Every day there’s more big job cuts at tech and games companies. I’ve not seen anything explaining why they all seam to be at once like this. Is it coincidence or is there something driving all the job cuts?
A few things happened pretty quickly.
During the pandemic, tech profits soared which led to massive hiring sprees. For all the press about layoffs at the big guys, I think most still have more workers than they did pre-pandemic.
Interests rates soared. Before the pandemic interest rates were ludicrously low, in other words it cost almost nothing to borrow money. This made it easier to spend on long term or unclear projects where the hope seemed to be “get enough users, then you can monetize.” Once interest rates rose, those became incredibly expensive projects, so funding is now much more scarce. Companies are pulling back on bigger projects or, like reddit, trying to monetize them faster. Startups are also finding it harder, so fewer jobs.
And of course, AI. No one is quite sure how much that’ll change the game but some folks think most programmers will be replaceable, or at least 1 programmer will be able to do the work of several. So, rather than hire and go through everything severance etc might entail, I think a lot of companies are taking a wait and see approach and thus not hiring.
I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It’ll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running
rm -rf /*on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.
Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.
To add to this, at my company, we’ve received a mandate to avoid putting any code into an AI prompt because of privacy concerns. So effectively no one is using it here.
Yep as far as most companies should be concerned, using something like CoPilot means giving free license to Microsoft to all your trade secrets and code that you input.
I’m pretty excited about LLMs being force multipliers in our industry. GitHub’s Copilot has been pretty useful (at times). If I’m writing a little utility function and basically just write out the function signature, it’ll fill out the meat. Often makes little mistakes, but I just need to follow up with little tweaks and tests (that it’ll also often write).
It also seems to take context of my overall work at the time somehow and infers what I’ll do next occasionally, to my astonishment.
It’s absolutely not replacing me any time soon, but it sure can be helpful in saving me time and hassle.
Those little mistakes drove me nuts. By the end of my second day with copilot, I felt exhausted from looking at bad suggestions and then second guessing whether I was the idiot or copilot was. I just can’t. I’ll use ChatGPT for working through broad issues, catching arcane errors, explaining uncommented code, etc. but the only LLM whose code output doesn’t generally create a time cost for me is Cody.
A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.
Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent… even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.
This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for
$MODELto usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority “thinking machine” viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of&using only~and|is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.
In my experience copilot for neovim is pretty useful if you
- Split the current window if you have anything like type declarations in a separate file
- Write a pretty verbose documentation, e.g. using Swagger.
If you expect it to whip out of thin air what you really need and not have you correct it in several places, learn to code without it first.
So basically, once again, management has no concept of the work and processes involved in creating/improving [thing], but still want to throw in the latest and greatest [buzzword/tech-of-the-day], and then are flabbergasted why their devs/engineers/people who actually do the work tell them it’s a bad idea.
a shit language like Bash
There’s your mistake, treating bash like a language and not like a scripting tool. Its strength is that it’s a common standard available on almost every machine because its older than most of us, its weakness is that it’s full of horribly outdated syntax because its older than most of us. If used to script other processes it’s great, but when you start using it as a language then the number of ways you can do something horrible that sort of works makes JavaScript look slick!
Interests rates soared. Before the pandemic interest rates were ludicrously low, in other words it cost almost nothing to borrow money. This made it easier to spend on long term or unclear projects where the hope seemed to be “get enough users, then you can monetize.” Once interest rates rose, those became incredibly expensive projects, so funding is now much more scarce. Companies are pulling back on bigger projects or, like reddit, trying to monetize them faster. Startups are also finding it harder, so fewer jobs.
Note that this also impacted other projects that take a lot of capital up front, then provide a return over a very long term. There was a nuclear power plant project with NuScale in Utah that got shelved over this; with interest rates suddenly going from way low to way high, the economics get upended.
I’d bet that in general, infrastructure spending dropped across the board.
1 programmer will be able to do the work of several
This is true right now. If you know how to use AI tools, it’s not that hard to work 5-10x faster as a programmer than it used to be. You still have to know what you’re doing, but a lot of the grunt work and typing that used to comprise the job is now basically gone.
