AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs-amazon

by felineflock • 9 months ago

700 557 9 months ago

laweijfmvo2• 9 months ago

wait until the GPUs and data centers start getting written off for being obsolete in a couple years when we still have nothin but fancy auto complete.

FjordWarden• 9 months ago

Imagine if you spent those years building something else.

reeredfdfdf• 9 months ago

Yes, like renewable energy infrastructure (which China does, and would be highly useful anyway in case generative AI does live up to its promise).

Even if generative AI lives up to its hype, with current US administration there's no way America is going to lead the race for long. There's just not enough energy available, when those in power oppose developing many of the energy projects that make most economical sense.

epicureanideal2• 9 months ago

Probably could be repurposed for something else though?

n3t• 9 months ago

You can already buy cheap but powerful old servers. But newer hardware tends to be more power efficient. So, depending on time horizon you consider, it might be cheaper to buy newer hardware.

Assuming that GPUs power efficiency will increase, the same will be true about them.

laweijfmvo2• 9 months ago

what else could possibly use that much compute? especially somewhat specialized compute, not suited for general purpose compute?

throw-523• 9 months ago

The one truly hopeful aspect of a bubble-burst scenario is that extra capacity always finds a use-case, and in this case practically any other use-case would be both less harmful and more real.

mrweasel3• 9 months ago

Mining crypto if we're unfortunate.

tryauuum• 9 months ago

interesting questions, how will this unroll

right now I see even old GPUs like V100 are still popular. Maybe the old GPUs will shift to the countries with cheap electricity?

xandrius• 9 months ago

I'd be glad to take any sweet obsolete enterprise HW off them.

permalac• 8 months ago

Electricity bill would be huge. Great heaters tho

dr_zoidberg2• 9 months ago

A little bit off topic: but I couldn't even start to read the article because "I reached my article limit" out of I site I never visited before... What are they using to determine how many articles I've read?

Opening in a private window solved the issue, however I'm pretty sure I don't regularly read anything on this site (maybe never was an overstatement?).

finghin• 9 months ago

Exact same experience here.

lordgrenville• 9 months ago

Seems totally possible that the limit is 0...

dr_zoidberg2• 9 months ago

Yes, the thought crossed my mind too... But then I tried a private window and it opened, so maybe the other suggestion that the cookies are very long lived is right.

system211• 9 months ago

Maybe their cookies are very long-term and you visited this site 6 months ago?

fiatpandas• 8 months ago

Shared public IP?

goalieca• 9 months ago

I can't read the article but that won't stop me from commenting..

This year alone something like 400B was spent on investing in chips, datacenters, electricity buildouts. That's 400B that could have otherwise been invested in people.

While i don't doubt that people will find a few solid business cases for LLMs, i am on team-bubble. I don't think this investment will add 400B worth of value and I very much doubt that this 400B is any good for future growth or long-term aspirations of AGI. Investing 400B into people and (tech) manufacturing would be a solid long-term bet with benefits.

darth_avocado2• 9 months ago

Bah, all of that is still employing people. Companies have completed almost $1T of stock buybacks this year. Since 2018, with the exception of 2020, that number has been between $800B and $1T every single year. And that number has been more than $500B since the 2008 recession. AI spend is bad but it’s not even close to how much stock buybacks have ruined the employee wages and employment prospects.

terminalshort• 9 months ago

You think the companies are just going to give you the money if they don't do buybacks?

danny_codes• 9 months ago

It’s mildly infuriating that we keep cutting corporate tax rates and using debt to finance public spending instead. That trillion dollars of buybacks would balance the budget with likely minimal impact on GDP (I mean clearly these companies don’t need the money).

jbreckmckye2• 9 months ago

Imagine if 10% of that money had been spent just training young people, or on a new cohort of PhDs. Imagine what benefits we would have reaped in a decade's time.

mrweasel3• 9 months ago

With $400B you should be able to do pretty much anything you set your mind on. Want to do to Mars, not a problem. End world hunger, $400B will do that in about ten years. You can do ANYTHING with $400B, yet OpenAI want's to sell erotic chats and show you ads?

I'm not saying that LLMs and the current AIs aren't useful, but they aren't worth even close to $400B. Some of the progress, especially in the medical field, is amazing, but the spending is completely out of proportion with the gains. It only works because right now people like Sam Altman has sold people with money on the idea and now they have to continue to peddle their sneak oil, hoping that the money won't dry up.

lucaslazarus• 9 months ago

Matter of time until markets reckon with AI investment crowding out non-AI investment (cf. the massive oversubscription of Meta's latest bond offering). Must suck to be a small-cap firm squeezed by tariffs raising costs, unemployment lowering demand, and AI investment raising your own non-AI cost of borrowing.

throwarchive• 9 months ago

https://archive.is/9sdT5

pants2• 9 months ago

That's an interesting point that I haven't considered before: that the narrative of AI replacing jobs plus the widespread cheating in school using LLMs is making students less engaged and new graduates less employable, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for AI.

philipov• 9 months ago

They told us TV would rot our brains, but AI actually does.

andrei_says_• 9 months ago

Or maybe TV also does and the baseline has already shifted into the state of that rot.

_the_inflator2• 9 months ago

No one gets fired for tuning out of temporary tuning out of his smartphone or doing chores the classic way I guess. ;)

I use mobile services timeboxed and in conjunction with blockers for certain services. I also went back to use old-school pencils and paper for work whenever possible. It is helpful - and fun.

Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/2/pgaf017/80160...

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462

MangoToupe4• 9 months ago

Surely this would be indicated by a glut of unfilled job postings.

a24j3• 9 months ago

Here: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/02/nx-s1-5591302/ghost-jobs-are-...

simonw• 9 months ago

This is one of the aspects of AI ethics that I don't think gets nearly enough attention: the general psychological effect that information about AI has on people, regardless of their interactions with the tools themselves.

Students getting lazy, or dropping out of subjects entirely because they don't think they have a future in them.

Depression and a general feeling of despair. I see this in programming communities quite a bit - people who see LLMs as an existential threat to their careers and that they have wasted their lives getting good at something which is now being devalued.

"ChatGPT psychosis" - where people talk to LLMs and have unhealthy thought patterns reinforced by them to disastrous ends - gets a ton of coverage. But what about these milder but still meaningful effects where the very existence of AI disrupts people's future plans and self-worth even if they're not using it at all?

boulos2• 9 months ago

Btw, the recent Conversations with Tyler had a few minutes on this topic with Sam:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-tyl...

It was a bit towards the end, I think.

captainkrtek3• 9 months ago

It makes more sense through the lens of advancing the short / medium term interests of corporations under the guise of “helping people”.

When we’re all brain rotted and unemployed, how will we spend money on corporations? Its a spiral.

dehrmann2• 9 months ago

There are two ways of reaching AGI: smarter AI and dumber humans.

steve-atx-7600• 9 months ago

In the span of like 2 yrs?

BenGosub• 9 months ago

It's like when we forgot all things that we can google, but on a much, much greater scale. For example, multiplication by heart. I think oral, in person examination should be used with students whenever possible, in order to deal with cheating.

If others are slacking, it's an opportunity to level up and stand out. Also, IMO there are market forces currently reshaping the jobs landscape, it's not only AI, I don't even think AI is the main driver.

thunderbong• 9 months ago

https://archive.is/9sdT5

_the_inflator2• 9 months ago

I think the article is missing two points: if the latest layoffs aren't related to AI, then this doesn't mean AI won't have or has an impact on head count.

And investment and experiments by definition include the risk of failing. In almost everything lies a survivorship bias and no one talks about the 100+ car makers that went into goldrush mode 100+ years ago. This is life. Netflix vs Blockbuster - already forgotten?

