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  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later.

    Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.

    by elktown
  • Does anybody else find this article reads really AI written? The way the argument is built, the emdashes, the dramatic one sentence paragraph:

    "That assumption is wrong."

    "The human is the equation. AI is what makes that equation run faster." -- what?

    by dosinga
  • It is a little ironic that this article reads so much like an AI-generated one.
    by internetguy

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