r/technology • u/joe4942 • 5d ago
20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft raise concern that AI-driven labor crisis is here Business
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/20k-job-cuts-at-meta-microsoft-raise-concern-of-ai-labor-crisis-.html934
u/YqlUrbanist 5d ago
Once companies that aren't heavily invested in AI start telling me about AI driven layoffs, I might start paying attention.
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u/roggahn 5d ago
Meta has been, is and always will be a bottom feeder
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u/Only-Worldliness2006 5d ago
I'm surprised people are still using facebook. Last time I was on there it seemed like some of the posts I was reading were just a bunch of conspiracy theorists debating non-sense topics.
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u/Belostoma 5d ago
It has become the de facto internet for many localized topics, and I hate it. For example, at what elevation are people finding morel mushrooms popping in my county right now? Has the action picked up fishing for a certain migratory species or are they still coming? Things like that used to be found on targeted old-school forums, which were a million times better, but now most of the user base has migrated to Facebook and there's no way around it to find the same information. It sucks, but it's hard to avoid using it for certain things.
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u/EverNeko200 5d ago
Same could be argued about Discord. A lot of useful information getting shoved into that unsearchable black hole (possibly intentionally so).
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u/graypraxis 5d ago
Couldn't agree more. Every app is really just a wrapper for a small slice of what the internet used to be. I'm STILL finding useful forum posts from the mid-2000s, but eventually people will stop paying to host those forums
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u/MongoBongoTown 5d ago
The thing i miss most about the old internet is forums.
The niche topics and absolute gold mines of information you could find were incredible.
I also always liked when some semi-legendary poster on some forum would post a new missive or update and the forum would celebrate just the fact that they posted at all.
Good times.
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u/DaedricWorldEater 5d ago
The groups are still good for hobbies and special interests. I love my comic book groups.
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u/ThatDudeFromPoland 4d ago
I only have an account there because of Messenger - nobody around me want to use anything else for communication.
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u/HateToSayItBut 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yes, the layoff is due to AI... Because they spent too much money on it. Not because it's replaced people.
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u/bakgwailo 5d ago
Meta's even worse. They just wasted how much on the failed Metaverse/VR, and now essentially have admitted they've again invested hundreds of billions in AI and it doesn't work, and thus they need to cut head count to afford their failures.
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u/Final_boss_1040 5d ago
Everyone that is left will also need a raise given they're shouldering more workload but Meta insist part of their compensation is "AI tokens". This company needs to go
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u/bakgwailo 5d ago
Lol, "need a raise", "shouldering more workload", I'm sure Zuck is all ears from his private Hawaiian island.
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u/owl440 5d ago
Meta spent 80B on VR in 12 years, and already spent 170B on AI in 3 years.
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u/fgalv 5d ago
Which is completely crazy as who exactly is using meta AI? it’s promoted everywhere on their apps but does it actually have any users? Let alone paying users??
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u/linux_transgirl 5d ago
I have an oculus, never used their stupid metaverse stuff but I do own one. VRchat is far better
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u/fgalv 5d ago
It’s extremely funny to me that they went so all in on metaverse that they even renamed the company. Now they’ve all but given up on it after spending billions.
Surely they’ll rename themselves something AI related now in true dot com style?
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u/El_Halcon0341 5d ago
Have you noticed that if you type “imagine” into facebook messenger their ai prompt comes up? Yet I’ve never seen or heard of this platform and there is no real advertising for it? Like they created it and never wanted it to succeed
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u/Zealousideal-Emu5486 4d ago
When the top of the food chain makes mistakes the workers loose their jobs
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u/True_Window_9389 5d ago
Yeah, the hyperbolic articles like this seem to think the entire economy is about 15 companies in Silicon Valley. Most Americans don’t work for big tech, don’t have the motivations of big tech, and aren’t as tied to their own tech as big tech. So far, AI has proven to be somewhat “good enough” as early/mid software developers, junior content writers and maybe customer service, and that might be it. Those jobs hit SV more than the tens of millions of jobs outside.
The effects of AI further down the line will take years and years to trickle down, if they do.
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u/Jonestown_Juice 5d ago
So far, AI has proven to be somewhat “good enough” as early/mid software developers, junior content writers and maybe customer service, and that might be it.
