.
It's important to say a large layoff isn't performance related, because it helps those who got laid off find new work. Even if it was all performance related, you want someone else to hire your former employees.
And, in a large layoff, it's likely to be at least partially true. Large layoffs work better when they're done quickly, when there's signs of layoffs but no information, many people will head for the exits themselves... which helps your headcount numbers, but ideally you want to keep people who are good at figuring stuff out and taking appropriate action and instead they've left. So... lay off people who are 'known performance issues', but also lay off some whole teams that have a mix of performance, and then do some random assignment and catch a mix of performance, because getting direct managers involved to pick who goes means having too many people know about the lay offs.
> This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
Yeah, this one isn't credible. If it was about something other than costs, like pivoting to a new market, you would offer first choice of jobs for the new market. Even if it's look at our productivity, 20% of our employees have nothing to do, it takes a lot of spin to say not paying them to twiddle their thumbs is something other than cost cutting.