I have no idea, but I can’t possibly imagine that that’s having no impact on resource allocation and hiring / firing decisions.
If you know how to use AI tools
Can you elaborate on this part? What’s your idea of proper usage?
So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. I will only share what I have experienced from using them. In particular I haven’t messed with Copilot very much after the upgrade to GPT-4, so maybe it’s a lot more capable now.
In my experience, Copilot does a pretty poor job at anything except writing short blocks of new code where the purpose is pretty obvious from context. That’s, honestly, not that helpful in a lot of scenarios, and it makes the flow of generating code needlessly awkward. And at least when I was messing with it there didn’t seem to be a way to explicitly hint to it “I need you to look at this interface and these other headers in order to write this code in the right way.” And, most crucially, it’s awkward to use it to modify or refactor existing blocks of code. It can do small easy stuff for you a little faster, but it doesn’t help with the big stuff or modifying existing code, where those are most of your work day.
To me, the most effective way to work with AI tools was to copy and paste back and forth from GPT-4 – give it exactly the headers it needs to look at, give it existing blocks of code and tell it to modify them, or have it generate blocks of boilerplate to certain specifications (“make tests for this code, make sure to test A/B/C types of situations”). Then it can do like 20-30 minutes’ worth of work in a couple of minutes. And critically you get to hold onto your mental stamina; you don’t have to dive into deep focus in order to go through a big block of code looking for things that use old-semantics and convert them to new-semantics. You can save your juice for big design decisions or task prioritization and let it do the grunt-work. It’s like power tools.
Again, this is simply my experience – I’ll admit that maybe there are better workflows that I’m just not familiar with. But to me it seemed like after the GPT-4 transition was when it actually became capable of absorbing relatively huge amounts of code and making new code to match with them, or making modifications of a pretty high level of complexity in a fraction of the time that a human needs to spend to do it.
I wonder if it might be the specific type of work that you do that allows for this. I don’t pay for ChatGPT, so I wouldn’t know the quality of the code it outputs with GPT-4, but I personally wouldn’t blindly trust any code that comes out of it regardless, meaning I’d have to read through and understand all the generated code (do you save time by skipping this part maybe?), and reading code always takes longer and is overall more difficult than writing it. On top of that, the actual coding part only accounts for a small fraction of the work I do. So much of it is spend deciding what to code in order to reach a certain end goal, and a good chunk of the coding (in my case at least) is for things that are much easier to describe with code than words. So I’m still finding it hard to imagine how you could possibly get anything more than a 1.5x output improvement.
The main time savings I’ve found with generative AI is in writing boilerplate code, documentation, or writing code for a domain that I’m intimately familiar with since those are very easy to skim over and immediately know if the output is good or not.
I love the speed-up. And I’m sure it factors into CEO and CIO decisions. But they’re on their way to learning, once again, that “code faster” never had anything to do with success or failure in efforts that require programmers.
Source: I sought great power, and I became one of the fastest coders, but it didn’t make my problems or my boss’s problems go away.
Lol AI ain’t that good, bud.
Want to have a programming contest where speed is a factor?
I actually looked this up, and the studies seem to agree with you. That one says a 55% increase in speed, and another says 126%.
All I can really say is, I’d agree with the statement that a single 3-hour task isn’t real representative of the actual overall speedup, and my experience has been that it can be a lot more than that. It can’t replace the human who needs to understand the code and what needs to happen and what’s going wrong when it’s not working, but depending on what you’re doing it can be a huge augmentation.
I would say a 3-hour-task isn’t representative in the other way around. When you tackle a 1000-hour task, you’ll probably spend more than 1000 hours working out what the requirements even are. A significant portion of my workday are meetings, not coding.
And with a long-form task, you’ll go back reading existing code much more often than writing new code, too.
What you’re missing is that 95% of programming projects fail, and it’s never because the programmer didn’t code fast enough.
