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  • Hacker News
  • One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. These data centers are not going to pay for themselves.
    by tristanj
  • > One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers.

    How many engineers do you think that can pay for? At 100k/year that's a pretty huge team.

    by skinfaxi
  • The companies cutting headcount because of AI often just aren’t creative enough to expand their portfolio. There, I said it.

    Today, even someone with minimal context can ship end-to-end prototypes. That means existing employees, the people with actual domain knowledge should be able to innovate faster than ever. Anthropic has shipped one of the best coding agents on the market and still has hundreds of engineering roles open.

    High-agency people with company context and ideas within each company should be getting amplified right now, not laid off. Instead they're stuck figuring out how to "tokenmaxx" because leadership mandated it and they are forced to ship software no one will use in order to keep their jobs.

    by iridione
  • This right here. Big companies laying off engineers are basically saying our backlogs are empty and we're out of ideas. This should represent opportunity for small/mid companies to finally compete with the large competitors as some of the advantages of scale are normalized.
    by matwood
  • That's absolutely correct. I use LLMs heavily in my work and open source projects. These tools are effective, they can solve hard problems and they allow me to work on a wider range of tasks than could before.

    But, they're also jagged in terms of functionality. When you work with a human, you can learn what their core competencies are, and then if you give them a task that falls within that domain, you can be reasonably sure they'll finish it correctly. That's not the case with LLMs. It might do one task brilliantly, and a next similar task, it just shits the bed on.

    And since it has no understanding of the task in a human sense, it can't self correct, learn or improve. All its doing is stringing tokens together based on probability. So, you need a human in the loop to review what it's doing, to correct it when it makes mistakes, and to define the actual goals. My experience is that doing all that properly ends up taking up a lot of time, so your actual productivity gain per person aren't all that significant.

    Companies that try to replace humans with LLMs will soon find that they end up with a whole bunch of code that doesn't actually work, and they have no hope of fixing. The double edge of LLMs is that they're really good at generating a lot of wrong code really fast.

    by yogthos
  • I agree with the article in its entirety, but its just so easy to play devil's advocate here. There might actually be a large value add to companies who replace poor performing employees with AI. So, who are the low versus high performing employees?

    The largest problem with software employment is defining software developer performance. There is no industry baseline for defining or measuring this. Its so easy for a person to be that 10x (or much greater) developer in a compatible team or be a complete failure on the wrong team.

    by austin-cheney
  • The problem for high-performing developers (even the elitest) is that over a long enough time scale, they won't be remotely competitive with high performing AI. At the moment we need human operators to guide and supervise these AIs, but unless the tech's progress grinds to a halt for some unforeseeable reason, it won't be this way for long.
    by squidbeak
  • My pet theory is that AI enables programmers to be relatively more productive than other roles. So, if I want to grow my company, shouldn't I hire MORE programmers? Anyone know a good counterargument?

    Along another vein, I guess I wonder with my limited knowledge of economics if the demand for programmers is elastic or inelastic.

    by koe123
  • if constructing houses or buildings are quick, the bottleneck will be moved to other things. Like city planner, regulations / legals, material procurements, furnishing / equiments, etc.

    for software it will be requirement gathering, product planning, looking for buyer / customer, even brainstorming on finding what to make.

    by fendy3002
  • Kinda playing devil’s advocate here but: if AI is a multiplier it makes (now more) sense to get rid of net negatives
    by raulparada
  • > So, if I want to grow my company, shouldn't I hire MORE programmers?

    You take the same pot of money and allocate it differently:

    2010s: Hire 10 programmers

    2020s: Hire 9 programmers and pay for the best AI money can buy

    The 9 programmers with AI will be more productive than the 10 without.

    by gwbas1c
  • Most businesses don’t grow just by churning out more units of software. At some point, it doesn’t matter how quickly you can churn out features if you’re not solving customer problems and convincing customers that they should pay for those solutions.