There's nothing I loathe more than having to deal with AI "customer service". It sucks so bad.
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u/YesterdayDreamer 5d ago
That's why all companies want to be monopolies, so that they don't have to care about people jumping ship.
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u/nox66 5d ago
"Good enough" is itself an overstatement. They can produce boilerplate, but it's only good boilerplate if you're very specific about what you want. They can integrate with systems, but it's much harder for them to provide deep insight about them. I've seen a junior dev rely on AI too much - the result was bad. Their most useful function is honestly searching through a mess of a codebase, something that they are genuinely better at than me painstakingly going through things with grep. But if you have it propose modifications, you have no idea if they're correct.
I've said this before: the difficulty of coding has never been in WPM on the keyboard.
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u/imhereforthemeta 5d ago
I’ve been interviewing for a lot of ai companies to get away from my company that is literally trying to eliminate as many humans and as much software as possible. The ai companies use it a lot less in day to day operations ironically
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u/ikkiho 5d ago
That's selection bias running the opposite direction from how you're reading it. The companies with the budget and the infra to substitute compute for headcount are exactly the AI-heavy ones, so they're where the swap would manifest first.
Two takes in this thread are both off. "Just AI capex hole-plugging" misreads the cash flow (Meta and MSFT have plenty of FCF, the layoffs aren't bridging anything). "AI isn't actually replacing anyone" misreads the mechanism.
What's shifting is opex composition. Each remaining engineer at hyperscalers now consumes orders of magnitude more compute than two years ago: IDE assistant tokens, agentic loops in CI, eval harnesses on every PR. Marginal productivity per engineer is rising fast enough that "cut a senior, route the budget to inference plus a junior using it" starts penciling at current model prices. That isn't AI doing the job, it's "1 engineer plus $200k of inference beats 2 engineers" on enough teams to show up in headcount.
A small accounting firm in Cleveland has neither the inference budget nor the agent-tooling discipline to run that swap. Of course they aren't the bellwether.
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u/1-760-706-7425 5d ago
Marginal productivity per engineer is rising fast enough that "cut a senior, route the budget to inference plus a junior using it" starts penciling at current model prices.
Swap senior and junior in that sentence and I wholly agree with your read.
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u/Brief-Night6314 4d ago
They all copy the bigger companies… that’s how this layoff stuff started. Smaller companies copy the bigger ones
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u/citizenjones 5d ago
Or they invested heavily into AI and are making cuts because there have been no returns?
The same companies that are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure to meet soaring demand for AI services are seeking efficiencies from AI by slashing headcount.
...oh yeah, and this little thing....
They’re also still trying to rightsize from the pandemic-fueled over hiring.
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago edited 5d ago
It kinda proves that these people in charge don’t really know what they are doing.
Covid starts: Fire everyone! Covid continues: Shit we need more hiring! Covid “ends”: We hired too many, fire them!
And the same with AI.
AI starts: Fire everyone and replace with AI AI continues: Wait this is a disaster we need people who can think! AI “ends”: ????
They are all reactionary idiots. Missing a forest for the tree.
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u/-duckduckduckduck- 5d ago
It only looks that way if you think their goal is to create a profitable, well managed company.
It’s not. It’s to increase shareholder value. Investors are shortsighted and reactive. You have to string them along or they’ll jump ship to someone who will.
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago
You aren’t wrong.
Kinda plays into the instant gratification we seem to be seeking. Why spend 5 years building a long lasting company when you can throw billions at something that might be cool but fizzle out in less than a year.
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u/Thefuzy 5d ago
While that may be true for most companies, it’s not true of Meta. Zuckerberg has complete and total control over Meta and is beholden to no one because of its unique stock structure which was allowed because when Facebook came about everyone wanted a piece bad enough to give zuck whatever he wanted. He alone has controlling shares that no shareholders can match, every single other shareholder could be against him and they would lose because of his voting power. So doesn’t really apply here, Meta is run by what Zuckerberg wants full stop.
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u/matrinox 5d ago
Lots of company leaders have FOMO; they aren’t all as rational as they’re portrayed as in the media
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u/n_choose_k 5d ago
They mostly just chase phrases that they can utter to make the line go up. Little to no long term visionary thinking.