Speed-up isn’t why I have a team instead of being a solo act.
There’s also the pure reality that, yeah, it’s easier today to get a project off the ground than ever before, and AI is good at that, but you know what AI is absolute shit at? Modifying ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code and addressing technical debt - the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.
True.
Good thing most companies aren’t stuck with ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code bases. /s
I can’t even type that with a straight face.
the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.
So true.
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Working with GPT actually helped me write better code, because it’s more familiar with good patterns in unfamiliar languages and frameworks and can write idiomatically. It got me out of one-language-centric habits I hadn’t known I had.
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Yes, it’s 100% true that the person driving the AI needs to have good design sense of what they want the final system to look like, and still work well with their team. You can fuck it up faster if you can code faster, absolutely that’s true.
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What you said, I know that. Do the people that run these companies know that?
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Are we great again yet?
I’m here to repeal and replace good things, and I’m all out of “replace”.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. AI had the potential to alleviate a lot of pressures of society, to free up much of our time spent doing tedious mindless tasks. We just need to make sure to use it for the benefit of the many rather than the profit of the few. I don’t want a union that wants to keep labor busy and well compensated, I want a union that keeps people safe, happy, and compensated properly
Yeah, except there’s no way the owners would give up any of the profits for the betterment of society. Every technological improvement since the industrial revolution made productivity skyrocket, and yet the capitalists made sure working people were still hovering just above destitution. The only reason some of us have it better is because unions fought them, and that includes Luddites that would destroy the means of production.
We’re like a century past innovation making our 40 hour work week into a 20 hour one
I fully believe we’ll get a standardized 60 hour work week before we get a 20 hour one. Hell, I’m pretty sure we’d relegalize slavery before we get a 20 hour work week. Your average American will bend over backwards for a chance to please “the boss” and actively rat on their colleagues for avoiding work because our cultural understanding of loyalty is functionally equivalent to boot licking.
A lot of technology problems and utilizing AI for the betterment of humanity could all be dealt with easily if we just removed a large chunk of the bloated administrative, management and ownership hogs at the top that contribute nothing, stall everything and constantly sabotage development with their politics, infighting and warring with competitors. If you remove the profit factor, corporate greed and economic shortsightedness in these situations, a lot of problems can be dealt with fairly easily and fairly quickly.
Unfortunately, we are greedy monkeys who want to rule the world and once you give power to one monkey or a small group of monkeys, they immediately try to overpower all the other monkeys and rule the jungle.
OMG I luv this:-) So, in your honor:
I completely agree, although I think AI is more likely to have impact marketing, communications, PR, creative and PM type roles (and there are a lot of those in tech companies). I suspect we will see a noticeable reduction in tech workers over the next decade.
It’s an easy win for the balance sheet. Their products are still sellable, the services should be more or less unaffected (for the next few quarters), so they’ll continue to get the same revenue. But their costs just decreased, so they look more profitable.
It looks good on quarterly calls. It’s a good way to juice a stock.
Short-term profits in exchange for long-term damage!
Many people got hired during Covid.
Grow isn’t as expected, so now they are firing again.
But on the bright side, most of those companies still employ more people than pre-covid.
A company hiring 19000 people isn’t going to get as many clicks as a company firing 1900 people.
Overhiring during covid is definitely a major part of it, combined with a slight investment bubble bursting
I don’t like calling it overhiring as if it was accidental or something. They didn’t hire thousands of people over covid thinking covid would never end, they just knew they could pick up people to fill the role for now and kick them to the curb as soon as they weren’t needed.
It wasn’t an oopsie, it was by design.
Yeah, here in Germany, workers have stronger protections, laying them off isn’t as easy, and I feel like the layoff waves have largely not occurred here, because companies didn’t hire so much during the pandemic.
Another factor was the PPP and other “totally not bailouts” that were part of the COVID relief spending.
Of the roughly $800 billion dollars from PPP which was provided as uncollateralized, low-interest loans 66-77% went directly to companies and ~92% of those loans were completely forgiven.. In other words an ~5-600M bailout predicated on keeping positions open long enough to maintain plausible deniability that is what the goal was.
