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As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in retaining senior level talent, to try and keep operating in the black, not because AI was materially producing a lot of benefits. (Because to the extent it was, I was the one reaping them compared to the offshore folks and less experienced onshore ones.)
In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.
All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'.
Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it.
But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games.
'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.
This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.
Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles.
If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the outsourced jobs with now?
My company has been intentionally causing attrition in the US by moving to effectively a 996 style schedule. As people quit, their positions are moved to the India office. It is not an officially communicated policy. I have just surmised this based on private conversations with the executives and what is actually happening.
Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.
A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to pay 10% of US salaries instead.
With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe. Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI hallucinations at all.
This is my conclusion as well, get the cost center down to good enough after threats from competition is relatively secured.
I think this is going to be a new golden age kf innovation. Lot of senior engineers capable of pencil whipping microservice infrastructure paired with industry experience means startup mill goes brrrr
>> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough.
Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work.
Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work.
Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support.
The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it.
Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.
Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.
I can assure you a lot of veteran devs in my company who had major impact were let ago because of off shoring to India and Poland. My employer is a very well known financial institution, think Blackrock, Bloomberg etc.
Public press paints picture of the firm laying off due to adoption of AI. Yet, I can assure you without doubt its not because of it but due to continued offshore.
I think we are at the brink of opening another large campus in India, not sure which city. Oh another thing is these full time position in NA were eliminated and replaced with employees from TCS.
My own boss is against it but its coming from higher ups. I have no idea what's driving them. We made billion in net revenues last year and we are actually part of the org that is in 'cash cow' category - upper management literally said this too in our town halls
If Amazon’s layoffs aren’t AI driven, and AWS is making more money than it’s spending on AI infra… how is Amazon evidence of AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at “AI washing” without doing any digging at all, and cites the MIT study without noting that it’s getting a ton of legitimate criticism. Is AI really a sideshow or an excuse for layoffs that big companies were hoping to do anyway, is it taking the blame for low confidence in the economy?
https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/why-we-dont-believe-m...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/white-collar-layoffs-ai-cost...
That's an interesting point that I haven't considered before: that the narrative of AI replacing jobs plus the widespread cheating in school using LLMs is making students less engaged and new graduates less employable, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for AI.
I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon.
And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.
IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.
And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.
A little bit off topic: but I couldn't even start to read the article because "I reached my article limit" out of I site I never visited before... What are they using to determine how many articles I've read?
Opening in a private window solved the issue, however I'm pretty sure I don't regularly read anything on this site (maybe never was an overstatement?).
Lost my previous job not to AI but to a pincer movement of Indians taking up positions here in the UK effectively forming a bridgehead to subsequently have the non-management roles outsourced to India. From purely my own anecdotal experience, I found my Indian coworkers very friendly when I could provide something, but once they had the whip hand their attitude was markedly different.
This should shock no one.
Over the last 20 years of tech, the giants have taken the smartest folks out there and put golden handcuffs on them. You could hire up all the smart folks and put them to work, or leave them out there and have them compete with you. With the launch of cloud providers and (expensive) dynamic scaling the problem only got worse. Think about hiring in the pandemic. Every one at home, with a stimulus check and nothing to do. Rather than a flurry of new software you got mass hiring.
But now we are in a capital intensive hardware cycle. Where in order to compete you need to have lots of $$$$ as well as software know how. It does not matter that there are smart people out there, without hefty backing they wont get very far.
I suspect that software is about to enter its "punk" era. We have software for small businesses that will help with accounting, HR, customer service, and cloud providers are starting to see some interesting competition. Much like the old punk poster showing you 3 chords and telling you to start a band it is entirely possible to find three friends and start a business that makes 1-10 mill a year with little effort and lower costs. The moment you stop thinking "unicorn" and start thinking "sustainable" the economics shift radically.
I am really surprised how well AI excuse works, most journalists just take CEO words as is, and make no effort to assess: is that even credible?
Obviously layoffs correlate with AI age, but it's most definitely not AI replacing jobs, not yet. Even in 2025 stories about a job fully taken by AI need to be scraped for, and it's almost always about non-SWE jobs. And in 2023, when the first layoffs already started, models sucked and none of the existing tools and agents even existed yet! But if you search for example for headcount growth in India/Mexico, the numbers can only be described as "booming".
I don't know what exactly is going on, but it's pretty obvious the companies are moving offshore or simply doing less work, and for some reason need to lie about why.
At the fortune 500 I work at there's no sweeping layoffs that I've seen. There is a big emphasis on AI, but more relevant to the concerns, there are scoped hiring freezes for US workers, new offshore hires are greenlit though. And I can't help but wonder, what happens to a state when most of its critical infrastructure directly depends on another external state.