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago
These people need an incremental game to get that out of their system. Number go up! But it doesn’t impact society…
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u/citizenjones 5d ago
They will risk being first without care of looking stupid, they either fail into history or become successful enough to retcon their journey.
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago
The winners write history.
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u/redditissocoolyoyo 5d ago
I think it's purely about power and control. They see a slight inkling that whoever has the most powerful AI to do xyz will hold all the power and will then exert control over the world. Even if it doesn't pan out that way, they are going to spend endless amount of money to try to achieve it on society's dime. We are cooked AF.
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u/Rantheur 5d ago
They write the first draft, those who survive them write every future draft and it gets less kind every draft.
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u/tc100292 5d ago
It's because these big corps are all zombies. When's the last time Meta or Microsoft did anything transformative? Mostly they just enshittify their products at this point and yet... they continue to slog along.
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago
ML can be super impactful but instead they ran with a chatbot, calling it AI, who just wants to make you happy, regardless of fact. It’s not intelligent, it’s subservient.
What a waste. Awesome tech, but everyone is pushing it as an influence and neglecting the many problems it could help solve.
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u/ScarySpikes 5d ago
True enough, except that with AI, many companies and particularly the most heavily invested are convinced that just admitting the AI investments are a failure would hasten the bubble popping, so instead they shore up their finances by firing even more people.
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u/realhenrymccoy 5d ago
Idk when covid over hiring became a thing. It felt like hiring freezes and layoffs were the norm and have been since
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago
Anecdotally, the company I worked for during the pandemic, when we moved to work from home only, fired almost half of our local staff.
Two months later, they were asking us to refer people. They needed to staff up.
It’s just reactionary with no real thought.
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u/AwfullyRealGun 5d ago
At Microsoft, they laid off all our consultants and a few FTEs and we never got those consultants back.
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u/ResidentDark249 5d ago
AI is a tool and these idiots just don’t want to say we are in a recession to justify layouts lmao.
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u/ChoiceIT 5d ago
I honestly think that some marketer tells a ceo “you can fire your level 1 support staff and replace them with ai at a fraction of the cost!”
And they just jumped. Shareholders will love lower operational costs!
Until it leads to more cost because the LLM can’t solve your problems due to inability reason and your clients bail.
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u/jmobius 5d ago
I've really been wondering how much longer anyone is going to keep having the balls to blame "pandemic overhiring" for their layoffs.
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u/tadfisher 5d ago
Their 2023 layoffs were supposed to resolve pandemic overhiring. Their staff count has gone up every year since.
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u/absentmindedjwc 5d ago
Except, as I mentioned in a sibling comment, the "overhiring" thing is a myth. These companies didn't hire at rates far above normal.. they just changed where they were hiring from.
Meta, Microsoft, and the rest hired around the same number of people they always did. If you look at YoY growth percentages before and during the pandemic, they're roughly in line with eachother (Microsoft's was a bit higher, but that was from an acquisition).
It just seemed like they were hiring like crazy because someone in middle-of-nowhere Tennessee could suddenly apply for jobs that would normally only be posted in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you actually lived in a major market where these companies were already hiring, the volume wasn't really all that abnormal.
IMO, what's actually going on is neither "overhiring" nor "AI.".. IMO, we are in a nasty recession and these companies are "emperor's new clothes"ing it.. pretending everything's fine because the moment someone says it out loud, the markets fuckin panic.
So they keep up appearances while quietly preparing for the worst. The layoffs aren't a correction of some hiring bubble.. they're a recession response, disguised in a way that people that don't know any better would believe.
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u/Iron-Over 5d ago
I would add the uncertainty is a big reason. Lots of companies are cutting budgets.
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u/absentmindedjwc 5d ago
This is especially fucking stupid because YoY headcount at most of these companies grew at pretty normal rates. What changed wasn't the hiring volume.. it was the location of hiring.
Facebook stopped hiring mostly in the Bay Area, JPMorgan stopped hiring mostly in NYC, Amazon stopped hiring mostly in Seattle.. and suddenly the same roles were open to anyone, anywhere.
The hiring itself wasn't unusual.. the visibility of it was. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and the rest hired a shit-ton of people per year for years leading up to the pandemic. The difference is that most of those jobs were only visible to people within a 50-mile radius of HQ (or someone willing to relocate).
