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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So true.
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.
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.
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.