I do consulting, I'm constantly scouting clients. Right around November 2022 something very stark happened. I went from fighting off prospects with a stick, to crickets, almost over night. I deal mostly with startups and mid-size companies, nobody with insider knowledge or cutting edge interests. I can tell you that GPT was not heavily on anyone I dealt with's radar as an opportunity to reduce costs.

Some sort of cultural zeitgeist occurred, but in terms of symptoms I saw with my own eyes, I think ZIRP ending (projects getting axed) and layoffs starting (projects getting filled within ~24 hours) were huge drivers. I have no proof.

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exitb 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Right around November 2022 something very stark happened.

The Twitter layoffs perhaps?

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pydry 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The interest rate rise also. It happened earlier but thats when the effects started to filter down.

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ants_everywhere 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.

So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.

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estimator7292 5 days ago | parent [-]

No, they weren't.

The Twitter layoffs were because the company was hemorrhaging money and Musk is an egomaniac.

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ants_everywhere 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?

Can you walk me through your thought process here?

	▲	habinero 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You're too in love with your own conclusion here. The reality is Elon's kind of an idiot who just impulsively does stuff and mostly gets away with it because money. Elon talked shit online and then fought hard to wriggle out of buying Twitter after promising to pay the funny weed sex number for it. And he fired employees because he's cheap and only keeps people who yes man him. You can read the complaint yourself: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/twitter-employee-laws...

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5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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k_roy 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think part of that is a bit of a collapose of traditional consulting. There's been a huge transition into the boutique firms now.

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speakspokespok 6 days ago | parent [-]

Where do you think the market is going in regards to boutique firms? I've heard it mentioned but I'm not sure what counts as boutique and what that signifies for the next few years.

	▲	k_roy 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		So if we are talking about "traditional consulting", that usually means MBB/Big Three The value they add is their corpus of previous work to lean on and sell. And anybody at the firm can reference that. But it's always almost the junior level consultants doing the work, and a bunch of c-suites trying to manage it and sell it. So when you work with a firm like this, you are going to get a team who has managed a similar project as yours, but it usually ends up being generic and trying to repeat past successes. I really think that's where some of the boutique firms are being different. Instead of just saying "here is our Lean Six Sigma team", they can say "we've got these four people who are perfect for technical implementation, and here is a project manager who has done almost exactly this before, and here is a RevOps person who has worked in your actual industry". Maybe someone is an expert on some super obscure domain. They might not qualify for a full time consultant position at a big 3 firm, can suddenly be pulled in on projects that are their specialty. Mostly these boutique firms can put together a more highly specialized and focused team than the prebuilt teams at a place like Bain or McKinsey.

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rdsubhas 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Interest rate was hiked rapidly from 1% (in May 2022) to 4% (in Dec 3 2022).

Oct 2022 recorded the lowest for S&P 500 since COVID (till now).

COVID assistance was over. Vaccination reached a critical majority. On Sep 2022, Biden declared "COVID-19 pandemic was over" [1].

Businesses got a reality check.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...

	▲	thr0w 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, interesting. Thank you.