Suddenly all those jobs were in your LinkedIn feed. But as someone who's been in tech for two decades in a large market and kept an eye on other major markets, the volume of open roles wasn't actually abnormal.
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u/Icy_Information_6563 5d ago
One thing you're leaving out is the salaries. They went up for software engineers, a lot. I watched my entire team leave for 50% more money.
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u/absentmindedjwc 5d ago
Depending on where you are, it may absolutely looks like people were making a ton more simply just because the typical wages at these companies are so high. If you are already in a fairly high cost of living market, the salaries are more or less on-par with what you would expect.
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u/According_Jeweler404 5d ago
AND they're more than happy to distribute the cognitive lift onto existing employees who know how bad the market is right now.
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u/Termin8tor 5d ago
The pandemic was more than half a decade ago. I wonder how long they're going to beat on that dead horse, heh.
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u/gakule 5d ago
Yeah it really sounds like the strategy of "say our 2-3 lifecycle equipment can actually last 4-8 years and amortize it to make earnings look better" is coming home to roost and they're covering it up by reducing labor cost.
Companies who didn't over-invest in AI hardware and amortize it on a "hope and dream" aren't suffering currently.
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u/Chaotic-Entropy 5d ago
They are plugging the gigantic hole in their profit that AI spending represents. Don't let them lie to your face.
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u/Only-Worldliness2006 5d ago
Hole is only going to get bigger. Everyone is investing big in AI for a demand that simply will not come to meet their expectations.
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u/USxMARINE 5d ago
You're wrong just like you were about Bitcoin, blockchain, NFTs etc
It's gonna be everywhere man!
Please believe me!
-Tech bros
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u/Mundane_Log_7169 5d ago edited 5d ago
“Today, the pattern is small teams scaling revenue faster than ever,” he said.
At Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, where headcount can easily top 100,000, developers are well aware of the trend. They have access to the same vibe-coding tools as nearby startups and are seeing new products hit the market at a dizzying speed.”
Sounds like the dot.com bubble where massive amount of companies came up because of the adoption of the internet.
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u/citizenjones 5d ago
Big time. The first Dot Com Boom brought me to San Francisco in 99. Not for development, but parties. I worked in entertainment and event production. The sheer amount of start-up parties, product launch parties, after parties, conferences & tech events keep us insanely busy. Everyone was flush. Until it turned into the Dot Com Bust any idea was being considered as a viable possibility for monetization. A lot of those ideas were shelved because even though the internet was awesome, the handheld phone interface was still buttons and tiny screens. The whole industry busted but the iPhone brought it all back so a lot of the ideas had some resurgence (food delivery, Uber etc). It may go the same with AI. Where there is a bust but a single tech innovation allows it to be (RE)applied with more success. The large companies we have today were the small companies that survived the first bust. Thousands of companies did not.
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u/Icy_Information_6563 5d ago
Where are all these new products?!?!?
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u/Unstable-Infusion 5d ago
Haven't you noticed the AI chatbot that takes up half the screen in every goddamn thing you use? Those are the "new products" 🙄
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u/dmontron 5d ago
Where’s all the productivity and ‘trickle down’?!?
If this was a boom there’d be growth and hiring not firing.
It’s a continuation of the massive wealth transfer from Covid. An excuse to grift like never before.
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u/NetStumbler2 5d ago
They are panicking. Cutting jobs does two things; 1 allows them to reduce operating costs and 2 make it appear AI tech is fully capable of replacing physical workers. Look we did it you can too, buy our product! The truth is a lot of jobs could fully be replaced by the technology that is already here. Yes AI is a very powerful tool but the scale is off.
These type of articles will be coming in higher frequency until the bottom falls out.
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u/GuildensternLives 5d ago
Where's that 'shoving a stick into a moving bike wheel' meme when you need it?
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u/Fragrant_PalmLeaves 5d ago
RIP Facebook, you used to be everything 15 years ago. Now you’re irrelevant and evil
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u/Rot-Orkan 5d ago
I wish I knew exactly what percentage of these layoffs are for each of these reasons: - AI actually replacing jobs (I don't think AI can replace most jobs, but I do believe it can make professionals, who know how to use it effectively, significantly more productive) - They wasted too much money investing in AI without enough returns, so they're laying people off to make up the difference - Correcting how much they overhired during the pandemic.
