> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.
You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6 times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.
Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your business. This works great for companies that are already a monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers and prevent competitors.
> Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while
As long as you're
1) In a position where you can make the decisions on whether or not the company should move forward
and
2) Hold the stock units that will be exchanged for money if another company buys out your company
then there's really no way things won't be fine, short of criminal investigations/the rare successful shareholder lawsuit. You will likely walk away from your decision to weaken the company with more money than you had when you made the decision in the first place.
That's why many in the managerial class often hold up Jack Welch as a hero: he unlocked a new definition of competence where you could fail in business, but make money doing it. In his case, it was "spinning off" or "streamlining" businesses until there was nothing left and you could sell the scraps off to competitors. Slash-and-burn of paid workers via AI "replacement" is just another way of doing it.
We have more middle management than ever before because we cut all the other roles, and it turns out that people will desire employment, even if it means becoming a pointless bureaucrat, because the alternative is starving.
I don’t think a lot of people here have been in the typists room or hung out with the secretaries. There were a lot of people taking care of all the things going and this has been downloaded and further downloaded.
There was a time I didn’t have to do my expenses. I had someone just know where I was and who I was working for and and took care of it. We talked when there was something that didn’t make sense. Thanks to computers I’m doing it. Meaningless for sure.
My first boss couldn't type. At all. He would dictate things to his secretary, who would then type them up as memorandums, and distribute to whoever needed them (on paper), and/or post them on noticeboards for everyone to read.
Then we got email, and he retired. His successor can type and the secretary position was made redundant.
heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.
Well, I've worked as a developer in many companies and have never met a DBA. I've met tons of devops, who are just rebranded sysadmins as far as anyone can tell.
> Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc.
Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.
Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.
Because companies made models build/stolen from other people’s work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow.
Shouldn’t we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world as well ?
It’s just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge and should be given back to all people for free. No companies should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building things at all because it’s too expensive and too slow to do by hand ?
It all should freely be made accessible to all humans for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.
I am 4 months into a planned 6 month break. The plan was learn Spanish and do some traveling. After a month I started a side project and haven't focused on much else.
Years of the reward cycle being around shipping code is hard to override I guess.
Seriously and beyond productivity, flow state was what I liked most about the job. A cup of coffee and noise cancelling headphones and a 2 hour locked in session were when I felt most in love with programming.
I'm not at all convinced that "break your concentration and go check on an agent once every several minutes" is a productivity increaser. We already know that compulsively checking your inbox while you try to code makes your output worse. Both kill your focus and that focus isn't optional when you're doing cognitively taxing work--you know, the stuff an AI can't do. So at the moment it's like we're lobotomizing ourselves in order to babysit a robot that's dumber than we are.
That said I don't dispute the value of agents but I haven't really figured out what the right workflow is. I think the AI either needs to be really fast if it's going to help me with my main task, so that it doesn't mess up my state of flow/concentration, or it needs to be something I set and forget for long periods of time. For the latter maybe the "AIs submitting PRs" approach will ultimately be the right way to go but I have yet to come across an agent whose output doesn't require quite a lot of planning, back and forth, and code review. I'm still thinking in the long run the main enduring value may be that these LLMs are a "conversational UI" to something, not that they're going to be like little mini-employees.
Speaking as someone with over 40 years paid programming experience, I've never understood this "flow" thing. I typically do about half an hours typing, get up and walk around, mooch over to colleague and yack bit, or go to the coffee machine, or just think a bit and then go back to the keyboard.
Never used headphones - if the environment is too loud, make it quieter. I once moved into a new office area that had a dot-matrix printer that "logged", in the worst sense of the word (how could you find any access on such a giant printout), every door open/close in the block. It was beyond annoying (ever heard a DM printer? only thing worse is a daisy wheel) so I simply unplugged it, took out the ink ribbon and twisted off the print head. It was never replaced, because as is very often the case nobody ever used the "reports" it produced.
Half an hour of typing would be above average attention span for the youth these days. That's pretty much how Pomodoro Timers start out for people who can't focus at all.
>if the environment is too loud, make it quieter.
we shifted to open office setups over the decades. There may not even be anyway to make things "quieter" externally.
For me AI has given that back to me. I'm back to just getting stuff built, not getting stuck for long when working in a new area. And best of all using AI for cleanup! Generate some tests, refactor common code. The boring corporate stuff.
I love the flow state, and I’m pretty sure it’s fundamentally incompatible with prompting. For me, when the flow state kicks in, it’s completely nonverbal and my inner dialogue shuts up. I think that’s part of why it feels so cool and fun when it hits.