Also the "fail rate" - so what part is failing and why? What's with the 5%? If we have a look at exponential functions this might be a really good deal, if the 5% can account for the losses. After all, benefits compound over time.

I witnessed first hand in FAANG some quota hires and I believe that now that no one gets paid for contrived and artificial business advantages, we are back to a more merits based evaluation of workers.

But AI should not be written off as fancy something with no impact. That's the wrong take. Whether it will be a springboard to new jobs that compensate for losses or replacements - I am not yet sure, but tent to be in the former group. ML engineers take care of ML - something new that takes care of something new.

We will see.

dahart2• 9 months ago

If Amazon’s layoffs aren’t AI driven, and AWS is making more money than it’s spending on AI infra… how is Amazon evidence of AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at “AI washing” without doing any digging at all, and cites the MIT study without noting that it’s getting a ton of legitimate criticism. Is AI really a sideshow or an excuse for layoffs that big companies were hoping to do anyway, is it taking the blame for low confidence in the economy?

https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/why-we-dont-believe-m...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/white-collar-layoffs-ai-cost...

diamond5595• 9 months ago

AWS is making more money, they are not making money running llms. The companies didn't want to reveal internal procedures and exact profit/loss statements, is that surprising to this article writer? Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy than this stonk pumper site.

dahart2• 9 months ago

Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy that this stock pumper site.

Oh I totally agree with you, this was just the first thing that came up in a Google search. The criticism of MIT’s study has been going around widely, this site isn’t the only one saying that this study lacks objective metrics.

davedx7• 8 months ago

The problem isn't with the MIT study itself -- it's with all the media framing of it as if "AI has failed", when the study was about pilots rapidly generating significant revenue.

gravypod• 9 months ago

I don't necessarily believe this is the best explanation but: We know the economy is doing pretty poorly and tech companies are consolidating. Amazon is losing it's two main drivers of revenue: Irresponsible startups with huge AWS spend and no pressure to optimize their stack and consumers buying treats online. Regardless if people are spending on AI, the only thing businesses are investing on is AI and analysts at AWS are likely signaling that many AI companies are not seeing a large ROI and model developers will likely build their own versions of successful products (Claude Code). AWS doesn't want to scale up it's GPU fleet and be left holding the hardware bag. Amazon can't juice numbers for consumer purchases since the rest of the economy is contracting, most people are losing jobs, etc. So the easiest way to for Amazon to juice their metrics is to offshore office work that can be done anywhere. They can claim they are using AI - but from conversations with friends who are working at Amazon this does not sound very realistic - and ride the AI bubble with no liabilities.

paulpauper• 9 months ago

Large companies add and remove jobs all the time. It's just the the latter gets much more media coverage. Jobs are always being created and destroyed, for all sorts of reasons.

torginus7• 9 months ago

Tbh AI and layoffs aren't direct consequences of each other imo. Just think back to the 19th century where automation started taking factory worker's jobs. Eventually society learned to deal with automation and even though by pre-industrial standards, 95% of the work that was done by humans to make goods is done by robots and machines, yet there are orders of magnitude more factory workers at least today than were back then.

nandomrumber2• 9 months ago

The benefits to some far off unborn future generations we’ll never know are a poor argument in favour of harms happening to us now.

submeta2• 9 months ago

This does not reflect my reality. I have worked on half a dozen projects where we would have hired consultants to get the job done but have used coding agents to document, understand, migrate a project, create backend services, dashboards, and other things with budgets ranging from a few thousand euros to 200,000 euros. No consultants hired, nothing spent.

diamond5595• 9 months ago

What job did the llm do that was worth 200k Euro to you? Be extremely specific w/ hours worked etc bc we all totally believe you!

foobar10000• 9 months ago

In our case - agentic loop optimization of kernels. Works like a dream - after all, you have a perfect python spec (validation), the kernel is small (under 10 kloc), and the entire thing is testable. The trick is to have enough back test data so that things like cache behavior are taken into account. Ended up with different kernel versions for batch-back-test vs real-time work - which was interesting. 5 years ago would have hired about 10 ppl for the job - now 2.

submeta2• 9 months ago

It was an innovation project, with an endowment of 200k. The task was to implement an llm based bot platform in a company with 700+ coworkers. After demoing MVPs, got 40k and access to experts I never needed to use. Deployed open source AWS solution, built customizations, landing pages, and data crawlers entirely solo using AI coding agents over ~3 months while working on other projects. Zero consultants, zero internal help. Would have easily burned the full 200k the traditional way.

sibeliuss• 9 months ago

Same - the leverage in using this tech is unbelievable for those who have a lot of experience. Folks are in denial.

croes2• 9 months ago

Why not both?

Given all those articles with AI generated images I bet that some artists lost their jobs

system211• 9 months ago

I doubt. Good artists are still killing it. I see it on social media all the time. Also, corporations rarely care about the art as part of business. I don't remember the last time a tech company (or finance, wholesale, manufacturing, etc.) hired an artist. It is part of the job description of some managers, maybe, but who cares about someone with mediocre Photoshop skills?

croes2• 8 months ago

I‘m talking about stock image artists. Nothing you put in your resume but it helps paying the bills, like the singers of all those silly advertisement jingles.

Those jobs get killed.

zer00eyz2• 9 months ago

This should shock no one.

Over the last 20 years of tech, the giants have taken the smartest folks out there and put golden handcuffs on them. You could hire up all the smart folks and put them to work, or leave them out there and have them compete with you. With the launch of cloud providers and (expensive) dynamic scaling the problem only got worse. Think about hiring in the pandemic. Every one at home, with a stimulus check and nothing to do. Rather than a flurry of new software you got mass hiring.

But now we are in a capital intensive hardware cycle. Where in order to compete you need to have lots of $$$$ as well as software know how. It does not matter that there are smart people out there, without hefty backing they wont get very far.

I suspect that software is about to enter its "punk" era. We have software for small businesses that will help with accounting, HR, customer service, and cloud providers are starting to see some interesting competition. Much like the old punk poster showing you 3 chords and telling you to start a band it is entirely possible to find three friends and start a business that makes 1-10 mill a year with little effort and lower costs. The moment you stop thinking "unicorn" and start thinking "sustainable" the economics shift radically.

gregates2• 9 months ago

Not to mention that there's already a small market for software products that work just like existing products that were once good, only without all the AI getting in your way at every turn. You're just not going to be making huge enterprise sales with such a product (in 2025).

vatsachak• 9 months ago

Yeah with ChatGPT anyone with enough agency and programming chops can design tailored solutions for local businesses.

I don't think that ChatGPT coding is valuable but rather it's ability to tutor people and guide them towards idiomatic patterns.

EPWN3D• 9 months ago

I think you're on to something, but interest rates probably have to come down a bit more for it to really have legs. We definitely need a response to enshittification though.

hobs• 9 months ago

The effort in those businesses was never coding, it was always connecting with and selling customers, understanding them, and supporting them as time went on. AI can help with some of that but generally the connections and network effects have outsized contributions in the smaller niches.

gregates2• 9 months ago

Funny to me how many of the replies to this comment are assuming you mean all these "punk" startups will be possible because of AI, when your actual comment says nothing of the sort.

zer00eyz2• 9 months ago

AI is another enabler, but by no means the primary one at all.

340 millon Americans. Reach 10k of them at 10 bucks a month and you have a business that pays for a couple people to live comfortably.

Glyptodon2• 9 months ago

As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in retaining senior level talent, to try and keep operating in the black, not because AI was materially producing a lot of benefits. (Because to the extent it was, I was the one reaping them compared to the offshore folks and less experienced onshore ones.)

qwertyuiop_• 9 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1j3c5in/it_seems_t...

https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/ibm_cuts_jobs_in_us/

soneca• 9 months ago

I was told that the main reason the “Who is hiring?” thread (and other job boards for startups) has much fewer remote positions that are global (the vast majority is Remote US now) is because of a legislation that reduces a fiscal incentive when hiring software engineers and the reduction is much more aggressive when the engineers are from outside the US.

