It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

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throwaway29130 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.)

This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week."

They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span.

When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon.

I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.

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genthree 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

For a non-tech case of this, my wife worked at a place that fired like 80% of their writers in anticipation of huge speed-ups they expected from LLMs, a couple years ago.

They had to hire a bunch of them back less than two months later. The speed-ups were approximately nil and making the editors edit AI slop all day long had them all close to quitting.

They didn't even wait to see if there were any actual benefits, they just blindly fired a bunch of people based on marketing lies. I can only assume they're the same sorts who fall for Nigerian Prince scams.

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justin66 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.

I’d have guessed the most annoying part would be that you’re assisting them in a hare brained scheme to terminate some people’s employment.

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oro44 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't even think it's stupidity. It's simple greed and an extreme case of Goodhart's lawsl. Shareholders want to hear AI, so CEOs will burn the rest of the company to satisfy that. The company doesn't matter; they will get paid handsomely for destroying it.

Shareholders only care about short term gains, CEOs have no skin in the game, everyone else under wants to keep their job. None of these are aligned towards "make the nest proudct and satisfy customers".

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oro44 2 days ago | parent [-]

The counter point to this is Apple who have not invested barely a dime in LLMs. Their stock price has not been crushed at all, quite the opposite in fact. They focus on the good stuff. Perhaps that's the luxury of living off the vision and leadership of someone who died many years ago.

Personally I believe the stock market is incredibly, incredibly shaky. Investors are now in full-fear mode, it doesn't matter what news Nvidia etc print - if customers of OAI and others, are not seeing a meaningful INCREMENTAL increase in revenue generation or increase in cost-reduction (aside from white-washing it with lay-offs from insane hiring in the past).

RE. stupidity - it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al.

Wanna know how stupid it is? Someone I know who works at Blackrock as a portfolio manager pretty high up is all of a sudden being forced to learn how to code and use LLMs to code. Yes you heard me right - this behaviour is expanding out of the software engineering profession.

Its absolutely nuts.

	▲	johnnyanmac 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, Apple always seems to go its own way. I wonder if it truly is a matter of a strong visionary (be it Cook or Jobs's legacy being upheld) or if shareholders simply come in with different mentality. Nintendo also has similar vibes. I see shareholder calls asking about AI usage and their answers come down to something like "we're not ruling it out, but we'll only use it when a situation presents itself". They tend to be pretty good at pushing back against their shareholders. Having a proper war chest instead of constantly funding on debt probably helps. > it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al. Stupidity implies incompetence and lack of intent. Greed is incredibly intentional. There's always a bit of stupidity with greed (we even call such an algorithmic approach the "greedy method" after all), but I think they are important distinctions. I'll admit your blackrock example is plain stupidity, though. I know part of the end-goal is for "idea guys" to be able to make their ideas without pesky employees, but I don't think too many really think they can achieve that today.

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graemep 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe what they really want her to do is get rid of 50% of her staff and the AI is just an excuse? In that case she should focus on "who can we do without?" rather than "how can we replace people with AI?"

	▲	johnnyanmac 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sure part of this mandatw implied "if you can't show us the numbers we want, you're part of the 50%". And the incentives are set.

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komali2 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year

I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a ceo@thatcompany.com email and nobody would notice.

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bikelang 3 days ago | parent [-]

We’d probably get better outcomes too.

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plagiarist 3 days ago | parent [-]

For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

	▲	theandrewbailey 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Shareholders would be mad, I bet. But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!

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leftytak 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The assumption that those managers have is that it’s easy to replace tech guys because AI is advancing, and a crap like that nonsense.

Funny enough, I got laid off last month, yes I’m a tech guy, now they apparently regret it because they are now scrambling to find a replacement to do the tech tasks!

TBH, I’m happy I got laid off because I’m finally building something I wanted to use.

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PedroBatista 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They perks and dread of middle management...