But LLM prompting requires you to constantly engage with language processing to summarize and review the problem.
That's pretty funny because LLM's actually help me achieve flow state easier because they help me automate away the dumb shit that normally kind of blocks me. Flow state for me is not (just) churning out lines of code but having that flow of thought in my head that eventually flows to a solved problem without being interrupted. Interesting that for you the flow state actually means your mind shutting up lol. For me it means shutting up about random shit that doesn't matter to the task at hand and being focused only on solving the current problem.
It helps that I don't outsource huge tasks to the LLM, because then I lose track of what's happening and what needs to be done. I just code the fun part, then ask the LLM to do the parts that I find boring (like updating all 2000 usages of a certain function I just changed).
As someone with no inner monologue, I think I could just as easily "flow" about a non-verbal task like spatial reasoning or a verbal task like reading, writing, or even engaging in a particularly technical or abstract conversation. Unlike you, my resting state is non-verbal and I would not be able to correlate verbal content with flow like that.
To me, flow is a mental analogue to the physical experience of peak athletic output. E.g. when you are are at or near your maximum cardiovascular throughput and everything is going to training and plan. It's not a perfect dichotomy. After all, athletics also involve a lot of mental effort, and they have more metabolic side-effects. I've never heard of anybody hitting their lactate threshold from intense thinking...
My point is that the peak mental output could be applied to many different modes of thought, just as your cardiovascular capacity can be applied to many different sports activities. A lot of analogies I hear seem too narrow, like they only accept one thinking task as flow state.
I also don't think it is easy to describe flow in terms of attention or focus. I think one can be in a flow state with a task that involves breadth or depth of attention. But, I do suspect there is some kind of fixed sum aspect to it. Being at peak flow is a kind of prioritization and tradeoff, where irrelevant cognitive tasks get excluded to devote more resources to the main task.
A person flowing on a deep task may seem to have a blindness to things outside their narrow focus. But I think others can flow in a way that lets them juggle many things, but instead having a blindness to the depth of some issues. Sometimes, I think many contemporary tech debates, including experience of AI tech, are due to different dispositions on this spectrum...
Interesting that for some people flow state is non-verbal. I personally have sort of a constant dialogue in my head (or sometimes muttered out loud under my breath) that I have to buffer or spool into various notes/diagrams/code. The process of prompting winds up being complementary to this—typing out that stream of consciousness into a prompt and editing it becomes a more effective form of reflection and ideation than my own process had been before. Sometimes I don’t even send the prompt—the act of structuring my thinking while writing it having made me rethink my approach altogether.
This really goes to show that everyone's 'flow state' is different.
My inner dialogue is always chatty; that doesn't stop when I enter a flow state. It just becomes far more laser focused and far less distracted. LLMs help to maintain the flow because I'm able to use it to automate anything I don't care about (e.g. config files) and troubleshoot with me quickly to keep the flow going.
I still hit the flow state in cursor, always reviewing the plan for some feature, asking questions, learning, reviewing code. I'm still thinking hard to keep up with the model.
It does feel sometimes like you can't escape. I got tired of the nonstop noise and loud cars of a big city and moved to a smaller suburb. Then I learned about Leaf Blowers. If every neighbor has gardeners come at ~7am once every two weeks, the odds are you will wake up to the soothing sound of a 2 stroke Leaf Blower almost every morning!
Car thing is so sad. For some reason people think it’s socially acceptable to blast music from their car at 7am. I can’t tell if they don’t understand they are annoying people, if they don’t care, or they are just a menace
Welcome to the sound of spring/summer/fall in the suburbs. 7am to 6pm, 6 days a week. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Most landscaping teams have 2-3 dedicated guys who do nothing but leaf blow the entire time they are at a house. Towns have been largely unsuccessful in curbing this, mostly because demand for landscaping services is so high.
> one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license. They said because I’m not an attorney (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis,” which only licensed attorneys are allowed to do.
Do lawyers still really believe they can just throw some legal jargon at laypeople and we will just get confused and back down? Like not only do we have every single law and legal precedent on a device in our pocket, we also have AI's that can instantly answer questions. I am sure shit like that might have worked before 2010 when you would have to scramble to figure out if what they were saying was true or not, but it just seems antiquated to attempt it nowadays.
There are a lot of old laws on the books about licensing that go beyond legal advice.
In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
There was a famous case where someone tried to get some attention about a traffic problem at an intersection in their city. They included a drawing of the intersection. The politicians involved didn’t like person so they tried to retaliate by going after the person for doing civil engineering work (aka making a drawing of a road) without an engineering license.
