When they say they are laying off workers, they are saying "we signed up for Cursor, and enabled some AI features on Jira and Salesforce"
The layoff is just an excuse until they realize that just because Jira can write a summary of the ticket, doesn't mean the ticket gets done any faster.
If anything it gives all the people downstream more power. The power to justifiably ignore the AI summary and do whatever they originally wanted as they see fit. This makes the people upstream even more obviously redundant than they already were before all the AI slop. The downstream people picking up the slack are effectively promoted.
This is pretty much the definition of a layoff. It's just a different and much more streamlined way this time to weed out the losers. The top AI users within an organization hang themselves by proving they're not needed. The system works.
- Google (a.k.a. Alphabet): $35B
- Microsoft: $27.7B
- Apple: $27.5B
- Nvidia: $26.4B
- Amazon: $21.5B
Feels like Nvidia has too much money and they know whatever they invest in will appreciate thanks to the “AI premium” that investors bestow.
I've been patiently waiting for their resurgence. Building embedded/mobile devices is their forte, which is also coincidentally the hardware space where AI is most poised to shine. Nvidia made a move in the same direction when they tried to acquire ARM. That got antitrusted (fairly so) but investing in a now-decimated telecom company isn't likely to ruffle any feathers this way.
Wouldn't most of those people have gone elsewhere by now? If you're a mobile device superstar, why would you stick around at Nokia once the mobile device part of it crashed and burned?
A company's just a legal structure, people change over time. And that was more than 10 years ago, and didn't they sell their mobile division to Microsoft?
Nvidia quietly in the background is getting more interested in the network side of things and are hiring accordingly. This is an area I don’t really think you have all the details to have an opinion on imo.
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-nokia-ai-telecommu...
It feels like economics in the US is turning into FanDuel mobile gambling. Can we pass a law to disincentivize this garbage and make them start paying dividends again?
Feels gamble-y when the shovel maker is playing weird VC for the gold prospectors like this, but I get the appeal since Nvidia stands to lose everything if this stuff tanks anyhow and it further entrenches Nvidia's own position all while keeping the hype train steaming by moving units.
Google is not at its all-time high, but still pretty close:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
Amazon: similar.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...
Microsoft: all time high?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
It sucks if you need to find work, but these are still major employers, even after large layoffs. They can lay off thousands without much of a dent.
I'm old, I remember when Google was 20k people and I thought that was enormous.
Shuffling money around between AI adjacent companies may (but I doubt it) be enough to keep the AI bubble going through the downturn, in which case stockholders in those key companies manage to ride it out without pain, and executives too because they serve their constituency well.
More likely, it just delays the reckoning.
I'm not seeing it, do you have any proof you can offer that your statement is true?
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
Consumer staples have seen almost a 20% decline in EPS YoY:
https://ycharts.com/indicators/sandp_500_consumer_staples_ea...
A specific example is Chipotle. It could certainly be company specific, but could also highlight a consumer trend.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/chipotle-stock-falls-after-q...
Still, most analysts attributed the slowdown to industrywide challenges, not company-specific issues that Chipotle needs to address. Unemployment, increased student loan repayments and slower real wage growth accounting for inflation are weighing on consumers’ spending, according to Boatwright.
https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/insights/...
EY forecasts 1.7% GDP growth, most of which is AI (~1.1% according to jpmorgan). The broader economy is facing headwinds (policy uncertainty, tariffs, etc etc).
> Overall, underlying economic momentum remained steady in the first half of the year despite mounting policy headwinds. But with the impact of tariffs and policy uncertainty becoming increasingly visible, slower US growth and higher inflation are still on the horizon.
Trump inherited a good economy and set it towards decline. If that's still not clear stay tuned, there's more to come.
I think it's a combination of factors including:
- Overhiring in the past, most of these companies were/are still employing way above the pre-pandemic numbers when overhiring was the norm. Many of these companies legitimately probably have more people than they need still.
- No matter what you think, AI is certainly already capable of improving productivity enough to make up for many of the jobs lost. Just look at how much AI can do today compared to even just a couple years ago. Practically every engineer who is worth their salt can put out way more than they previously could. Yes there is the question of quality and whether that's going to keep up, but you simply cannot argue at this point that AI is not able to increase productivity enough for the decreased headcount. Theres a reason junior hiring has fallen, they expect senior engineers to both output more using AI and to have the capability of effectively reeling it in and reviewing.
- As much as I hate to say it because it gets people angry and political: offshoring. Every company that I've worked on or worked at in the last few years has increased headcount of offshore employees and contractors.
- And lastly is simply expectations. Executives can see that other companies that have let go of people are able to still effectively run much slimmer.
Layoffs aren’t just to “fund AI” - layoffs (a) always happen and (b) likely genuinely make sense at some scale due to efficiency gain from AI.
It’s not “cut employees, send they money in circles to prop up stock prices” it’s “cut employees, like we always do (but more than usual since we have actual AI efficiency gains).” Separately, let’s yeet excess money in circles to prop up our stock price and AI is a great hype cycle vehicle for that.
Yeah layoffs always suck, especially big ones, but they literally always happen and IMO are not caused by AI circlejerking at the c level.
Also, for anyone curious about “AI gains”. In my role at bigtech company I need to have a high/medium level understanding of like 30 products and teams. LLM summaries of docs, tickets, slack, etc mean I can get a basic understanding and history of any topic in seconds, rather than spending hours reading all those sources. My role is not unique or special
I'm not terribly surprised.
Someone will get left holding the bag because someone always gets left holding the bag - often lots of someones.
> Just met a founder who fired his entire team because he was able to individually beat their entire productivity with Claude Code
It just came across as some of the most small-brain thinking that anyone would then "Like" this content and not see it for what it is: idiotic management and leadership and just complete lack of basic foresight.
