Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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i struggle to understand how any company needs many hundreds of "engineers". wtf do these niggers even do? exactly how many real products does a company like the trello devs conceive and launch to need thousands of people? you faggots make glorified power points. and there's free alternatives that do literally the same thing and look just like trello.
 
OtherLastTrainHome said:
i struggle to understand how any company needs many hundreds of "engineers". wtf do these niggers even do? exactly how many real products does a company like the trello devs conceive and launch to need thousands of people? you faggots make glorified power points. and there's free alternatives that do literally the same thing and look just like trello.
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I’d like to see the demographics of these companies. I’ve seen some engineers do nothing more than attend ERG conferences, get training, and do just enough work to get by without getting fired. You’ll see rare spikes in productivity when they feel there is a little heat on them and when management backs off, they go back to their usual routine. Most office drones can get by with that until the next inevitable round of layoffs. They can repeat this for most of their working careers.

The AI excuse is an opportunity to get rid of as much of the chaff as possible without running afoul of various EEOC requirements.
 
OtherLastTrainHome said:
i struggle to understand how any company needs many hundreds of "engineers". wtf do these niggers even do? exactly how many real products does a company like the trello devs conceive and launch to need thousands of people? you faggots make glorified power points. and there's free alternatives that do literally the same thing and look just like trello.
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Companies that are obsessed with the ideal of Agile tend to severely underutilize their resources, as it becomes more important to ensure every stage of the agile process is 'successful', rather than to utilize your resources to their full capacity. Software workload is difficult to predict as most things worth doing are going to have inevitable and nebulous complications and setbacks, so the only way to be really sure that you can say "we finished 100% of what we planned to do" in a given timeframe is to put in PLENTY of padding. Every person at every stage of a deliverable is encouraged to inflate their deliverable timelines, so you end up with a developer estimating double the effort on a feature to build in their padding, then when that's presented it gets doubled up again by the sprint planners to build in some padding, then maybe it gets doubled up a third time by someone else overseeing the wider plan. By the end of it, that developer is given a two week period with two days worth of work to actually do, and is actively discouraged from grabbing more.

So to make up the massive productivity loss, they bring on more engineers. So you'll pay nearly an order of magnitude more for labor, to make it feel like you can effectively predict your final output, so the spreadsheet warriors in your company can try and normalize the output and therefor the value of a notoriously bursty and irregular field. It is generally preferable to reliably underdeliver, than to erratically overachieve, because the overachievement because the beancounter expectation, and if it was truly your exceptional effort/luck moment and you can't replicate it, you don't become "occassionally amazing" you become "consistently underperforming".

Suffice to say, the companies making the tools to facilitate this shit are going to be at the extreme end of obsession with the ideals.

The whole structure is fucked, top to bottom, but its also hard to really find a better way. At small team sizes you don't really need to worry about any of this because the relevant leadership is right there, but at large team sizes the observation needed to know the difference between negligence and excellence is infeasible. This is why there's so many fucking weird ways to try and manage software programs, nobody has found a good way beyond "just trust them to do their jobs" and that's culturally infeasible at this point for a dozen different reasons before you even consider the Jeets.
 
Well I think I have a new one for everyone here. I have worked as a SWE for going on 20 years. I recently accepted a new position for a huge pay increase among other things.

One of my offboarding tasks is to create an AI Agent of myself and give it a bunch of docs of the institutional knowledge I have acquired in my time at this company. Nobody has any idea how to do this, but the order to make this part of offboarding came down from C-Suite. Nothing prevents me from making it an AI Agent for the intricacies of 40k lore or just giving it technically sound but totally incorrect information to ruin the next devs forced to use it. Both would be lol.

I suspect y'all may need to get used to this.
 
TJT said:
One of my offboarding tasks is to create an AI Agent of myself and give it a bunch of docs of the institutional knowledge I have acquired in my time at this company.
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Offer them whatever business process documentation you have, and otherwise just fuck around with the AI - Not maliciously, but just spend your time trying to learn what the fuck they're even asking for. You just got told to spend your last weeks learning a new tool, so might as well, even if that's not enough time to actually learn shit. Unless your current job title is "AI developer" and your role mandate includes this shit, they don't have a leg to stand on to reasonably expect you to suddenly develop this extremely valuable skillset and suddenly shit out a product at any level of quality for them on your way out.

TJT said:
I suspect y'all may need to get used to this.
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Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn't be surprised if we see the first employment lawsuits over these brought in soon, and there's some preexisting legal grounds regarding someones skillset being their trade secret - They're hiring you to do a thing at better than minimum wage, because most people do not know how to do this thing, and they need this thing to be done. If an employer hires you to use your skillset to do something for them, they own the product created of that skillset, and have a reasonable expectation of you using that skillset for what they ask for, but they don't own the skillset itself. This stuff has been for the most part only dubiously explored in law because how does an employer attempt to 'claw back' an employees skills? It mostly manifested around extremely shady attempts to charge employees some surcharge for learning and shit. But now that AI is rolling around, it starts to raise these prior arguments in different lights.