Doesn’t it affect big tech companies? Only startups?

I would guess the opposite, with big companies being much more savvy and influenced by fiscal incentives.

diamond5595• 9 months ago

Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.

random97498324• 9 months ago

I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing.

Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...

alephnerd24• 9 months ago

GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and Costa Rica as well.

Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to operate when entire teams are communicating async.

If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't sustainable especially when factoring the growing skills deficit because universities failed CS students to a certain degree over the past 10 years by watering down programs in a short term bid to compete against bootcamps.

If we are paying Bay Area salaries, we expect performance comensurate to that salary. Basically, all companies are now starting to adopt the Netflix model of hiring in the US.

lazide8• 9 months ago

The way the outsourced companies are structured, the folks who actually know things spend all their time selling new customers/placating existing customers. The moment someone shows promise/that they are actually skilled, they get moved out of the actual dev teams.

It’s genius, in a way.

m-ee• 8 months ago

The long term part is overstated in my experience. People move around a lot at these offshoring firms as better opportunities arise. In my experience by the time you find someone competent they’re already interviewing for a better role. Constant churn trying to find the next one.

guluarte• 9 months ago

one of the main drivers is companies like Deel that make it very easy to hire remote workers anywhere and I think AWS will soon launch a similar service

giantg22• 9 months ago

Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles.

If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the outsourced jobs with now?

sixtyj• 9 months ago

Offshoring/outsourcing is nice on paper, but as management doesn’t have to deal with time zones, in reality it is much more chaos than expected. And how do they want to deal with fuckups? Thru Slack or Discord? :)

We had British SaaS supplier and all the time I have talked with Bangalore-based people. They had to work in night I suppose…

lumost• 9 months ago

I do wonder at times if tariffs and offshoring protection are necessary at a certain point. Forcing a labor constraint on an economy (within reason) can spur efficiency. Accepting high structural unemployment in the name of the free market seems irrational.

gboss• 9 months ago

I’ve had two experiences with off-shoring. The first time my former CTO brought in a near shore firm and they worked independently on a large project. There was no knowledge transfer or collaboration with the on shore devs. They built what was asked, it was over engineered and much was built of little value. We still have the software they wrote but it is a liability. The second time, I’m now in the CTO position, instead of having the nearshore people silo’d we work integrated. Everyone is on the same team, code reviews, pull requests, all mutually understood. It’s so much better. It all starts from the top and if you don’t have vision you’re doomed to fail.

raxxorraxor• 8 months ago

Usually 5 - 10 years later the industry will cry because of lacking competence and being left behind by new companies from nations that can produce cheaper and themselves.

It turns out there is little value in management alone. It will be cut loose like the rest. Perhaps these companies can become patent trolls.

Also they have a very hard time to find new talent since word gets around. Sometimes it works for industries like textile, but not always, and it doesn't work for engineering.

It mostly works for low budget or high volume products. It is still a bad long term strategy. Still, outsourcing didn't just start yesterday.

dehrmann2• 9 months ago

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

dingnuts2• 9 months ago

sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets

CivBase• 9 months ago

I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.

echelon• 9 months ago

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech.

The era of American developer exceptionalism is over.

Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor.

You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts.

It's not just React. Overseas markets have DevOps, SREs, embedded, systems engineers, you name it.

For years Americans joked that overseas labor was subpar. It's not, or at least it isn't in today's world.

hshdhdhj44444• 9 months ago

Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t justify our higher salaries anymore.

Just outright insane.

YZF• 9 months ago

Offshoring didn't start in Covid and it still has the issues of time zone, culture, etc.

You're not wrong in that companies are looking to hire in cheaper geographies but I think the remote aspect is just a small part of it. Another part is that SV comp has shot through the roof because RSUs. There are also arguably more and better people available in the cheaper geographies.

But it's not a zero sum game and there are still a lot of tech jobs in North America. AI hasn't reduced that total number of jobs.

xienze• 9 months ago

All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

Here’s the thing though. People have been trying to outsource software development since the late 90s. Every time I’ve been around offshoring efforts wherever they were implemented, a few years later onshoring would happen again. It turns out time zones, thick Indian accents, and poor quality control have been and still are major obstacles to overcome.

candiddevmike2• 9 months ago

There are plenty of studies showing that remote work increases productivity that have been published before or after COVID, and similar case studies showing the dangers of off shoring. In a perfect world, a business that correctly understands these studies would be rewarded.

questionableans5• 9 months ago

Admittedly privileged counterpoint: I want to work with the best co-workers in the world. Most candidates I’ve interviewed both in the US and in other countries aren’t anywhere near that level. If just anybody will do for a job, I’ll probably get bored and frustrated by it.

High pay has been a mixed blessing for the tech field. For every aspiring top mathematician or physicist who’s been tempted by the pay and relevant new problems, I often feel like we’ve gotten 10x as many people who would otherwise have been uninspired doctors and lawyers or top business majors.

oxfordmale• 9 months ago

Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence.

In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online for months, and they are now reducing the amount of work they outsource to India.

We will see something similar happen to other companies in a year or two, but until then we just have to tighten our belts and hope we don't get layed off before then.

whoknowsidont12• 9 months ago

No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies.

Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like.

It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print.

Workers need to be more intelligent and what was that word you used in your comment... "collective."

The U.S. managerial class has been GORGING off worker's labor for decades and workers are about to have nothing to show for it.

gedy3• 9 months ago

Like every person I knew who "went remote" was so they could afford a home. Which they weren't able to do next to office with what you all are paying.

It wasn't some digital nomad work in my jammies lifestyle thing. It gets tiresome to hear: "see it's all your fault"

blackqueeriroh2• 9 months ago

Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts, and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed internet isn’t uniform enough for folks to be able to just work from home.

Additionally, companies can’t just hire individuals in other countries. They have to set up business entities and that costs significant money to do. It’s why they mostly work with outsourcing companies, who often do have offices where these people come in and work.

phil213• 9 months ago

One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of industry I can think of in my lifetime.

I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the world who could even compete at their level. No project managers anywhere who could do the job for less than $200k/yr.

One the dam broke and it was clear that remote work could be productive it simply opened up a rather insular industry to extreme worldwide competition. Far more smart and talented folks out there in the world than many anticipated.

The hubris was (and is) crazy to me.

throw-523• 9 months ago

I think it's both more simple and more complex than AI or out-sourcing, though these are symptoms. Leadership everywhere is just kind of moving further away from reality, and don't care about progress, results, or fundamentals as they focus more on optics and spin, and controlling narratives or choices. Circular financing, ad fraud, trendy scam products or whole sectors.. does anyone want to do anything real when it's easier to make huge profits being fake? Enshittification is another sign of the times, but that's just about products and platforms, we need a better term. That leadership really wants a scammy rotten economy/product/company which ignores quality isn't that surprising, but the extent to which investors and even workers are often onboard too is surprising. Vandalism economy? Expertise simply isn't valued for the same reason that enlightenment values and rationalism generally are on the decline, in SWE sure, but also just in general.

acephal• 9 months ago

Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice" and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring. The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire premise of American labor exceptionalism was built on this faulty assumption. And rather than reconfigure your negotiation as labor, your first thought is how you can get back in the good graces of the 'big boss'.

nickpsecurity2• 9 months ago

I didn't think about that but you may be right. I think what might be non-debatable is that setting up the ability to work remotely definitely makes it easier to outsource someone's job. Whether that's causal or makes sense with other factors would vary company by company. Remote jobs are easier to outsource, though.

