This fails when the hype doesn’t meet reality - shift back to cashiers from self-service checkouts as an example.
I think we’ll see something similar in AI where many companies will have over rotated and will end up rehiring sales, marketing and other roles that we thought AI could replace.
Except in this case it is like laying off the factory workers at the robot factory before the robots are built. Investing in AI still means investing in tech people to work on AI, but that's who just got laid off...
One might be inclined to think that it is a freeing up of dead weight accumulated during the COVID hiring spree, but we also know of industry-recognized people deemed very talented, who should be prime candidates for AI investment, that were let go, so...
There are a small number of CS-degree holding software engineers or statistical expert data scientists who can pivot into AI with a fairly direct application of their existing education and experience, but the vast majority of people who were laid off from "tech companies" do not have that background.
In some cases, they'll probably have false positives: they were already bloated, and the missing staff were just doing the mythical man month.
In other cases, they'll probably claw back hiring as AI turns out to be a force multiplier but the force is at some orthogonal angle to the human labor that's most valuable, eg, mediocre programmer gets unstuck quicker, but still writes buggy code.
In further cases, they just fucked themselves by chilling their staff and sassling managers with the most desperate and mediocre employees. Eg, no one is available to debug the now more efficiently produced but still buggy code.
Odds of any of these orgs successfully streamlining work flow is low because ultimately, these layoffs are inline with trying to raise shareholder value when money is no longer cheap so you can't just go buyout competitors or novel business plays. AI is just a rationale to paper over jack Welches legacy.
"I'm sure you understand that sacrifices must be made in order to prop up our stock price."
Bring on the next stock repurchase that could have paid those employees' salaries for the next 20 years.
