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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Layoffs have been a defining feature of the job market in 2025, with several major companies announcing thousands of job cuts driven by artificial intelligence.
In fact, AI was responsible for almost 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. this year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
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AI has been the cause of 50’000 layoffs to middle-lower class employees. Mamy of whom now have no jobs, some homeless, but overall less money going to the working class. Now, has this made companies more moral? More efficient? Has AI created any jobs? I doubt it.
All this has done is increased the profit margins, and enshittified these companies, now writing code, managing employees, and doing other jobs humans should be doing.
No it wasn’t, shitty bosses were and AI was their excuse.
I lead a lot of the AI work at my organization. Sr leadership is chomping at the bit to find an area to reduce headcount. It’s just not there. Nobody can understand a solid enough ROI. Most all the companies say it saves time and can shave FTEs but there’s no proof. If anything it added an entire section we had to fill expertise which has added headcount. Which data scientists for AI and engineers and architects who understand AI aren’t cheap. Helluva lot more expensive than the jobs they’re hoping to replace.
Hilariously the people LLMs could replace most cost effectively are probably management and higher. They’d probably do a better job too.
Let’s look at the job requirements for executive level and see who has the advantage.
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Biological relation to other C-suites…humans win.
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Ability to spout an endless stream of nonsensical garbage… AI wins (it was close however).
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Wasting valuable resources for little to no gain… AI wins.
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Ability to kiss ass… Humans win.
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Making correct conclusions based upon available information… AI wins (only wrong 60-70% of the time).
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Ability to claim other people’s work as their own… Too close to tell. Gonna have to give this one a tie.
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Ability and desire to harm/kill other people for personal gain. Humans still win.
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I did replace a bunch of tasks with “AI” this year, but none of those tasks are worth a full employee. They do save time so our employees can get more done.
Execs want me to build more AI tools, but frankly I’ve built all the ones which can be made reliable.
I pretty much use LLMs to manage jira for me.
Someone I work with uses the jira LLM to make the worst tickets I’ve ever seen though. They’re massive.
I’ve been asked by my manager to come up with a goal for next year on how to augment my job with GenAI.
Why not combine two hatreds at once - GenAI and Jira. Thanks for the idea!
I write Jira tickets with what needs to be achieved and why, and usually my preferred method of doing it and if there’s any constraints. I usually don’t much care exactly how it’s done, as long as it works, but sometimes it needs to fit into the bigger picture in a way that might not be obvious. My team have different strengths, and I’m more than happy for them to do what they do best. Most of my tickets range from two to six sentences in length - some are longer if it’s complicated, but most things aren’t.
My managers don’t think that’s enough for a ticket, and have been using LLMs to boost them up to several pages. That obviously requires making up tonnes of shit and overspecifying shit that doesn’t need specifying. We have to waste time verifying that we’ve not now got requirements that make no sense, and now have pages of test notes of things that don’t need testing, which means tickets now take days rather than hours to complete.
No-one can read these multi-page monstrosities, and are using LLMs to compact them down to a few sentences again.
I can’t believe that we’re boiling the oceans for this shit.
Yeah, this is annoying. My Jira tickets are usually as long as “Implement new email notification system. Make sure opt-out is respected”, I set a due date, assign myself, and move it to the active state. Once I’ve started work I post the PR.
If it doesn’t fit on a sticky note then the task or documentation is misspecified.
AI its current form has replaced exactly no one. Layoffs are at best anticipatory and at worst to pump up stocks.
Correction: AI was the excuse behind 50,000 layoffs.
Schrodinger’s AI: It’s both useless slop that serves no real purpose while simultaneously, it’s actually good enough to replace people.
No, it’s not a paradox, as it’s both CEOs totally thinking it’s the next great thing, and it’s not good enough to replace people, but either way it’s a hell of a good reason to cut labor for that next quarter bonus.
I take it back, it may not be the CEO that’s the driving force usually, but the CTO/CIO who are trying to validate their existence.
To me, it just shows how out of touch and useless most CEOs are. The modern executive model is totally broken, these people effectively don’t actually do anything, and they ultimately destroy shareholder value when they are supposed to be protecting it. The executive compensation model is supremely broken, and if AI can replace anyone, it’s them. Not the people that make things and processes function.
Problem is, AI was built and trained on the sort of broken logic that prevails today, so if it replaced executives it would probably act in an even worse manner. Because it’s a reference tool at most (and a shitty one that’s in a primitive state), not a replacement for human capital.
whenever we talk about a “RIF” at work (reduction in force) I shoehorn “layoffs” “firings” “unemployment” into the conversation to re-humanize the cost.
And 51000 frantic rehires at greater cost
It wasn’t the economic calamity resulting from massive tariffs, government service cuts, tax breaks for the rich, runaway inflation, or the general mismanagement if the entire United States government?
No, execs were.
I’m not sure there’s a single job that can be done by AI reliably today.
Yep including mine. Entire team of 120, gone. It was in august, only one of us found a job so far. Merry Christmas! Tx asshole executives i hope your bonuses are not as lean as my xmas.
Do you think they will lose business over this or are they able to replace this team with AI?
Honestly i see a dumpster fire incoming. Our team was the cybersecurity team. We’ve been gutted for years and now are finally completely gone. It’s one of the major banks in the world and it has no cybersecurity team anymore. Code review team was disbanded 2 years ago, site review team 3 years ago, pentesters last year. Now all the analysts are gone too.
Banks like to say they are a tech company but in reality they are just a company run by a group of idiotic businesses men who know nothing about technology but require just enough amount of technology to survive.
Does the bank’s name start with “ch” by any chance?
Sounds like they’re sundowning your bank 😁
need to start a new tax on companies that used AI to replace employees.
that’s over 50k citizens that are no longer generating taxable income. 50k citizens that are no longer spending and paying sales tax.
where is all that taxable deficit going to come from? it should come from a tax applied to companies that are required to document how many jobs their AI has replaced. if they lie, audit their asses into oblivion.