This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o
Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens of billions of investments in new offices.
Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening:
Microsoft announces US $3bn investment over two years in India https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-... (Jan 2025)
Google announces $15B investment in AI hub in India https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-vi... (3 weeks ago)
[Indian] ex-Accenture CTO named Google Cloud’s Chief Product https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-na... (last week) (a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India)
Big Tech giants defy US-India trade tensions, record strongest 12-month headcount growth in India in 3 years https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy... (September)
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-indi...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-t...
and so on. Something very crazy is going on.
NOTE: I am not American and this doesn't affect me directly.
There is certainly pressure to spend money on and use AI tools. I know multiple people at different companies whose managers brought up low AI utilization in their reviews. This is, of course, really stupid but here we are.
AI processing hardware deprecates (and depreciates) at a much faster rate than conventional CPUs, as much as 50% per year. Consider the billions being dumped into compute at that rate of depreciation and explain to me:
1. How will tangible assets generate profit net of near term capex requirements and interest on debt?
2. Why wouldn't payroll shrink as a result of the increased AI capabilities emerging from the capex spend?
3. If AI lives up to the hype & given recent news that public backstops are being requested, why shouldn't the US quasi-nationalize cash strapped players and distribute equity to every American?
4. As NVDA and AAPL local models and local compute eat into utility and base automation business, how do edge players maintain profitability without pricing capabilities well beyond the affordability of SMBs and individuals?
AI is absolutely replacing jobs though. I personally know multiple people whose companies have downsized departments or eliminated departments completely, offloading the work to fewer people using AI tools.
The article seems to hinge on the core assumption that revenue is much less than spending:
> Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025, while AI revenue—which would be used to pay for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software—will not exceed $30 billion this year
While it's clear that the author is summing up the spending from the big players, it's not clear to me that their math is right for revenue. Yes, OpenAI, Anthropic, Thinking Machines, SSI, etc. have pretty limited direct revenue (including zero!).
But this comparison assumes no revenue growth for other top computing users. Some companies are certainly saving money on some tasks and increasing revenue, particularly in fields like customer support. See the confusing figure in section 5 of https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo... .
That chart is by number of respondents and not weighted by revenue. Like the MIT study, it would not be surprising that "just pipe this to an LLM" isn't enough for most fields or companies. But a few have likely made material improvements.
10% of respondents saying they've seen a >10% revenue gain could be substantial, if they're bigger firms with high leverage in computing.
Edit to add: the comparison also makes a classic "GDP vs market cap" style mistake. Capital expenditure has multiple years of useful life. Revenue is annual. You'd want to compare depreciation vs revenue.
If AI really generates the value it claims to cutting jobs is short sighted. If existing human knowledge is commoditized, then we should be able to invest in generating new knowledge, and creating new kinds of products that were not even possible before.
I'd say the biggest problem is AI complacency, something like: "in the future our revenues will be the same but won't need any people". So, in order to prepare for this future the obvious course of action to do some layoffs and just chill for a while. The problem is, we don't really know when this future will happen. If it is soon, maybe companies are making the right bet, if not it is more like a deliberate choice to slow down. That's fine if one or a few companies choose this path as competition will correct the error. However, if they essentially all move in unison competition won't fix the problem and we'll have a self-inflicted economic contraction for no reason.
The other factor is, will revenues really stay the same for companies once we have AGI / super intelligence? It seems value will not accrue to the companies that are in chill mode.
Matter of time until markets reckon with AI investment crowding out non-AI investment (cf. the massive oversubscription of Meta's latest bond offering). Must suck to be a small-cap firm squeezed by tariffs raising costs, unemployment lowering demand, and AI investment raising your own non-AI cost of borrowing.
AI is just the scapegoat; otherwise we should see jobs like administrative assistant, legal, and medical replaced first. But I also think engineering is the worst field to get into. It's neither protected by a license like other white-collar jobs nor by a union like most blue-collar jobs. You end up overworked plus debt from school like white-collar workers but getting paid worse than blue-collar workers. And everyone's okay with that for some reason. Not a single organization is trying to change it. The government is happy with it, companies are obviously loving it, and on top of that, engineers are building the systems to replace them in a few years and they still think they are smart..
I think the article is missing two points: if the latest layoffs aren't related to AI, then this doesn't mean AI won't have or has an impact on head count.
And investment and experiments by definition include the risk of failing. In almost everything lies a survivorship bias and no one talks about the 100+ car makers that went into goldrush mode 100+ years ago. This is life. Netflix vs Blockbuster - already forgotten?
Also the "fail rate" - so what part is failing and why? What's with the 5%? If we have a look at exponential functions this might be a really good deal, if the 5% can account for the losses. After all, benefits compound over time.