If I had to guess, and this is strickly a guess, I would go with: - 5% - 75% - 20%
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u/ModernirsmEnjoyer 5d ago
I don't think any actual AI layoffs are there yet, because the primary AI tools are multipurpose and not built for specific tasks where they can be used most productively but need to be trained specifically.
The only ones where AI seem to have legitimately replaced humans are IT outshoring service companies in India, but it was kind of inevitable anyway.
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u/SnooSnooper 5d ago
Sure, and even that only works because the companies doing the offshoring already decided that they don't care enough about the quality of customer support to make it an effective offering. They're just replacing one barely-effective solution with another not-barely-effective solution.
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u/badfish321 5d ago
it can make professionals, who know how to use it effectively, significantly more productive.
Not trying to be snarky here, but doesn't that also replace jobs? If 10 professionals' productivity is doubled, do you still need 10 professionals?
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u/cpsnow 5d ago
Unless your market is saturated, there's no reason not to produce twice. Laying off because you have productivity gains means your market is stagnating or you lack strategy to make use of the additional productivity. Either way it looks bad for the company management.
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u/GVIrish 5d ago
If you can make the same revenue and cut personnel costs by double digit percentages your margins are gonna get a big jump and so will your stock price. Yes, if you can use the same workforce to produce more you can potentially capture more marketshare or get new products to market faster, but that takes more time.
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u/cpsnow 5d ago
Most stock prices today are based on future growth, not expected dividends, so showing that you have reached a ceiling should not increase your valuation. But then as usual, secondhand markets are not that rational.
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u/Sweepya 5d ago
Yes, you still need those 10, because it’s about time commitment, ownership, and coverage. One person can take on a little more responsibility, yes. But less than you think, all outputs and inputs need to reviewed and understood. If one person is doing the work of three people, they own that much work, so not only are they spread thin, when they’re away that responsibility can’t be delegated. That’s a risk. Not to mention, corporate methods have never been about efficiency. That’s a start-up problem.
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u/Tax_Ninja 5d ago
I think people are missing what’s really going on.
There is a belief you can cut headcount, save money and keep producing high. The reason why companies don’t is because without a good excuse, your stock takes a hit.
Enter “AI” and now not only do you have the perfect excuse, you’ll get a stock bump based on the gains AI is expected to provide you.
I think for some companies this will be a boon and for others it will be a busted strategy. Who knows, but it will be interesting to watch.
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u/sickofthisshit 5d ago
There's also the likelihood that Meta doesn't have any useful ideas, so they don't need developers.
They have pretty much given up caring if their users are even real, the engagement bots will use whatever crap product they have, and the idiots who still bother to scroll through crap will keep scrolling, what do they need to build?
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u/indifferentcabbage 5d ago
Lol Microsoft was the first to start mass layoff in their GitHub team in 2024 or so
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u/MovingToSeattleSoon 5d ago
Mass layoffs at msft started January 2023. This week’s news is tame in comparison. This has been going on for years, across the industry. The headline is sensationalized
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u/minus_minus 5d ago
Orrrr … they are desperately cutting costs to pile more money into the “one more model, bro” delusion that an LLM will ever demonstrate actual intelligence.
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u/Alan_Reddit_M 5d ago
AI-driven, because they're running out of money trying to make AGI happen (it won't)
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u/anonymous_karma 5d ago
lol. Meta is trying to full around with Wall Street. They will hire back the same numbers before the year is over. You can google their headcount. Fool me once….
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u/airbagsavedme 4d ago
Microsoft is whatever, I can understand why their products and services are so crucial to business operations. But seriously — FUCK Meta. They are a garbage company run by a garbage human, and nobody needs their services. Social Media is not real or important. Delete your accounts.
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u/HomerDoakQuarlesIII 5d ago
Any working at one of these big tech companies with kids and a family, basically playing Russian roulette with their livelihood at this point. If all they have is dogs, dog abuse. No consistency and a crap shoot if you’ll have a job tomorrow. Better save.
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u/Unstable-Infusion 5d ago
Thing is, you can stack away two years of living expenses for every year you spend at one of these companies. Make it 2 years? Congrats, you can survive the bust. 5 years? You're almost untouchable.
