Ask HN: How are you dealing with anxiety with layoffs?
2 pointsby throwaw12an hour ago1 comment
  • karamanolevan hour ago
    I am a technical director in a non-tech, but high growth company. Our team of engineers is 15-20 people. We have so SO many more projects we'd like to do than what we have capacity for. It's hard to really do compress 2 weeks in 2 hours - our company is 10 years old, we're dealing with (some) legacy data, legacy systems, outside systems. We debug, trace, conceptualize problems, test them with people (often our own employees for which we write software). Agents can 10-100x small parts of this loop and have no effect on other parts. Am I worried? A bit. Does it impact my day-to-day work and do I see it having a severe impact in the very near future - not so much.

    Right now, as advice to other people, I'd say: "just don't work in pure-software, SaaS companies where you can rewrite the app in a week with agents". Plenty of such work, many people don't consider it "stereotypically attractive". I love it.

    • taylodl7 minutes ago
      I'll second this. I've worked for multiple Fortune 200 companies as an enterprise architect and I can tell you there is years worth of work in the backlog that development teams aren't even aware of. If they knew, they'd be more stressed-out than they are currently!

      AI is a productivity-enhancement tool. We're working on getting real numbers, but what we'll do is go to our other backlog of work (not the mainstream backlog I was talking about above) that was "shelved" because the ROI didn't make sense. Well, with increased productivity it might make sense now. That would add even more work to the backlog.

      I get it. A lot of people here on HN pay attention to FAANG and startups. Well, the FAANG companies are now decades old and have pretty much run their course. Startups have always been dicey, but nowadays we're back to the model before the mid-90s where industry experience mattered more than being a so-called "serial entrepreneur." All that is to say if you're Gen X and were in this industry back in the 80s and early 90s, then things are looking very familiar.

    • throwaw1236 minutes ago
      Thanks for the perspective, do you use agents in your day to day work? Does your expectations increased for your developers, because they are now at least 20% more productive?