They’ll give corporations all the slack and handouts but look at those trying to feed their children and scrutinize every little detail. It’s so sad.
Overinvestment and strong labor demand led to very high salaries. Investors hate high salaries. Firing people they can replace at a discount now that supply is increasing
It’s this.
With inflation, everyone deserves a higher salary. And programmers are able to command it.
CEOs hate this, so they’re playing chicken.
They’ll all get fired and pull their golden parachute in the next three years, when the shit hits the fan because they decided they could get by without XYZ critical skill.
Then they’ll go to the next place and evangelize about how “you’ve got to invest in talent”.
And soon they’ll be surprised the employees are less and less loyal and blame it on the new generations.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in order to cause layoffs. The capitalist class wanted to enlarge the reserve army of labor so that workers would be too worried about losing their jobs to demand raises.
‘You Are Gambling With People’s Lives’: Warren Rips Powell Over Job-Killing Rate Hikes
This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.
The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.
People need to understand that the Federal Reserve is the cartel of the US private banks, and that they have captured the US Treasury as well, which is the US sovereign fiat money printer. Just look at the history of people in executive positions at the Treasury and the Fed. It’s a revolving door between those positions and the executive positions at major US banks and corporations.
Bitcoin solves this. Clear, unambiguous, unchanging monetary policy that doesn’t constantly increase the supply and take a portion of your dollar’s value to give to anybody else. It is not aligned with any country or even block of countries and is truly the first international currency in that sense. No politician or even national or supra-national government can force Bitcoin do do anything that isn’t part of its protocol because it’s so decentralized.
It has been running 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single major security issue in the protocol or a single hour of downtime. With lightning network upgrades, transactions confirm in under a second internationally with fees 1000x less than credit cards, often under a single cent.
It is accessible to anybody in the world with a cell phone and internet access, including the billions, with a B, who don’t have access to stable banking infrastructure or local currency. No credit checks, no needing six forms of ID, no overdraft fees, no bank holidays, no middlemen, no nonsense. And it does this with less electricity than you’d think, less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewable sources as miners chase the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is from renewables and over-provisioned grids.
For anyone remaining in the world who still believes cryptocurrency nonsense, I have a bridge to sell you.
I agree this has got to be the root reason. They are scared.
Which is ironic because one of the Fed’s chartered purposes is to maximize employment. I guess maximizing profits is more important, even though it’s not on the list.
Yup. From an article I linked to in another comment:
The Federal Reserve Board’s ostensible policy aim is to manage the money supply and bank credit in a way that maintains price stability. That usually means fighting inflation, which is blamed entirely on “too much employment,” euphemized as “too much money.” In Congress’s more progressive days, the Fed was charged with a second objective: to promote full employment. The problem is that full employment is supposed to be inflationary – and the way to fight inflation is to reduce employment, which is viewed simplistically as being determined by the supply of credit.
So in practice, one of the Fed’s two directives has to give. And hardly by surprise, the “full employment” aim is thrown overboard – if indeed it ever was taken seriously by the Fed’s managers.
It starts with C and ends with M and bringing it up will get the white tyrants crying to the pinkertons.
EDIT: DAMN IT ITS NOT CUM.
Lol ok I’m sorry, is it cum?
White tyrants is what I call cum too
I can’t believe it’s not cum
I actually think it’s just bandwagoning by a bunch of cowards.
We saw this same phenomenon early last year too: Facebook laid off a bunch of employees, then Apple announced the same, then Microsoft, then Google, then Salesforce, then the infamous Twitter layoffs.
I think big tech is so sensitive to negative press that they all just wait and lay off folks at the same time so no single company takes all the bad press.
It doesn’t even have to be Illuminati-level coordination, either. All it takes is for some exec at Tech Company B to see that Tech Company A is firing people. Then Tech Company B decides to clean house too. The cascade is just a bunch of morons deciding to hop on the “let’s fuck over our employees to help our balance sheet” train.