One of my friends from school has long worked in robotics. He showed me a machine he programmed to cut glass or something at a Volvo factory. I asked him about outsourcing back then. He told me his job required being physical plant to assess, program, and monitor it. He was going to stick with that over the higher-paying alternatives that he believed would be outsourced or automated more easily. Today, outsourcing only threatens work opportunities for one of us.

leros• 9 months ago

I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many companies are laying off their US engineering teams and replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans, produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great English. It seems like a no-brainer to go offshore.

groundzeros20159• 9 months ago

This could not have been said here in 2021 or 2022. It’s disappointing to see how easily opinions change with the zeitgeist.

ugh123• 9 months ago

100%

ponector3• 9 months ago

Cannot fully agree with this. I've just been fired from remote job. My remote contact position after 4 years was replaced with internal full-time position. I could convert to employee if I was willing to relocate to Bratislava and take a huge pay cut. I'm in Eastern Europe already, but cannot agree to €40k salary offer.

It's not like they don't have money, it was an insurance company with $1bn in quarterly profit. Market is extremely unfavorable for IT talents currently.

time0ut• 9 months ago

My company has been intentionally causing attrition in the US by moving to effectively a 996 style schedule. As people quit, their positions are moved to the India office. It is not an officially communicated policy. I have just surmised this based on private conversations with the executives and what is actually happening.

RobRivera• 9 months ago

This is my conclusion as well, get the cost center down to good enough after threats from competition is relatively secured.

I think this is going to be a new golden age kf innovation. Lot of senior engineers capable of pencil whipping microservice infrastructure paired with industry experience means startup mill goes brrrr

hirako20002• 9 months ago

Exactly this, articles of that tone are starting to surface. AI is often the pretext, because it makes sense to replace labour with technology. The dissonance is why those who make layoff decisions refuse to accept reality, that AI does not replace staff.

One thing also contradicting the "AI can do it" argument, is that a business's playbook is to rather expand the work force in order to multiply the effect of technology. Yet they lay off in waves.

There is no dissonance, just a disguise: Several big tech companies in the US cut their workforce, in the US, while expanding it in countries where talent is cheaper.

Paradoxally, junior folks have it even worse. It has become very difficult to land a job without experience, again, in the US. It all makes sense, if you replace US based senior staff with Junior staff on different time zone, and having a different culture, you are left with nobody to mentor and supervise junior so staff.

I still can't explain how ending up with more Junior staff, offshore, less senior staff and little to no Junior staff locally will pay off in the long term.

I guess I will figure that out, but for now that's one piece of the puzzle I can only call an "economic downturn" outlook.

candiddevmike2• 9 months ago

Or it's just plain, boring cost cutting because finance is looking down the barrel of a grim YoY outlook. Companies are hurting, and GenAI can't get people to spend more money with them.

com2kid6• 9 months ago

The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to completely destroy our international competitiveness.

Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs.

Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed.

Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that America is competitive in on a large scale.

groundzeros20159• 9 months ago

Don’t you have this backwards? People want to live in the bay because it has high salaries education etc, so the housing market is competitive. Everyone wants to live there

torginus7• 9 months ago

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.

All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'.

Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it.

But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games.

'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.

This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.

franktankbank• 9 months ago

What dev to do then?

rcbdev• 9 months ago

This markedly does not apply if the stack is esoteric enough and/or the code is bad enough.

BobbyTables2• 9 months ago

You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new devs are going to fix subtle race conditions…

They’ll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away though..

captainkrtek3• 9 months ago

'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.

From my time at AWS, and in light of the recent DynamoDB dns race condition bug, this is a line of thinking that is problematic.

There is so much complexity in the inner workings of any one of those services. Many of those services are now composed of many teams, each having turned over completely multiples of times.

Yes there are runbooks and knowledge passed down from each generation, to some extent. But when you hit some critical outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems have such a different relationship to the system having simply maintained it vs. built it.

ncphillips• 9 months ago

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.

Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.

etruong42• 8 months ago

I am finding this to be the new "meta" for the software development lifecycle. Given this new reality, it's getting harder and harder to actually invest in ambitious, green-field projects. In this new meta, individual contributors and leadership don't trust each other, leading to a vicious feedback loop of making it harder and harder to jumpstart ambitious projects.

It's hard to commit to a green-field project that is predicated on a level of risk that leaders are hesitant to take on as they would also take on the "counterparty risk" of the expert individual contributors holding them over the barrel to finish the project. The expert individual contributors are likewise hesitant to devote themselves to the task knowing that once leadership considers the "hard bits" to be done, leadership's aversion to risk will try to swap out the expert-individual-contributor roles with much more replaceable roles and ultimately replace the expert individual contributors.

P.S. The parallels between this cycle of mistrust and the modern dating crisis (in the US) does not elude me.

thisisit• 9 months ago

A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to pay 10% of US salaries instead.

With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe. Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI hallucinations at all.

almosthere• 9 months ago

Sorry to hear, as well as to many others.

burningChrome2• 8 months ago

> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough.

Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work.

Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work.

Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support.

The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it.

Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.

arresin2• 8 months ago

But it MUST be cheaper. I mean it just has to be right. Think about the hourly rate. That proves it.

exasperaited2• 9 months ago

This is absolutely crucial to understand.

Because in any country with poor worker protections, the outcome is layoffs regardless.

AI succeeds? Layoffs of unneeded roles.

AI fails? Layoffs to cut expenditure to make up for the written-off expenditure.

In the UK, if AI makes a well-established employee redundant, the employee is entitled to redundancy pay. And if the company fucks up and overspends on chasing a ridiculous Macguffin they can't just fire people without making them formally redundant.

The damage that is going to be done in the USA if the AI bubble bursts is going to be generational.

lisbbb6• 9 months ago

It already is. The US is currently missing an entire generation of journeyman tech workers because they never got hired in the first place. It's like when Cash for Clunkers got rid of so many used vehicles that it caused market distortions for years.

hexbin0102• 8 months ago

they can't just fire people without making them formally redundant

They are however pretty well trained in getting people to quit by making their job/life hell, avoiding all redundancy processes and cost

exasperaited2• 8 months ago

It's hardly as if the USA is better. People murder each other over workplace problems there.

But I guess if they want another tool to help make the workplace depressing, hellish, absurd and kafkaesque, congratulations everybody Microsoft just built it into Windows and Office365 and everything else.

jbreckmckye2• 9 months ago

Slightly tangential to the article: a lot of the "AI layoffs" are really just old fashioned layoffs, but with exciting press releases meant to reassure investors.

AMZN for example overhired in various functions because it expected demand that never materialised. Admitting that is bad for the share price, but writing some woo about "AI and agility" will convince at least some investors to keep the faith.

alecco5• 9 months ago

This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o

Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens of billions of investments in new offices.

Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening:

Microsoft announces US $3bn investment over two years in India https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-... (Jan 2025)

Google announces $15B investment in AI hub in India https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-vi... (3 weeks ago)

[Indian] ex-Accenture CTO named Google Cloud’s Chief Product https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-na... (last week) (a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India)

Big Tech giants defy US-India trade tensions, record strongest 12-month headcount growth in India in 3 years https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy... (September)

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-indi...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-t...

and so on. Something very crazy is going on.

NOTE: I am not American and this doesn't affect me directly.

thedevilslawyer• 9 months ago

Confirmation bias, maybe? 15B is like 1.5% of a trillion dollars currently being invested in AI..

manquer3• 9 months ago

A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work .

It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of people work on curating data for model training.

Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business processing massively is just inline with that.

Any compute investment is largely local . Internet and Electricity is expensive and erratic, there is red tape, loads of import duties, there are dozens of cheaper places for cheap data centers.

All this to say it is not the kind of outsourcing you think it is.

—-

There is a some amount of high tech outsourcing happening, those are driven by challenges in getting even a business visa in last 5 years.

those numbers are quite small in aggregate won’t be news worthy.