Why are you hiring absolutely replaceable people in the first place?
Don't forget the implicit admission that "my product can be made in claude code."
Why is the conversation rarely framed 'with AI we will move faster and have more output'?
It feels like companies would be well served to expand their product teams and roadmaps to go bigger, but instead choose to hold the pace now with less headcount.
Or at least that's what many C-level people believe to be true. "We need to move like a startup" is a common mantra repeated by executives, even megacorps like Amazon.
I guess it's true to some degree though, anecdotally as an IC at a tech company, I feel like I could move a lot faster if some people around me removed and replaced by an automation instead.
What they're doing is "doing less with less", as they say.
With that said, I think AI is just cover for the current set of layoffs. Companies are still right sizing from the pandemic/ZIRP over-hiring. Additionally, while none will say it at the risk of angering the administration, the economic uncertainty based on how someone is feeling day to day means companies want to derisk.
Who cares about any other path - get rich quick!!
The flip side is now there's nobody else to troubleshoot when the house of cards inevitably collapses. Whats he gonna do, "Hey Siri, do a security review on this codebase"?
Quantity has a quality of its own, but I feel like if its a website with an iOS app you're just vibe coding your way towards the memes, and if its something actually pushing the envelope one guy and an API key isn't going to cut it, no matter how many tokens you spit out.
You too can be a 1 man startup founder.
It's not even that. It's just straight up lying. The most generous interpretation is that his "team" was Fiverr contractors who were working part-time for $10/hour. More likely is he never had a team to begin with.
You can just say things. You can just say that you've unlocked 1000x productivity gains with AI and "agentic processes" and investors and AI boosters are so eager to believe this nobody will bother fact checking it.
This would be like saying cloud spend was circular because F1000 tech companies represent the majority of cloud spend from a revenue perspective, but tend to sell or partner with those same organizations. For example, AWS and Zscaler, or GCP and Broadcom.
Reality is, a lot of product lines were formed or overhired with little-to-no business justification during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Most of us are now cleaning shop and axing those product lines and features that cannot be attached to tangible revenue generation. Inevitably this leads to ICs getting axed.
If you want to blame someone, blame EMs, PMs, Principal SWEs, and VPs who decided to launch product lines and features for their resume instead of for business justification. (Edit: that said, BeFlatXIII is right that we probably won't have hired most people if this didn't happen at all)
Additionally, comp expectations just got too high - most new grads are not worth $150k-200k TC (some absolutely are though)
But the CEOs have been there all along, doing the math on ZIRP and getting caught up in FOMO. They could have tightened their belts at any time, or demanded better justifications for investments. Why didn’t they?
Because the job of a CEO is not to micromanage. The whole point of hiring middle management is to keep CEOs out of micromanaging decisions.
The job of C-suite is to
1. Be the arbitrator between different orgs
2. Be the primary salesperson - a large portion of corporations will not purchase without a CEO or CTO being in the same room and giving the same promises
3. Manage investor and board relations
We (c-suite, boards) give middle management significant autonomy to shape roadmaps and organizational structure explicitly because we assume they are adults as well. Some amount of lossage and BS is expected, but the kind of financial slack that existed a couple years ago to cushion these blows doesn't exist anymore.
> This feels like abdicating responsibility...
How a tech company is supposed to work is:
1. You get feedback from a cohort of customers. This is primarily collected by the CEO and Sales, as well as PMs.
2. Based on feedback collected, you then decide what to prioritize or build. This is primarily done by Product Management
3. Based on the scoped feature, you then try to understand how long it takes to build and what is the expected cost to build. This is primarily done by Engineering Management and a bit of Product Management
4. Based on the scoped proposal, now you try to project net new ARR and COGS that can be attributed to that proposal. This is done by Product Management with coordination with Sales and a subset of Engineering Management
5. Based on the set of proposals that have come in from all PMs and EMs, you now decide which ones make sense with existing customer demand, and which can drive revenue. This is done by Product and Engineering Leadership.
6. Based on those proposals that passed muster, you now propose an annual operating plan (AOP) to the board to justify headcount allocation. This is done by the C-Suite.
In a normal tech company, the primary steps (2-5) are done without the CEO in the conversation because that is not the job of the CEO. Their job is supposed to be the Sales and Customer Relations Manager for your largest 20 accounts, Investor Relation Management, and arbitrate between the various different functions within an organization.
A CEO is not expected to take part in the larger product creation lifecycle because it creates fear amongst ICs, because no one below the VP level wants to give a CEO unadulterated feedback - even if they really trust them - because of the power differential. This is why most CEO-driven initiatives have been severe boondoggles, such as Zuckerberg and the Metaverse, because no one could tell Mark otherwise and expect to keep their job - even people as powerful internally as Sheryl Sandberg (COO), Mike Schroepfer (CTO), and Marne Levine (CBO).
We are all adults. It is expected that people in your reporting structure are adults who are aligned with the primary incentive of the business - generate growing revenue while maintaining or enhancing COGS.
Mind you, this is the ideal world. Like everything else, humans muck it up. Boards, C-Suites, Mid-Level managers, and line level ICs all have various relationships with each other, and in a lot of cases, rational business decisions are disincentivized in order to prioritize personal decisions.
And they generally got it wrong, so they are in good company with each other. Is that because they were all equally smart? Or because they are sheep?
Arguably, thank them. The alternate is more likely that those jobs never would've existed, not that they'd have the same jobs with same TC but somehow in profitable business units. Enjoy having milked the job while it lasted instead of being stuck in a lower-paying career the entire time.
And the people in charge had no say in the matter.
The highly likely scenario is that: - These people will spend money on "AI" to solve stuff to keep their job - These people will be so slow to respond that they are ripe for disruption/exit.