My end-state expectation is that it'll settle as "the employer can train agents on anything the employer actually owns" and the fight shifts towards asking employees to document every single thought, decision and action on their path, in a bloated effort to extract thought patterns and shit. If you thought the productivity crisis was bad before, imagine having to document why you decided to start any particular piece of a program first, and so on. You'll have man hours of work per month, and weeks of crap.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
Offer them whatever business process documentation you have, and otherwise just fuck around with the AI - Not maliciously, but just spend your time trying to learn what the fuck they're even asking for. You just got told to spend your last weeks learning a new tool, so might as well, even if that's not enough time to actually learn shit. Unless your current job title is "AI developer" and your role mandate includes this shit, they don't have a leg to stand on to reasonably expect you to suddenly develop this extremely valuable skillset and suddenly shit out a product at any level of quality for them on your way out
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I am not an "AI Engineer" but I have been developing Model Context Protocols for the past year. This is nothing new to me really. I just question if there is any use in doing this.
 
TJT said:
I just question if there is any use in doing this.
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If you mean "Will the end result be any use?" then the short answer is no. There's not really any good way to extract "logical thinking" from a person and insert it into a model, and that's most of the programmers secret sauce. Once you made a plan of attack for a particular business problem, then if you give that plan of attack to an AI, it can try and work through it, but its terrible at making that plan of attack in the first place. I'm sure you've already seen the difference in outcomes between telling an AI "just send the question here for an answer" and "Send a payload, structured exactly like this, in this order, and I'm going to add a second AI who's entire job it is to sniff out and reject bad payloads" when it comes to getting it to actually use that protocol correctly. They're cargo cultists through and through, by nature of their technology.

Feeding the model business process docs gives it that structure it craves, and that's the best way to go at it. To flip it around, imagine trying to condense every aspect of your job and every possible task you may perform into a single universal project plan, that covers everything. That's what the AI needs to replicate your actions, and that's just infeasible because humans are too damned irregular and inconsistent, and half that irregularity is important, as we know when to save effort or not do something.
 
Been looking into career spaces and such posts recently and man, comp sci type niggas are cooked. On one hand, they graduate with a master's in something and some general interest and experience to their name, but they can't get jobs. Then I see a friend do a 40-week network tech sort of thing and he lands a government position day to next. No concrete tasks, no outline, but at least he's in.

I looked up some general doomer posts and it seems like it holds true that you need to basically have programmed for fun since 10 to stand a chance, but yet these autists only wanna code, so they decline promotions into leadership roles, basically frontloading companies with office drones yet not in a manner that allows them to use their lifelong competences.

There's basically no IT jobs here outside the capital. I look at job listings and think "man, you really need to go to the big city to get work these days", yet even there they're maybe 1 per 25. I feel like I was born right in time to be part of the tech bubble but man that shit bursted real quick. I would've enjoyed maybe 4-5 good years if not one bad unemployment cut that in half.
 
⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
Been looking into career spaces and such posts recently and man, comp sci type niggas are cooked. On one hand, they graduate with a master's in something and some general interest and experience to their name, but they can't get jobs. Then I see a friend do a 40-week network tech sort of thing and he lands a government position day to next. No concrete tasks, no outline, but at least he's in.
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There is a term called, "commodified engineers" you might read about. It makes a lot of sense and sadly a lot of career programmers fit this category. This person is technically capable but brings nothing else to the table. He avoids all interaction with anyone but he can diligently complete tickets, which he does only when you give them to him. He asks no questions, engages with no stakeholders, nothing. Just does his assigned work and that's it.

My team is small but we have 2 like this. One eventually asked how to get promoted and I had to straight tell him that he has done absolutely nothing other than the work directly assigned to him and never even took any part in ticket grooming, design discussions, or anything. That he in fact actively avoided it and forced our manager to deal with the stakeholders on all of your work because you wont participate outside of writing code and pushing it. Not sure if he understood that as he just said okay and that was it. This was like a year ago and his behavior hasn't changed so he remains where he is.

I bring this up because the fresh out of the gate college hires, like this guy was 4 years ago, are the most susceptible to "AI replacement" from the perspective of leaders. Because they can only solve narrow problems and provide nothing else. College programming coursework is the most ideal thing for AI to work on because it has no external dependencies. Your value as an engineer increases dramatically as you learn to deal with vast ecosystems with hundreds or even thousands of external dependencies. Along with all kinds of nuance of technical systems, versions, and so on. But most importantly your scope increases as you do this and you become irreplaceable.