India simply does not have that kind of high quality talent pool .

The education system is both expensive and very poor. There is shortage of qualified teachers, even bigger shortage of good ones. Students and parents just want to get a “degree” /maximize scores to get a job, There is little interest to learn.

alecco5• 9 months ago

A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work .

Then why are they giving one year of free accounts for developers to the whole country? Remember they have about one million CS graduates every year. Do you see the scale of costs?

krackers2• 9 months ago

is just annotation and labeling kind of work

Given that this is presumably all data used for RLHF'ing, I wonder how much of this is responsible for things like LLM "sycophancy" or the issue of "hallucinations". What if the reward-hacking entity isn't the LLM/optimizer but the human annotator in the loop.

axelthegerman• 8 months ago

[...] just want to get a “degree” /maximize scores to get a job, There is little interest to learn.

Seems to be more and more common these days in general :-/

HarHarVeryFunny7• 9 months ago

I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs.

Not that I believe Trump actually cares about US jobs, let alone thinks strategically about the importance of a strong software sector, but you might expect him to at least do another mafia-style shakedown of the companies outsourcing jobs. Heck, you might think he'd even care about all the lost tax revenue, by having developer salaries going to India rather than staying here.

jdlshore• 9 months ago

Check out the HIRE Act.

sumedh3• 9 months ago

I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs.

They might use it for the next elections, all the white collar jobs are going out of US, they will bring it back if you elect them again.

alfiedotwtf3• 9 months ago

a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India

Having dealt with A LOT of Accenture “devs”, how do I leverage the barn and then some to short Google!

boulos2• 9 months ago

The article seems to hinge on the core assumption that revenue is much less than spending:

Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025, while AI revenue—which would be used to pay for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software—will not exceed $30 billion this year

While it's clear that the author is summing up the spending from the big players, it's not clear to me that their math is right for revenue. Yes, OpenAI, Anthropic, Thinking Machines, SSI, etc. have pretty limited direct revenue (including zero!).

But this comparison assumes no revenue growth for other top computing users. Some companies are certainly saving money on some tasks and increasing revenue, particularly in fields like customer support. See the confusing figure in section 5 of https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo... .

That chart is by number of respondents and not weighted by revenue. Like the MIT study, it would not be surprising that "just pipe this to an LLM" isn't enough for most fields or companies. But a few have likely made material improvements.

10% of respondents saying they've seen a >10% revenue gain could be substantial, if they're bigger firms with high leverage in computing.

Edit to add: the comparison also makes a classic "GDP vs market cap" style mistake. Capital expenditure has multiple years of useful life. Revenue is annual. You'd want to compare depreciation vs revenue.

DeathArrow• 9 months ago

Many are predicting the AI bubble will burst soon. Then we will see massive layoffs.

shinycode• 9 months ago

Massive amounts of people with unsustainable lifestyle will stop consuming stuff. How will the whole capitalist economy continue to function with massive amounts of medium-high income people not having the same income anymore ?

rvz2• 9 months ago

It's complete market failure.

By the time the AI bubble bursts, those that have investments in those companies would have already exited.

Then in 10 years time, they will look back at how they scammed the back off of the layoffs with AI driving the entire problem.

lmm• 9 months ago

The layoffs have already happened though. Companies are cutting massively even when it's supposedly good times. That's the story.

howmayiannoyyou• 9 months ago

AI processing hardware deprecates (and depreciates) at a much faster rate than conventional CPUs, as much as 50% per year. Consider the billions being dumped into compute at that rate of depreciation and explain to me:

1. How will tangible assets generate profit net of near term capex requirements and interest on debt?

2. Why wouldn't payroll shrink as a result of the increased AI capabilities emerging from the capex spend?

3. If AI lives up to the hype & given recent news that public backstops are being requested, why shouldn't the US quasi-nationalize cash strapped players and distribute equity to every American?

4. As NVDA and AAPL local models and local compute eat into utility and base automation business, how do edge players maintain profitability without pricing capabilities well beyond the affordability of SMBs and individuals?

zkmon2• 9 months ago

So, jobs are being replaced by AI spending (not by AI), and AI spending is increasing because of AI, which means AI is replacing the jobs. Did I get wrong?

HarHarVeryFunny7• 9 months ago

I suppose the distinction is worth making, since if it was actual AI replacing jobs, i.e. AI that is capable enough, today, to do someone's job, or more likely to increase someone's productivity so that headcount can be reduced, then that would seem a permanent shift and is only going to ratchet up.

OTOH, if it is only dreams of AI, manifested as AI spending, or CEOs laying people off thinking that AI will soon (even if not today) be capable of backfilling them, then this may well backfire, and will be "reversed" if demand is less than forecasted and/or job-replacing AGI doesn't materialize, and all we get is productivity tools, useful mostly for a narrow band of jobs.

Incidentally, I think Karpathy might be right that there is pretty much only one job that seems it actually could be replaced by AI today, at least potentially, which is call center tech support, or customer support, staff, who are dealing with a narrow domain and just reading off a script.

zkmon2• 9 months ago

Spending is happening only because, it promises to replace workers. And that possibility arises only because AI exists. Spending is only a means, not a cause.

rvz2• 9 months ago

correct

phplovesong• 9 months ago

Absolute garbage site. After all the popups it redirects to some general page. No sign of OPs arcticle.

heywoods• 9 months ago

This article gets the phenomenon right but the causation wrong: it's not "AI spending vs. AI replacing jobs". both are happening simultaneously, and they're causally linked.

The spending-revenue gap is real. Hyperscalers are projected to spend $300-550B on AI infrastructure in 2025[1] while generative AI revenue won't exceed $30-40B [2]. Amazon's capex jumped from $48B in 2023 to $84B in 2024 to a projected $100B+ in 2025[3], that's capital intensity doubling from historical norms of 11-16% to over 22% [4].

But here's what the article misses: this isn't financial desperation. When Amazon's CEO announces 14,000 layoffs and explicitly states that AI will enable "fewer people doing some jobs"[5], he's revealing the strategic logic — show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. Companies aren't cutting jobs despite AI spending; they're cutting jobs because they know AI spending will pay off.

To be clear, the article treats the spending-revenue gap as evidence of irrationality. But infrastructure buildouts always precede revenue: railroads looked insane before they transformed commerce, electricity grids consumed massive capital before delivering returns, the internet required enormous infrastructure investment before creating trillion-dollar companies.

What's different now is companies are pulling the future forward. If we take this article at face value which I can appreciate is a BIG “if” then AI is already automating 25% of tasks and delivering 10-55% productivity gains[6] so they're not waiting for AI to replace jobs organically. They're cutting headcount now to fund the infrastructure that will make those cuts permanent.

More broadly, this is rational capital reallocation in a winner-take-all race. Companies that don't build AI infrastructure won't gradually decline, they'll lose competitive positioning entirely. That's why Meta is using off-balance-sheet financing for a $27B data center[7], why Oracle is borrowing $25B annually despite already carrying 450% debt-to-equity [8]. They're all-in because the alternative is obsolescence.

The real story isn't "spending causes cuts" it's that AI infrastructure commoditizes human expertise, the complement to compute infrastructure. Companies are trading labor costs for compute infrastructure because they've correctly identified compute as the new moat. The job cuts aren't the price of spending on AI; they're the business model shift that AI enables.

The article is right that we're not seeing mass AI job replacement yet. But the job cuts are happening in anticipation of replacement, not as an unfortunate side effect of spending. That's not desperation just business strategy.

