You must log in or # to comment.
Can’t wait for the exposés that come out and show that the job cuts and spending on AI is just an effort to outsource jobs out of the US and that their “AI training” expenditures are largely just paying cheaper workers to do the work under the auspices of “moving to AI” while increasing the AI hype.
As a manager in tech, for me the answer is simple.
(1 average mid-level engineer + AI) = (1 better-than-average mid-level engineer + ~3 low-level engineers)
Yes, we cut the low-level engineers. And some of the poorer-performing mid-level engineers.
And now you have no up and coming low-level engineers to become mid-level engineers in the future. Congrats on playing yourself.
The same short sighted thinking as:
"We fired Jeff, the developer with double the salary of everyone else, and now no one knows how to maintain the system because all of the institutional knowledge is gone. Now he wants 3x his pay and double the PTO to come back.
Nope. I don’t know why doomscrollers think “no new talent!” is an obvious checkmate. Due to the cost savings, onboarding a new college grad is still a money saver. I should have added them on the RHS of the above equation.
I think the dynamic involves a sort of tectonic shift where yes you need fewer people. But those people that you do have you invest much more in. Not only because they are more productive, but because they have to know so much more.
So you’ve already invested in the entry level folks you hired and are now firing, and your solution is to hire more entry level folks to address the flaw in this plan?! And when your mid-level and senior folks see how you treat employees or just get sick of your bullshit and decide to go somewhere else, how do you replace them? Certainly can’t promote from within!
You cranker wankers seem to think every employee is a fungible widget that you can just replace with an ersatz, close-enough-if-you-don’t-look-too-closely autocomplete on steroids and think that makes you a business genius. You might even have some initial success-- until there are new languages/platforms/etc that your smart toaster hasn’t been trained on and can’t adapt to because there aren’t a bunch of StackOverflow posts to crib answers from.