    Once software becomes cheap, the bottleneck to growth shift to product design, infrastructure/manufacturing, sales and support.

    by rhplus
  • I still think AI is just a cover story for these job cuts. Tech companies are still "rightsizing" after unsustainable growth during the pandemic. At the same time we're clearly headed into a recession.

    Investors like growth, not shrinkage. Claiming AI is replacing those jobs helps avoid the appearence of shrinkage, while also feeding the AI hype machine that many of these companies have invested heavily into.

    by CivBase
  • Nobody ever knew what the right size was. There was a valve that was opened to allow hiring. And another "bung" that could be unplugged to facilitate firing. The algorithm was to open the valve when times are good/money cheap/greed is good, and opened the bung in other times. Totally decoupled from how many people (and largely what sort of people) are required. AI has changed that mechanism.
    by dboreham
  • Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.
    by haburka
  • You must be joking, the vast majority of HN loves AI and thinks they don't need to write any code anymore.
    by iLoveOncall
  • The AI slop articles about AI will continue until morale improves.

    Flag and move on. Too bad the HN audience eats this shit up by the spoonful.

    by sph
  • Even if you hire more people into jobs where AI acts a multiplier, there are still going to have to be layoffs where AI basically makes certain jobs _redundant_. I think both things are happening and will continue to happen, and happened anytime new technology came out.
    by empath75
  • more articles there will be about this - bigger the probability of this idea it will be in the dataset for chatgpt 6.9 thinking so the c-level of the companies would stop firing people
    by adamska
  • In reality there are two kinds of layoff going on.

    Idiots who truly believe that AI will actually replace a significant amount of the workforce (Long term, it will not but some jobs displaced) and those who have internalised that ZIRP is over, they need to be more lean as VCs have closed their wallets and saying "We've revolutionised our workflow with AI" than "We haven't turned huge investment debt into profit in 5 years and we need to reduce headcount for even the slightest chance of that happening, or at least raise again by saying 'AI' over and over" has far better optics.

    by TeriyakiBomb
  • But we see layoff from companies that are making record profits, how does that fit here? Are you saying all of them are AI-idiots?
    by dgellow
  • Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tunes currently.
    by embedding-shape
  • The AI story is a cover for the companies becoming less profitable in a bad economy, less able to invest because of the end of ZIRP, not capable of finding new markets, and developers becoming more expensive due to changes in accounting laws on the US.

    People keep trying to make sense from the official story told by professional liars.

    by marcosdumay
  • If you freeze the over-hiring, you'll still get people complaining about how there's no entry-level jobs anymore.
    by zozbot234
  • > Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them!

    You can't put "undocumented knowledge" into a spreadsheet.

    by mschuster91
  • I disagree. Lots of people are so laser focussed at only the close to the code aspects of programming they are unable to leverage the enormous increase in scope it can offer them.

    There is absolutely room for head count reduction while companies restructure around this.

    by __alexs
  • Because they aren't getting cut cause of AI. They are getting cut cause of the uncertainty re: future revenue streams AI is bringing. These layoffs are driven by fear and leadership lacking any vision for how the post AI world looks for their company. Their solution is to tighten the belts, which of course opens the window further for the AI companies to actually write software and make them obsolete.
    by fullshark
  • On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.
    by eru
  • we're not taking into consideration the new bottleneck: product growth. imo it's the growth/expansion of the product that creates new work and opportunities for more work. at the moment, product growth is human-driven--because it's a risk to take a product in any direction, and whoever makes it has to bear the full responsibility. ideas that cause product growth are still generated by humans (and rightly so), perhaps also augmented by ai.

    there's also what the market is ready for. we've said that some products failed because they were ahead of their time. it's even more true now where the power of ai, ai productivity, etc could take the product far beyond the markets expectation. what does that lead to? the deliberate slow rate of growth means power/potentials have to be controlled somewhat. so even without hiring, if ai is adopted as a first-class tool within the organization, there will be surplus resources that need to be shed somehow.

    by religio
  • The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required.

    You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be.

    It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy, so eventually when there are enough of those people on bench they have to find something else.

    by pjmlp