The worst part is that they actually might have had a case under the licensing laws. The licensing laws are outdated and mostly unenforced, but they’re out there. If you call yourself a software engineer you might be breaking a law in your location.
> In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
that is the case in most countries. the US is an outlier in the First World in that sense.
only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.
Also hilarious to think you can't offer "legal analysis" without a license. As long as you don't do it for hire or while representing yourself as an attorney, the first amendment protects your right to offer your legal analysis of something. The exceptions are either are in regards to offering commercial services or representation without a license, not the underlying speech.
Well, sometimes your compiler will work out how to more efficiently compile a thing (e.g. vectorize a loop), and other times you'll rework some code to an equivalent formulation and suddenly it won't get vectorized because you've tripped some invisible flag that prevents an inlining operation that was crucial to enabling that vectorization, and now that hot path runs at a quarter of the speed it did before.
Technically it's (usually) deterministic for a given input, and you can follow various best practices to increase your odds of triggering the right optimizations.
But practically speaking "will I get the good & fast code for this formulation" is a crap shoot, and something like 99% (99.99%?) of programmers live with that. (you have guidelines and best practices you can follow, kinda like steering agents, but rarely get guarantees)
Maybe in the future the vast majority of programmers put up with a non-deterministic & variable amount of correctness in their programs, similar to how most of us put up with a (in practice) non-deterministic & variable amount of performance in our programs now?
How? Other then calling utility functions that C++ doesn't have you can't just like skip understanding what you are coding by using Python. If you are importing libraries that do stuff for you that wouldn't be any different than if someone wrote those libs in C++.
Are you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way?
The reason is that you no longer really know what's going on. (And yes, that feeling would be the same if C++ had as rich a library of packages as python for numerical analysis.)
If you are doing something that requires precision you need to know everything that is happening in that library. Also IIRC, I think not knowing what type something is bothered me at the time.
>Are you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way?
I think they just wanted clarification. If a program is just "make lines of code do thing" then it wouldn't be different.
But if you are used to ummanged code and considering the hardware architecture and memory management when you make a high performance program, working on python can feel like a black box. Things will slow down because there's a lot of "magic" weighing down the program. But not everyone works in that space.
Unlike LLMs, at least thos box can be peered inside of you really want to.
Reminds me of all the parables about kings who "pretend to be a common man" for a day and walk among their subjects and leave with some new enlightenment.
The idea that you lose a ton of knowledge when you experience things through intermediaries is an old one.
You don't have a strong mental model after agentic coding something in my experience.
It isn't an abstraction like assembly -> C.
If you code something like: extract the raw audio data from an audio container, it doesn't matter if you write it in assembly, C, Javascript, whatever. You will be able to visualize how the data is structured when you are done. If you had an agent generate the code the data would just be an abstraction.
It just isn't worth it to me. If I am working with audio and I get a strong mental model for what different audio formats/containers/codecs look like who knows what creative idea that will trigger down the line. If I have an agent just fix it then my brain will never even know how to think in that way. And it takes like... a day...
So I get it as a optimized search engine, but I will never just let it replace understanding every line I commit.
Maybe in order to get the most out of agentic programming one needs to either a) already master the domain in question, or b) become a master in the process.
When (b) then the process can be the thing that triggers "thinking hard", and when (a) the one's mastery can be the reason one "thinks hard" when driving the agent.
Does this help TFA? Idk. Maybe if TFA can try either doing (a) a lot or (b) a lot it might. Or maybe agentic programming is going to drive out of the business those who stop thinking hard because they have agents to help them.
I don't think it will ever really happen because of ownership.
Sure this is awesome now and maybe he shipped it in a week using AI or something, but he now owns a critical part of his wife's business. 5 years from now he is gonna be working 50/hrs a week and not want to deal with this project he barely remembers even doing, whenever an SSL cert goes bad or the CC he was paying the server bills with expires or actual bugs happen he is on the line for it.
It is lame to let family/friends pay $20/mo for something you could build in a few weeks, but they will own the product forever, I don't want to.
It doesn't have to be this messy. If I were the maker I would treat this as a good first version and transfer the ownership to the business slowly. This is just like working with any consultant.
The business is run by his wife, and if they had a SWE(-like) already, that person would’ve made this. But instead, the husband did and now owns it. He also open sourced it, so he has to live with the inevitable consequences of that too.
I wonder if a very simple moltbot can do the ongoing development on its own. I mean, the hard work is mostly out of the way. This isn't so out of the realm of capability.
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.
You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
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