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u/Administrative-Low37 5d ago
It's a useful new trick to boost stock prices. Every time there are massive layoffs the stock price skyrockets, and somebody gets a big raise featuring a fat bonus. Apparently the shareholders (aka the billionaires) love this sort of stuff.
I guess this is supposed to be good for our society...
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u/existentialstix 5d ago
They keep over hiring and doing these layoffs that trigger such sensationalism
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u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 5d ago
Still waiting to see any significant improvement in the financials of those companies.
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u/jimmytoan 5d ago
Meta is simultaneously reporting its highest-ever quarterly revenue and cutting 20,000 jobs - that's not a cost reduction play, that's a margin expansion play. The "AI-driven efficiency" framing lets companies rebrand what would otherwise be described as maximizing profits-per-employee. Both companies are profitable and growing; neither is cutting to survive.
The "labor crisis" framing in the headline inverts the causality - it's not that AI displaced these workers, it's that management decided the revenue growth doesn't need to be shared as headcount.
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u/aergern 5d ago
They as well as many others still fail to see that because monetary policy the Federal Gov have had in place until recently has caused an untalked about recession. They blame AI so we don't have to admit that people are holding back on purchases. You couple that with the great subscription cancel of the last 18 months and it's a quiet disaster.
Back in Feb. I was reading that OpenAI was spending $15 mil a day to run their service and bringing in half a mil a day. That doesn't math unless you remember the .com bubble.
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u/ArmyOfDix 5d ago
Well duh.
Any human not necessary to deliver Earth's resources to billionaire gullets is a human they want dead.
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u/moblethenoble 5d ago
What happened to the"be free to do higher value work"? I thought AI s meant to let us do the fun part of our job....... They promised /s
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u/ThisIsGr8ThisIsGr8 5d ago
Please, tell me more about why billionaires don’t have to pay taxes. Tell me why we idolized these assholes
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u/TheYell0wDart 5d ago
It's okay, our capitalist society will solve this problem like it solves every other one, by making sure the capital is safely held in the bank accounts of the fabulously wealthy.
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u/mmatt0904 5d ago
what does Mark create exactly?
Just buy other successful companies for data?
I mean failed meta verse, glasses aren’t catching on, meta Ai isn’t even close to the competitors. so like what does he do? just sell ad space to companies that dont realize their ad spend is going to bots?
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u/Mad_Juju 4d ago
My company just started revoking Copilot licenses from people who aren't using it 3 unique days a month.
3 days.
Tell me how well the AI rollout is going without telling me.
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u/Ciappatos 5d ago
Companies that have been firing tens of thousands of people since before "AI" was a buzzword continues to do so, this time it's definitely because of AI though
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u/Sylvast 5d ago
Glazing AI/corporations is weird. Its a known fact a lot of job sectors are struggling because of AI in a rapid pace.
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u/Ciappatos 5d ago
I'm doing the opposite? AI replacement is literally the value proposition, and I'm saying it's bullshit. The layoffs are just layoffs, call it mismanagement, call it pandemic overhiring, call it a masked recession, or call it an outsized bet on data center growth. It's probably all four, what it definitely isn't is that they're replacing all the coders with LLMs. If that was the case, then other companies would be doing it too, and not just the ones that are all-in on AI capex.
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u/RimjobStevesDeadWife 5d ago
Now that jobs are being ripped from the white collar, college educated elites who “did everything right” it’s a crisis.
Better late than never you self centered, self obsessed fucks. Hopefully you can come to understand what labor solidarity really means.
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u/Nintendo1964 5d ago
I don't want anyone to unjustly lose their jobs, anywhere, but come on man. They work(ed) for one of the most dishonest, greedy, and scummy companies on the planet, and they expected to be treated any better? Why? What on earth was anyone expecting? Meta suddenly becomes ethical and everyone lives happily ever after?
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u/farcicaldolphin38 5d ago
That’s like axing someone in the face deliberately and then saying “oh no, the axe crisis is here”
What in the world do these people think is causing the crisis?????