If you're graduating to be a frontend dev you are straight fucked. Frontend by definition exists in the vacuum of whatever framework you're using so AI is the best at replacing it. In the sense that you just need the UX engineer to build whatever wireframe and boom AI makes it real and hosts is on your local and you can adjust from there. Two roles become one, so you fire the other guy.

SIMIΔN said:
Force all debugging to be via the abominable intelligence who thinks it is a tech priest.
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I did name this agent Silica Animus lol.
 
TJT said:
Well I think I have a new one for everyone here. I have worked as a SWE for going on 20 years. I recently accepted a new position for a huge pay increase among other things.

One of my offboarding tasks is to create an AI Agent of myself and give it a bunch of docs of the institutional knowledge I have acquired in my time at this company. Nobody has any idea how to do this, but the order to make this part of offboarding came down from C-Suite. Nothing prevents me from making it an AI Agent for the intricacies of 40k lore or just giving it technically sound but totally incorrect information to ruin the next devs forced to use it. Both would be lol.

I suspect y'all may need to get used to this.
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That is vile. Somehow worse than knowingly training your (cheaper) replacement. I hope you teach it to play StarCraft and when asked, claim that's what you did all day.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
The whole structure is fucked, top to bottom, but its also hard to really find a better way.
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I agree that the current crop of programmers can't be trusted to work without constant supervision. But I'd like to also bring up the overwhelming amount of managers I've had that are actively hostile to the idea of "learning how their business makes money." There is a large group of midwits, that have somehow found themselves in the positions of managing technical teams, whether that is software or "traditional" engineering, that actively refuse to learn anything about the engineering side of the business.

So in return, you end up with these complicated management schemes, where 70% of my productivity is going towards meetings, one on one meetings, progress report meetings, writing shit on jira, writing shit on the trello board, writing paragraphs at the end of the day on teams reiterating everything. Just so the manager can avoid knowing what a "Sea Plus Plus" is.
 
General Zigger said:
I agree that the current crop of programmers can't be trusted to work without constant supervision. But I'd like to also bring up the overwhelming amount of managers I've had that are actively hostile to the idea of "learning how their business makes money." There is a large group of midwits, that have somehow found themselves in the positions of managing technical teams, whether that is software or "traditional" engineering, that actively refuse to learn anything about the engineering side of the business.

So in return, you end up with these complicated management schemes, where 70% of my productivity is going towards meetings, one on one meetings, progress report meetings, writing shit on jira, writing shit on the trello board, writing paragraphs at the end of the day on teams reiterating everything. Just so the manager can avoid knowing what a "Sea Plus Plus" is.
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It's not just in programming, there are plenty of fields where management has been expressly redefined as bean counting first and technical competency second.

From my own experience seeing this in action bullshit artists are the ones that get rewarded - management has no clue what matters or how things work, so all it can go off is how important people make their work sound + how much effort they put into the bullshit time sinks you listed. The senior staff engineer who sits next to me just talks nonstop about how great Initiative X is and how he's got all these milestones and announcements related to it lined up and how important initiative X is . . . but it's all just a circlejerk with management about what a great job he's doing. He has accomplished literally nothing in years.
 
blargenheimer said:
Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Bluesky, now of Block (Square payments, Cash App, Afterpay, Tidal music, etc.) lays off 40% of workforce, over 4000 people, due to AI, while already profitable. Stock rises 23% in after hours.
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Some rehires.
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Separately, Dell has been letting tens of thousands of people go, just as it did the previous year.

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https://www.reuters.com/business/wo...drops-10-fiscal-2026-filing-shows-2026-03-16/
March 16 (Reuters) - Dell's (DELL.N) total workforce declined by about 10%, or 11,000 employees, in fiscal 2026, it said on Monday, a sign that the ‌AI server maker is limiting external hiring to reduce costs.
The company spent $569 million in severance payments in this period, compared with $693 million a year ago, its annual report showed.

Dell had about ⁠97,000 employees as of January 31, down from about 108,000 employees a year ago. Its workforce had declined by about 10% in fiscal 2025.

Silicon Valley employees have grown increasingly concerned about AI disruption in recent months as 60 tech companies have laid off more than 38,000 employees this year, according to ‌Layoffs.fyi, ⁠a website tracking sector-wide job cuts.
Reuters reported on Friday that social media giant Meta (META.O), opens new tab was planning a sweeping layoff that could affect 20% or more of its workforce.
Dell, ⁠whose shares have risen over 24% so far this year, said last month that it expects revenue from its ⁠key AI-optimized servers business to double in fiscal year 2027.
In February, it announced a 20% hike in ⁠its cash dividend and an additional $10 billion for its share repurchase program.
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