-- 1.(Morgan Stanley: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/morgan-stanley-hy...) 2. (Grand View Research: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/generati...) 3. (CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/06/amazon-expects-to-spend-100-...) 4. (Cerno Capital: https://cernocapital.com/accounting-for-ai-financial-account...) 5. (CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/amazon-layoffs-corporate-wor...) 6. (PwC: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/ai-...) 7. (Fortune: https://fortune.com/2025/10/31/metas-27-billion-bet-turns-ai...) 8. (The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/oracle_ai_debt/)

hackandthink• 9 months ago

"they're cutting jobs because they know AI spending will pay off."

They think they know.

chongli2• 9 months ago

They hope they know. They hope they're not in a bubble. It's the same hope that keeps people in a ponzi scheme.

Tomcollins42• 9 months ago

This misses the point. The expenditure is financed by stock price increases driven by retail enthusiasm. Meta hasn't spent 1 dollar in AI that it hasn't made in increased mcap. The moment that dries up all the data centers are cancelled. You don't play with the food you eat.

pjmlp6• 9 months ago

I can tell that editors doing CMS translations, marketing images have certainly been replaced.

Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration.

Thinking that AI isn't replacing jobs is wishful thinking.

system211• 9 months ago

Those are tools, not jobs.

jjk1663• 8 months ago

The combine harvester and the automated telephone switchboard were tools. If a tool allows for tasks to be done with much less labor, and the quantity of those tasks that need doing don't increase by a commensurate amount, then it does mean replaced jobs. The people replaced may move into new and perhaps even better jobs, either at different employers or transforming their current roll, but the job they once had is in lower demand.

pjmlp6• 8 months ago

Tell that to the people that were using those tools, now looking for a new job.

jollyllama2• 8 months ago

Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the particulars of this.

pjmlp6• 8 months ago

Look into iPaaS products.

Workfront Fusion, Workato, Boomi, Power Apps, OutSystems

Basically the evolution of BPEL, doing orchestration with any kind of microservices exposed via APIs, which can themselves be exposed via API endpoints.

Now with MCP, tools and agents, some of those diagrams can be further automated.

csullivannet2• 9 months ago

If AI really generates the value it claims to cutting jobs is short sighted. If existing human knowledge is commoditized, then we should be able to invest in generating new knowledge, and creating new kinds of products that were not even possible before.

J_Shelby_J2• 9 months ago

And if AI makes workers more efficient, then businesses not actively hiring more employees are admitting that even with extra resources they have no strategy to grow their business. Like, if one person is effective as ten people, then a business should be able to grow quicker since their operating costs are effectively lower freeing up capital for growth.

So either their business is a dead end, the inefficiency is at the management layer, or AI isn’t actually making workers more efficient.

jjk1663• 8 months ago

So either their business is a dead end, the inefficiency is at the management layer, or AI isn’t actually making workers more efficient.

I'd bet on all three being generally true.

throw2342342346• 8 months ago

Most businesses have a limit to growth in general (e.g. market size, etc). Doesn't mean they are bad businesses just means they can't grow forever and there is a limit to the demand of that given activity. I argue this applies more so to tech products since they generally are relatively affordable already and for most people aren't price demand constrained. A dead end business w.r.t growth could be a cash positive asset for a very long time depending on what it does and maybe that's OK.

Its why I'm not the biggest believer in "Jevon's Paradox" when it comes to software. Most software projects scale and as such they aren't really cost constrained. Or another way of stating this is "if the idea is good and can make lots of money the cost of dev's isn't a limiting factor" - hence why AI doesn't necessarily increase demand all that much. This is unlike say physical industries where cost can absolutely matter especially if the good is constrained already by affordability.

I think most SWE's know this - they see it with outsourcing as well where cheaper costs don't necessarily mean more software is done; but there is some "hope" that things will be OK.

jayd16• 9 months ago

It's true. Instead of talking about cutting jobs, we'd be talking about all the new companies building new things and AI itself wouldn't be the story.

Instead we're still talking about cost cutting. Seems the market is not focused on investing outside the AI moonshot gamble.

simianwords• 8 months ago

that's what is happening. the economy is re-arranging itself and layoffs are obviously a part of re-arrangement.

gnarlouse• 9 months ago

MCMA: Make Class-warfare MAD Again

rzwitserloot• 9 months ago

I read in multiple somewhat off-beat sources lacking good info (in the sense "They did not back up their writings and don't enjoy an impeccable track record of such high regard that I will take their word for it", not in the sense "its known untrustworthy drivel") that the hiring rates in the US in particular for 'junior developers' is way, waaaaaaaaaaay down. As in, off a cliff.

I wonder if that's true; I'm not in the US myself so I can't exactly just go have a drink in a place with lots of devs to try to find out.

The reasons are somewhat obvious:

* World economy in general and the US in particular is a rollercoaster, with the current administration being apparently dead set on flip flopping on every decision it makes, and always making extreme decisions. That's not a good time to invest. Hiring juniors is investing.

* AI not necessarily replacing the jobs, but that's not actually relevant: AI has already torpedoed the general notion that 'if you have investor money you gotta spend just hire a bunch of folks; # of employees is the primary yardstick to check company size / success', whether AI works or not. If the boss tells a VP to 'use more AI to get a handle on hiring practices', then they're going to stop hiring juniors because it looks like you're outright refusing a direct order if you hire a bunch. Even if AI 'employees' are useless, you are strongly incentivized not to hire juniors in such an environment. Juniors both lost the job opportunities stemming from companies just hiring folks because they have enough cash to do it and no good idea on where to spend it, and the downside of looking like you aren't on the AI hypetrain, if you hire juniors.

* There's evidently been a rather massive push in particular during the previous administration to get folks from dead end jobs into IT, so there's now an overwhelming amount of junior devs, and many of them didn't naturally get drawn to the profession; they were told it's an easy way to get a steady job.

* Even though there's some downturn/uncertainty, seniors/mediors aren't being fired because companies still remember how expensive and difficult it was to (re)hire dev teams post COVID. But that just makes the market for juniors even worse and makes it harder to hold out hope. When everybody is getting fired, then once the economy is in better shape you stand a good chance. But that's not happening; those mediors and seniors are continuing to get job experience whilst the juniors aren't.

Those 4 combined: Sure, yeah, I can imagine your average junior dev's odds to get hired are at this point well into the single digits. But is that actually true?

arisAlexis• 9 months ago

There is incredible norlmancy bias lately and hopium. Yes it does and yes it will much much more. Preface all writings with "yet" if you will.

osigurdson• 9 months ago

I'd say the biggest problem is AI complacency, something like: "in the future our revenues will be the same but won't need any people". So, in order to prepare for this future the obvious course of action to do some layoffs and just chill for a while. The problem is, we don't really know when this future will happen. If it is soon, maybe companies are making the right bet, if not it is more like a deliberate choice to slow down. That's fine if one or a few companies choose this path as competition will correct the error. However, if they essentially all move in unison competition won't fix the problem and we'll have a self-inflicted economic contraction for no reason.

The other factor is, will revenues really stay the same for companies once we have AGI / super intelligence? It seems value will not accrue to the companies that are in chill mode.

johnjames87• 9 months ago

Everytime automation replaced jobs the economies created by this replacement always created new jobs that replaced the previous ones. The USA has always been on the forefront of automating away jobs and it's unemployment rates show that new jobs were always created and that there was no long-term unemployment due to automation. AI won't be any different.

throw2342342346• 9 months ago

We shall see. Most automations didn't automate the "controller/intelligence" part - they automated the actual task's labor (even if it was clicking for hours on a computer screen). Someone still needed to make all the decisions at every decision point. AI is fundamentally different if it approaches what AI proponents want; it surpasses human intelligence and has "agency/agentic".

On a side note this is why I find proponents that state people with agency will thrive in the AI world puzzling -> isn't the whole point of "agentic AI" to have "agency"?

