Original Reddit post

Sharing personal perspective as someone that has worked with IT strategy. AI driving layoffs: Vibes shifted tremendously at the end of 2022. That’s when Amazon pivoted to WFH and began planning layoffs. In 2022, AI tooling wasn’t great. In reality, I’d say 90% of layoffs are simply cost-cutting measures and/or offshoring. With the goal of increasing margins by a few basis points. Here’s the thing, you can’t tell the Street (Wall Street) that you are laying off workers to improve margins. The Street doesn’t like layoffs. They’re a sign of weakness. But. Here’s the cheat code. “Workforce reduction through AI efficiency gains”. That’s all CEOs have to say. It does two things:

• Let’s them layoff workers for cost savings
• Showcases that they are innovative It’s bullshit though. I haven’t come across any substantial RIFs in which the work was replaced by AI. The work either just goes away, is absorbed by existing workers, or sent to India. I guess you can argue that the work absorption is enabled by AI (because existing staff can do more things). AI replacing jobs: The cleanest way to view this is to separate out “doers” from “advisors”. If you are a coder, help desk analyst, etc. and you are just executing on what someone tells you…that’s a role at a higher risk of being absorbed by someone using AI. If you are an advisor / architect, AI can 5x-10x your productivity. I think this cuts across a variety of roles at companies, not just SWE. Traditionally, people moving up the leadership chain were often strong ICs. You are forced to delegate to junior team members because your focus is on stakeholder relations, strategy, and other nonsense. But now with AI, you can dive a little into IC work because it’s often more capable than a junior employee. That will be an interesting paradigm shift. E.g. the senior Big4 partner who can now orchestrate and write a white paper on their own in a few hours vs. asking your staff to spend weeks doing that research and writing. Corporate reality: Corporate codebases are a mess. I think that’s why so much AI hype comes from people building greenfield projects or in start-ups. No one talks about the 60 year old company that has acquired 30 companies over its history and its systems are a mishmash of SaaS tools and legacy applications. With limited metadata and with KTLO being held afloat by offshore contractors. AI is going to be pretty ineffective in that situation. There’s a LONG way to go for these companies. If you see those companies hyping AI, just go back to my first point. It’s basically marketing cover to layoff people because tariffs and inflation are eating into their business. submitted by /u/CHC-Disaster-1066

Originally posted by u/CHC-Disaster-1066 on r/ArtificialInteligence