AI Layoffs - The Greatest Lie of the Decade
You could nearly title this “The Greatest Lie of the Century.” Each day, friends and family tell of another company that announced HUGE LAYOFFS, with the narrative framed around AI efficiency gains. This is far from the first time companies have used scapegoats like “Improved Automation” or “Synergistic Simplification” to replace native workers with those overseas willing to do the same work for a dollar an hour, or even just with an empty office chair.
How would markets respond to a more honest announcement?
“Microsoft Cuts 10,000 Jobs in Effort to Fix Pandemic Over-Hiring and Inflate Short-Term Profits.”
Similar to Walmart’s using of the pandemic to make it impossible for me to buy big bags of Sour Patch Kids at 3 AM, companies across America are using AI to cut costs. The “efficiency gains” they speak of simply don’t exist yet, and won’t for years. Most of humanity (and leadership across said companies) still has no idea how to use AI properly for much of anything, let alone, such that a few Microsoft employees could replace the efficiency of 10,000 laid off workers.
Don’t get me wrong. There are small pools of workers across these companies who are proficient with AI today, and just one of those, armed with solid knowledge of AI utilization and the ability to efficiently verify / audit it, really can outwork a group of those who don’t, by a large margin. It’s an undeniable fact in this new era of AI augmentation. Everyone arguing that the “craft” of hand-typing things will never die, is on their way to joining all the similarly-stubborn portrait painters replaced by cameras in the 1800’s.
The Worst (and Best) Time to be a Software Engineer
It’s both the worst time, and the best time to be a software engineer. On one hand, the skill of coding is currently on the same trajectory that books, music, and movies recently took: the flat-lining of its value. Every University still teaching the traditional software path is showing their student body how to paint portraits, in the wake of photography. On the other hand, the new paths of value opening up in software are unprecendented. If software students also take the time to master agentic development, the career opportunities opening up in large-scale orchestration of enterprise software creation will soon be immense, and carry the same high-salary dreams traditional software carried prior to a few months ago.
“Every University still teaching the traditional software path is showing their student body how to paint portraits, in the wake of photography.”
Most importantly, those in every field of study and type of work can now be software engineers too. The same way any of us with a smart phone can now pull off “decent” photography, an Anthropologist can now build “decent” software that has either never existed, or been owned by tech companies that charge a fortune to use it. Anyone, existing within any domain of expertise, can now build software that serves needs that could never before have been served like they can be today.
The greatest injustice of AI, is that it was thrust on the world far too quickly. Most of humanity is slow, and fearful to adapt big changes. Just ask the vast count of Americans who still write paper checks as payment. Leadership across America faces the monumental challenge of quickly adapting their own skillsets, and helping their workforce get up to speed with the new world. Employees across every industry have to put away all the stone tools they’ve been using for decades, and pick up the laser guns we were just handed, with no instruction manuals.