With no advantage left (e.g. strength, intelligence, agency, etc) even if new industries come about why not use the AI for those too? Unlike previous industries where new domains needed more "brains" to drive/direct it, we have AI now. AI isn't a tool; it can for example deploy and can make decisions for itself. That's what the obsession with "agentic" is all about - replacing agency which at the moment was the very general domain that you still needed humans for.

This strongly favors the economic means of production remaining that are still scarce (capitalism rewards the scarce, not the efficient). Land, capital, social connections/nepotism, etc. Logically people without these will be less economically and socially valued in general - I hope I'm wrong. The current productive class have the most to lose from AI.

AI IMO breaks meritocracy and skilled based work long term assuming they succeed. Even if not in the next decade, and not the current crop of companies pushing it I'm sure AI will eventually cause this outcome.

tamimio3• 9 months ago

AI is just the scapegoat; otherwise we should see jobs like administrative assistant, legal, and medical replaced first. But I also think engineering is the worst field to get into. It's neither protected by a license like other white-collar jobs nor by a union like most blue-collar jobs. You end up overworked plus debt from school like white-collar workers but getting paid worse than blue-collar workers. And everyone's okay with that for some reason. Not a single organization is trying to change it. The government is happy with it, companies are obviously loving it, and on top of that, engineers are building the systems to replace them in a few years and they still think they are smart..

fruitworks2• 9 months ago

there's the PE license

tamimio3• 9 months ago

It’s not mandatory, if an employer chose not to care about it, you won’t find any legal issues otherwise in most engineering jobs, that’s not the case in say nursing or legal work. Unless there’s a regulation that requires any engineer should pass certain criteria as seen in other white collar jobs, then it won’t be considered.

groundzeros20159• 9 months ago

Software development is by nature a boom and bust industry, probably most like film. It’s about creative and isosyncratic contractors picking up projects when they are available.

What most people aspiring for a white collar career probably want is a job in IT - managing technology for business is much more stable than developing novel tech.

If the thought of needing to move or lose a job strikes you as horrible, this is not a likely career path for you.

tamimio3• 9 months ago

Neither software development nor IT work is engineering work and shouldn't be considered one either. I am talking about engineering jobs, jobs that you went to school for 4-5 years in an engineering discipline, not a few weeks bootcamp or made-up program like computer science only to be called an engineer later, diluting the whole industry in the process. So yeah, software development might be boom and bust, engineering is not.

siliconc0w2• 9 months ago

There is certainly pressure to spend money on and use AI tools. I know multiple people at different companies whose managers brought up low AI utilization in their reviews. This is, of course, really stupid but here we are.

harshaw• 9 months ago

Why? I look at this. I want engineers to use the tools on the stuff that AI is good at so we can do more high value work.

siliconc0w2• 8 months ago

It's measuring inputs instead of outputs. If AI is useful, it'll get used.

s-lambert• 8 months ago

If it's obviously useful then people shouldn't need to be prodded into using it. Maybe there are actual downsides to rushing through everything with AI, maybe people can't actually work on the hard things 100% of the time.

I just don't understand this need to rush, software already moves fast without AI tools. Software developers already make a lot of money for their companies that their salaries are easily covered. Realistically people could develop software 10x slower than now and the world would still keep progressing.

EricDeb• 9 months ago

American devs should support the hire act bill

silisili• 9 months ago

25% isn't nearly high enough. Seems more like a government money grab than an effective tool.

downrightmike3• 9 months ago

Just a shake down. "Be a shame if your store windows were to break" Or like the Tylenol thing being a setup for hostile takeover

qgin3• 9 months ago

AI is absolutely replacing jobs though. I personally know multiple people whose companies have downsized departments or eliminated departments completely, offloading the work to fewer people using AI tools.

mrweasel3• 9 months ago

Here AI is more like a magic solution to stretch the employees you have. I don't know a single person who has been replaced by AI, but plenty of companies and government office hopes to be able to get more work done fast with AI. I doubt it will work.

gtsop• 9 months ago

No the OP is right, we had a whole department vanish: translators. Half laid off and half absorbed to other roles. I am waiting for this to backfire eventually, but even if it does, it will still be cheaper to handle the backfire than employing all those people.

system211• 9 months ago

Can you list a few tools that replaced jobs?

qgin3• 9 months ago

At a big hospital system, nurses call patients with complex medical issues and help organize appointments and tests and whatnot. Previously, they had about 20 people who would transcribe recordings of the calls and then write up documentation for the medical records. Now AI transcribes and writes the report and sends it to the nurse to sign off / make edits.

enraged_camel• 9 months ago

I've been seeing AI-based call center software replacing jobs in droves. This has affected my company negatively as well, since a good chunk of our own users are call center employees.

nickpsecurity2• 9 months ago

re title

I literally just said that on Reddit:

"They [big companies] were already laying off lots of people and hoarding around 100 billion in cash. This has nothing to do with AI. The elites have been at that for some time for who knows what reason. If anything, they didn't start spending money until the AI boom.

You could say AI is destroying jobs for a different reason. The leaders of the companies believe in gold rushes more than a steady stream of investments into forming and growing actual businesses. They didn't or don't believe America is worth investing in. They're simply about extraction."

moominpapa• 9 months ago

Lost my previous job not to AI but to a pincer movement of Indians taking up positions here in the UK effectively forming a bridgehead to subsequently have the non-management roles outsourced to India. From purely my own anecdotal experience, I found my Indian coworkers very friendly when I could provide something, but once they had the whip hand their attitude was markedly different.

MagicMoonlight• 9 months ago

They then get visas for the outsourced workers to bring them over. And I’m sure they get a nice backhander for arranging it.

vivzkestrel• 8 months ago

indian dude here, sorry to hear that. The way it gets talked over in local circles is that most people dont like the concept of minimum wage when they have to pay someone. The thing about most Indians is that they dont have clear distinct personal time vs professional time. Even if a boss asks them to make a presentation at 10 pm, they'll do it. They feel that people of other nationalities mostly developed countries would not put up with such workplace behavior. Unfortunately it is a race to the bottom on that one

azan_• 9 months ago

I think it's not even AI spending, but just the end of ZIRP.

Animats• 9 months ago

From the article: "We have been following the slow growth in revenues for generative AI over the last few years, and the revenues are neither big enough to support the number of layoffs attributed to AI, nor to justify the capital expenditures on AI cloud infrastructure. Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025, while AI revenue—which would be used to pay for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software—will not exceed $30 billion this year."

Are the numbers really that bad?

Google has been claiming that their cost per AI search query has dropped by over an order of magnitude.[1] They're presumably reaping the gains of not cranking up a really smart model on dumb questions.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-th...

ultra_nick• 9 months ago

AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending isn't either. It's outsourcing and can be easily confirmed by cross-referencing H1B approval rates with layoffs.

If you've been outsourced, ask your representative to support the HIRE Act: - Creates a 25% tax on outsourcing payments - Creates a “Domestic Workforce Fund” for apprenticeships/workforce development. - Prohibits companies from deducting outsourcing payments.

klysm2• 9 months ago

How do you prevent thin wrapper organizations that just contract out “services”?

evilduck3• 9 months ago

If we're hypothesizing, then the thin wrapper organizations should or would bear those same taxation and penalty costs when outsourcing and their prices would also be going up.

downrightmike3• 9 months ago

You don't, you get turtles all the way down the same way they avoid taxes.

daxfohl• 9 months ago

I'd say it's more "cost reduction" overall. And it makes sense to me. From my experience over the last few years, features are increasingly lower marginal ROI, and seem to take longer and longer to launch because the amount of coordination required keeps going up. Plus generally expected revenues in this economy are trending downward, so it only makes sense to reduce staffing and focus on only the highest priorities.

yalogin• 9 months ago

AI spending is replacing jobs now but all of this spending is in preparation and anticipation of the real AI replacing jobs

zerolayers• 9 months ago

Here's a fictional take on it, yet sadly based on real events: https://syntheticauth.ai/posts/synthetic-auth-the-power-prob...

nsainsbury3• 9 months ago

I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon.