Definitely agree it’s not an Illuminati cabal meeting in hoods and masks.
But it’s not not that either - there’s lots of overlap on boards of directors and VCs invested in these companies. They’re in the same circles and probably play golf together. Or, they hang out on the tarmac before their Davos keynotes on saving the world.
I live in Silicon Valley and I’ve heard that there’s a WhatsApp group with a bunch of “big tech” CEOs and CTOs in it and they chat and share memes with each other 👀
It’s more devious than that. If company A lays off 1000 people due to “legitimate” reasons (e.g. twitter generally doing poorly), that’s 1000 people looking for new jobs. Company B, C, and D can then take that as an opportunity to lay off 1000 people each that aren’t immediately vital to the success of the company. Company A might not have the funds or desire to rehire right away, but the other three will slowly start building back up. You end up with 4000 people competing for 100 open positions. Many may not be willing to accept a pay cut, but some percentage will, and gradually the rest will be slowly starved down to accepting less pay.
Software engineering is notoriously a high paid career path, and executives at these companies hate that, so any opportunity they get to suppress wages, they’ll jump on. Especially if you know every other big company is doing it to, so they won’t be able to turn that into an advantage against you
Apple did not announce any layoffs last year. It’s been news worthy because some many of the other tech companies have had multiple rounds
Big companies are inefficient at monitoring themselves and can have a lot of employees that aren’t contributing to the company’s health… it’d be nice if those were the folks laid off but it can also be difficult to determine who is valuable and who isn’t so usually the cuts try and target low performers but metrics are used that cut a lot of high performers… then you’re still in the hole and try more cuts.
This continues (obviously never affecting upper management) until the company collapses or you get lucky as hell.
One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that’s an “easy” way to try to get the line closer to positive.
This is kind of a rough overview and I’m by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.
Michael Hudson, Jun. 2022: The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages
To Wall Street and its backers, the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending. The orthodox way to do this is to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows.
It also takes time to realize the costs of shedding workforce, and by then you might have a different CEO. As long as it’s next quarter, it’s fine.
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The chatbot that’s wrong 50% of the time? That’s hard to believe.
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I can’t wait to be starving
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There’s no way capitalism and those that buy into it can responsibly use AI
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Maybe people should learn to fight for a better tomorrow instead of just trying to get through today
I’m not doing that at all, this is my personal experience.
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Clearly the most reasonable response. Did you work for apple back in the day?
And how many major corporations that invested in NFTs are still doing so?
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It doesn’t need to be right to make money, often more money than companies get by paying people to do a job properly.
… Yes, it does in the tech sector. If you’re wrong it doesn’t work.
I’ve tried the tools out. You go from writing code for an hour and debugging for half an hour to writing code for 15 minutes and debugging for three hours.
Half the time you’ve ripped out literally every bit of code the AI wrote by the time you’re done making it work.
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What’s your metric that you improved 600%?
Oh, I know how to prompt AI. Getting it to spit out workable code doesn’t mean you don’t have to review the code, or make sure it’s integrated correctly.
You also have to make sure it’s not generating blatantly braindead code, which makes the review and debugging cycle take longer.I remain unconvinced that it’s suitable for domains where there is a right and wrong answer, like engineering or law.
I’ve found more value in the systems that do a good job understanding the problem description and then returning references to documentation and prior art on techniques, as opposed to the actual code.
I don’t need a virtual junior dev I need to hand hold, I actually have those and mine get better. I want a virtual “person who worked on something like this once and knows the links to the good articles”.Imagine training what’s going to replace you lol
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Nah, I have standards
I mean, I can imagine it. It’s the industrial revolution all over again but Cyberpunk style.
It’s Q1. Companies always push hard for Q1 profits above all else. There’s usually hiring freezes and cuts to maximize profits, come Q2, they’ll hire a bunch of people and the cycle will continue.
Maximizing shareholder’s profits, as St. Friedman commanded.
Greed. They are making more profit than ever