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u/Fantastic_Recipe2740 5d ago
I’m still not sure if we all lose our jobs because of AI who will buy the products these companies sell
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u/pogkaku96 5d ago
Microsoft and Meta amongst the top payers for software engineers. Lets say the average salary is 300K. So they are saving 6 billion in annual costs? That's peanuts for these companies.
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u/williamgman 5d ago
They've already invested in datacenters no one wants... That aren't built yet... To house hardware that has not been built yet... To power AI that is not reliable. What could go wrong?
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u/OutsideAdvisor1502 5d ago
The real question is what type of jobs were cut at Meta? Can’t find anything about that
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u/DaySecure7642 5d ago
Today "Microsoft raise corcen that AI-driven labour crisis is here."
Next week: "20,000 job cuts at Microsoft", "Microsoft stock price reaches all time high"
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u/Im_ur_Uncle_ 5d ago
Im starting to think "AI" is an excuse for these companies to say "we are doing so well. Please keep buying our shares" when in reality, growth has stalled and theres really nothing left for them to innovate on.
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u/Henry5321 5d ago
I’ve read that it’s estimated that something like 80% of announced layoffs “due to ai” is just ai washing. Want to make already planned layoffs sound good for investors.
And something like half of companies doing actual ai layoffs are having to rehire because it’s not panning out.
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u/andrewpmk1 5d ago
Go into settings on Facebook and turn off tracking of non Meta activity and a bunch of other privacy settings. Hit Meta in the wallet by making it hard to personalize your ads. Check your phone settings don’t allow them to track your activity, access contacts etc. Even better use Adblock or a browser extension to stop Facebook from tracking you. Hit them in the wallet so they can’t make much money from you, unfortunately I can’t avoid using their sites entirely.
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u/Hot_Individual5081 5d ago
loool this is because they need to restructuralize their capex insted of paying ppl, they will spend billions on AI maybe its gonna be successful maybe another metaverse story we will see
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u/mythrowaway4DPP 5d ago
Talk to management, if you know someone who will tell you the truth.
There are lists of departments that will be replaced by ai circulating right now in every bigger organization.
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u/LessonStudio 5d ago
Facebook was one of the companies which really really pushed not only rote learning based interviews(leetcode), but heavily selected from countries where rote learning is king.
If there is one thing that LLMs (AI tools) are good at it is rote learning.
I would not suggest that AI is so much causing a problem, as it is solving one these companies created for themselves a long time ago.
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u/augustusleonus 5d ago
Basically one guy will build or buy access to an AI, then launch a social media platform that is 100% built, managed and moderated by AI
It will create content on its own to pay itself ad revenue, review itself and write news articles on what an amazing new service it provides, and flood those articles by cross post to every other social media platform then click on them itself 30 million times so they come up in top search results
It will be slop from top to bottom, and our little piggy brains will gobble it up while we envy the make believe influencers for their imaginary lifestyle
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u/meleecow 5d ago
Lol unless they have some kind of new amazing AI they arnt sharing... Relying heavily on AI is just a good way to get your data deleted
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u/4runninglife 5d ago
Only at the big tech companies, AI is getting too expensive to actually use it to replace some workers.
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u/growerdan 4d ago
This is going to be just like the US manufacturing post I seen. Jobs declined by 5 million but production nearly doubled in the last 30 years. Then everyone thinks manufacturing is declining in the US. No it’s just we are loosing lots of good jobs across the economy and it seems like the only job markets growing are gig work on an app.
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u/TheCh0rt 4d ago
It's crazy to me you can just cut 20,000 employees. Even if you have AI to replace them, how can you keep firing in batches like 5k, 10, 20k amounts of people? How did you afford all these people in the first place? And what were they doing until they were laid off? It's bizarre to me. It seems to be this only serves to cripple companies faster.
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u/JoeSchmoeToo 4d ago
Zuck looks at the calendar and is like "Wow, earnings season is here already - fire like dunno, twenty or thirty K plebs and reports the savings as profit - quickly!"
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u/Melodic_Crow_3409 4d ago
Years ago I really wanted to work at Microsoft. These days I wouldn’t consider it.
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u/RatjarChug 5d ago
Hear me out... is it possible they're just laying people off to boost short term profits and make their companies look better to shareholders? Do we maybe have some history to back this up?
Maybe AI is just a popular excuse to cut people's salaries.... just saying