And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.

IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.

And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.

ireadfaces• 9 months ago

It is interesting that a similar thing happened when millions of manufacturing jobs were offshored to China and other low-cost sites. Now it has come to the tech industry, and every other industry where it is possible. It hurts when it comes to us. (Speaking as a person in tech in high COL). I hope we will find other roles as people found when they moved on from manufacturing roles too

etoxin• 9 months ago

I'm seeing the same thing in Australia.

These new tech companies/existing companies were not here for the first wave of offshoring engineers many years ago. basically, the product/service degraded and they brought the product/service back onshore.

It's a cycle that will repeat. Product degrades, there will be public outrage, then they will onshore the product to fix the problems caused from offshoring.

nsainsbury3• 9 months ago

IMO, things are different this time (as someone who has been in this industry for about 20 years now) and I don't see these jobs coming back.

For one, many of these companies are now used to their tech teams being remote. The tools, culture, infra, etc. over the last ~5 years has all become remote which lessens the shock of going fully offshore.

Two, many tech teams in the western world are already partially offshored and have been for some time now. I know where I worked, a reasonable % of the team was already offshore in low COL countries (India, etc.). What's happening now is just the expansion of that cost saving after initial testing of the waters was successful.

Three, the quality gap between offshore teams and their western counterparts is now much smaller, and AI will be used to lessen the gap even further (along with just throwing more bodies at each problem which you can do when your salaries are 1/3rd of what they are here).

Four, many products/services now have captured markets with strong network effects, which means they can weather a heavy degradation of services with little to no loss of customers. It's called enshittification, and businesses are doing it now because they absolutely know they can, and get away with it.

Maxious• 9 months ago

Most famously Optus is bringing their network operations back on-shore after a mismanaged firewall upgrade was linked to three deaths from customers unable to contact emergency services https://www.itnews.com.au/news/optus-fast-tracks-network-ope...

notaurus• 9 months ago

Sorry for snooping—if this is about Foxtel, they were also sold to a UK company this year right?

I guess you’d expect some staff turnover, but not mass layoffs.

nsainsbury3• 9 months ago

Yep, sold to DAZN. Who in turn do all their development out of Hyderabad, India. Almost entire tech team locally is gone now with handover done to that team.

j-bos3• 9 months ago

At the fortune 500 I work at there's no sweeping layoffs that I've seen. There is a big emphasis on AI, but more relevant to the concerns, there are scoped hiring freezes for US workers, new offshore hires are greenlit though. And I can't help but wonder, what happens to a state when most of its critical infrastructure directly depends on another external state.

j-bos3• 9 months ago

Actually on further consideration, this darkly hilarious, it's doing to knowledge work what's already been done to manufacturing.

abustamam2• 9 months ago

I think the company I work for has a pretty pragmatic approach for AI utilization. Don't use it to replace jobs, use it to make jobs more efficient (we call it an "enhancer"). IE we won't lay people off, at least not because of AI, we just may not hire as quickly as we did before LLMs, but still attaining similar scale. This goes for all departments, not just tech. We have very strict standards on what code gets accepted (no slop). Whether it's AI generated or not is irrelevant; even senior engineers can be guilty of slop after a long day. But we do have regular meetings to discuss our AI usage and to converge upon common patterns and rules to level everyone up.

That being said, I think we as a society are quickly reaching the point where there just doesn't exist enough jobs to keep everyone gainfully employed. There may be new jobs opening up but not ones that people in the middle or ends of their careers can quickly pick up on. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily, just that when combined with the shitty safety net that the US has, it's a recipe for disaster. If even folks who are working full-time still need assistance for groceries, then we've already failed, and that's not even AIs fault.

danielschreber• 9 months ago

use it to make jobs more efficient

I left IT for the time being, but I ask copilot.microsoft.com a question once in a while to see if we've got to AGI yet.

Today's question (I admit not so creative) was what's the market cap of TSLA.

Its answer was "Tesla Inc. (TSLA) currently has a market capitalization of approximately $429.52 billion USD. This figure is based on the latest trading price of $429.52 per share"

It allegedly used a web search to find this out, and it included a screenshot showing the market cap as $1.4B.

On the other hand, chatgpt.com prudently tells me to go look it up myself, because it doesn't have live data.

I guess OpenAI is winning?

abustamam2• 8 months ago

I never use LLMs to get current data. Sometimes for fun I'll ask it for product recommendations and it'll routinely make up products that don't exist and confidently even generate links for such products.

But for code generation, Claude is awesome. ChatGPT is OK too but I've had much better results with Claude. Weird things happen if a new version it a library came out with breaking changes though. You'll have to write rules or ensure that the new apis are in context.

But that's kinda my point. It's not good enough to replace a human, but it is good enough to make a human more efficient.

mattfrommars• 9 months ago

I can assure you a lot of veteran devs in my company who had major impact were let ago because of off shoring to India and Poland. My employer is a very well known financial institution, think Blackrock, Bloomberg etc.

Public press paints picture of the firm laying off due to adoption of AI. Yet, I can assure you without doubt its not because of it but due to continued offshore.

I think we are at the brink of opening another large campus in India, not sure which city. Oh another thing is these full time position in NA were eliminated and replaced with employees from TCS.

My own boss is against it but its coming from higher ups. I have no idea what's driving them. We made billion in net revenues last year and we are actually part of the org that is in 'cash cow' category - upper management literally said this too in our town halls

JumpCrisscross• 9 months ago

Are visa restrictions deterring or promoting this offshoring?

epicureanideal2• 9 months ago

Let them offshore if that’s what’s going to happen. And then let the stats show that American employment in certain sectors is tanking, and let the electorate decide what to do about that. Basically, I think this is a multi-round game rather than a one or two round game.

altcognito• 9 months ago

But you can make more money. And if you don't, then it's crime against the fiduciary.

amypetrik8• 8 months ago

Exactly, you're on the hook to profit-max for the next quarterly earnings report. If that may negatively impact subsequent quarters, not your problems, that's to be resolved when profit-maxing those quarters

davedx7• 8 months ago

I'm not sure if this is a tongue in cheek comment or not, but it's a myth that leadership has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits at all costs.

macbem• 8 months ago

The market is not so hot in Poland either right now, so I guess the flow to India continued or the funds have become more limited.

56J8XhH7voFRwPR• 8 months ago

This is my company too. Also large financial firm based in US. They say AI, but what they really mean is "Always Indian".

Wojtkie• 8 months ago

Yeah, same here except in Retail. All the hiring is in the Indian campus where they can pay junior devs 11/hr compared to the 80/hr billed by Kforce, InfoSys, et. al.

hamstergene• 8 months ago

I am really surprised how well AI excuse works, most journalists just take CEO words as is, and make no effort to assess: is that even credible?

Obviously layoffs correlate with AI age, but it's most definitely not AI replacing jobs, not yet. Even in 2025 stories about a job fully taken by AI need to be scraped for, and it's almost always about non-SWE jobs. And in 2023, when the first layoffs already started, models sucked and none of the existing tools and agents even existed yet! But if you search for example for headcount growth in India/Mexico, the numbers can only be described as "booming".

I don't know what exactly is going on, but it's pretty obvious the companies are moving offshore or simply doing less work, and for some reason need to lie about why.

Rastonbury• 8 months ago

The Mag 7 minus Nvidia are not the only employers, the cloud providers while big are a microcosm of tech which one industry. 99% of other companies aren't investing in data centers.

yadaeno• 8 months ago

Something like the hire act bill is the only solution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...

AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

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