I witnessed first hand in FAANG some quota hires and I believe that now that no one gets paid for contrived and artificial business advantages, we are back to a more merits based evaluation of workers.
But AI should not be written off as fancy something with no impact. That's the wrong take. Whether it will be a springboard to new jobs that compensate for losses or replacements - I am not yet sure, but tent to be in the former group. ML engineers take care of ML - something new that takes care of something new.
We will see.
Slightly tangential to the article: a lot of the "AI layoffs" are really just old fashioned layoffs, but with exciting press releases meant to reassure investors.
AMZN for example overhired in various functions because it expected demand that never materialised. Admitting that is bad for the share price, but writing some woo about "AI and agility" will convince at least some investors to keep the faith.
Something like the hire act bill is the only solution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...
I can tell that editors doing CMS translations, marketing images have certainly been replaced.
Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration.
Thinking that AI isn't replacing jobs is wishful thinking.
Why not both?
Given all those articles with AI generated images I bet that some artists lost their jobs
American devs should support the hire act bill
I think it's not even AI spending, but just the end of ZIRP.
I'd say it's more "cost reduction" overall. And it makes sense to me. From my experience over the last few years, features are increasingly lower marginal ROI, and seem to take longer and longer to launch because the amount of coordination required keeps going up. Plus generally expected revenues in this economy are trending downward, so it only makes sense to reduce staffing and focus on only the highest priorities.
Everytime automation replaced jobs the economies created by this replacement always created new jobs that replaced the previous ones. The USA has always been on the forefront of automating away jobs and it's unemployment rates show that new jobs were always created and that there was no long-term unemployment due to automation. AI won't be any different.
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending isn't either. It's outsourcing and can be easily confirmed by cross-referencing H1B approval rates with layoffs.
If you've been outsourced, ask your representative to support the HIRE Act: - Creates a 25% tax on outsourcing payments - Creates a “Domestic Workforce Fund” for apprenticeships/workforce development. - Prohibits companies from deducting outsourcing payments.
Here's a fictional take on it, yet sadly based on real events: https://syntheticauth.ai/posts/synthetic-auth-the-power-prob...
This is absolutely crucial to understand.
Because in any country with poor worker protections, the outcome is layoffs regardless.
AI succeeds? Layoffs of unneeded roles.
AI fails? Layoffs to cut expenditure to make up for the written-off expenditure.
In the UK, if AI makes a well-established employee redundant, the employee is entitled to redundancy pay. And if the company fucks up and overspends on chasing a ridiculous Macguffin they can't just fire people without making them formally redundant.
The damage that is going to be done in the USA if the AI bubble bursts is going to be generational.
The Mag 7 minus Nvidia are not the only employers, the cloud providers while big are a microcosm of tech which one industry. 99% of other companies aren't investing in data centers.
AI spending is replacing jobs now but all of this spending is in preparation and anticipation of the real AI replacing jobs
This does not reflect my reality. I have worked on half a dozen projects where we would have hired consultants to get the job done but have used coding agents to document, understand, migrate a project, create backend services, dashboards, and other things with budgets ranging from a few thousand euros to 200,000 euros. No consultants hired, nothing spent.
I can't read the article but that won't stop me from commenting..
This year alone something like 400B was spent on investing in chips, datacenters, electricity buildouts. That's 400B that could have otherwise been invested in people.
While i don't doubt that people will find a few solid business cases for LLMs, i am on team-bubble. I don't think this investment will add 400B worth of value and I very much doubt that this 400B is any good for future growth or long-term aspirations of AGI. Investing 400B into people and (tech) manufacturing would be a solid long-term bet with benefits.
MCMA: Make Class-warfare MAD Again
I think the company I work for has a pretty pragmatic approach for AI utilization. Don't use it to replace jobs, use it to make jobs more efficient (we call it an "enhancer"). IE we won't lay people off, at least not because of AI, we just may not hire as quickly as we did before LLMs, but still attaining similar scale. This goes for all departments, not just tech. We have very strict standards on what code gets accepted (no slop). Whether it's AI generated or not is irrelevant; even senior engineers can be guilty of slop after a long day. But we do have regular meetings to discuss our AI usage and to converge upon common patterns and rules to level everyone up.
That being said, I think we as a society are quickly reaching the point where there just doesn't exist enough jobs to keep everyone gainfully employed. There may be new jobs opening up but not ones that people in the middle or ends of their careers can quickly pick up on. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily, just that when combined with the shitty safety net that the US has, it's a recipe for disaster. If even folks who are working full-time still need assistance for groceries, then we've already failed, and that's not even AIs fault.