It’s known as institutional knowledge.
Voluntary retirement/resignation sounds like it could only ever be a bad idea, even financially.
The people who choose to leave are the ones who know they’ll land on their feet and find another place. ie: competent, experienced, in-demand. Possibly being head-hunted.
The ones you can’t easily bribe to leave are the ones that don’t expect to find alternative employment in a reasonable time frame (or rate). So… inexperienced, under qualified, or low production.
You have a job because you are young and not expensive. All the old timers with experience have had 20-30 years of pay raises. AI is just some bullshit excuse to get rid of the high earners. It happens all the time, the excuse just chances every decade. It will happen to you, I guarantee it.
“The efficiency gains are real!”
Also there’s the amount of tokens being blown through at breakneck speed. There’s zero path to profitability.
AI is the shortcut to what looks like knowledge to people who are clueless. Hence the massive CEO tripling down on it being the big thing. This bubble gon’ pop and it’ll leave quite the nasty mess. Now what to short first and when is the question
How it works when these bubbles burst, the billionaires talk among themselves and decide it’s time they short everything. They make the money when the bubble inflates and makes more money when the bubble bursts.
So you have to have an invite to whatever is the present day equivalent of Epstein Island to know what to short and when.
the efficiency gains from AI are real
Citation needed.
I’m an experienced solo developer who tried embracing the state of the art in agentic programming on a several month long non-trivial project. My income depends on this project succeeding so I’m not fucking around here looking for an excuse for ai to fail. I’m trying to keep up…
My idea is that if this works, I want it working for me.
The results were unimpressive at best. It feels very fast at first but the entropy is insidious and comes even faster.
When you hit the wall where the agent stops being able to understand it’s own work and contextualise tasks in a meaningful way, you’re left with a pile of incomprehensible shit that kind of looks like code.
You will have nothing. Nothing but a giant token bill, wasted time and a sense of shame.
The last study I saw might have been from 18 months ago, but they found that AI costs programmers more time than they saved AND that programmers completely miscalculated the efficiency of AI, unaware that it was slower.
Whether or not AI is more efficient now, it’s demonstrated that individual programmers are pretty bad at evaluating AI efficiency subjectively.
That leaves the reports of CEO’s, desperate to justify layoffs from lack of work with AI, desperate to goose their stock prices by being AI-first, and the slavish business press who exclusively repeats whatever they say.
Citation definitely needed.
18 months is an eternity in terms of AI performance. Local models now are better than the frontiers models were at that moment.
In my experience, AI automates the boring part of programming (which is actually writing the code). It leaves me able to focus on user experience, architecture, the fun stuff. Am I more productive? Maybe a little, yeah. Is it magically going to replace my whole team? Only a fool would think so.
I think every three to six months I read people on HN saying the new X.Y model has finally broken the barrier and is the game changer that will forever transform the industry.
Whatever AI is like today, it’s been demonstrated programmers wildly overestimate how much time AI saves them; meanwhile, most everyone else has a vested interest in exagerrating the efficiency of AI and there is very little media presence pushing back against or investigating AI claims.
“The common wisdom” that AI saves a lot of time could just be to result of ignorance and delusion. I’m happy to wait for objective research before making assumptions one way or the other.
And however efficient AI actually is, nobody wants to pay the true cost of it yet.
The efficiency gains depend on your metric. You have a shitty one, and you gamed it, intentionally. Congratulations?
It’s a big difference when a company use AI as tool for the employees to improve the quality and productivity, or use the AI to substitute with an AI experimented employees to save costs. It’s not the same a student which use eg. the Sketchapediaº to understand better a complex theme in the research for his essay or simply use a Chatbot to write the essay for him. A designer or artist using an AI in graphical editors for routine tasks or adding some effects to his work, o simply writing a small promt in an AI to create yhe design or artwork. Absolute not needed a Smart Home, Fridge or Toaster with AI to spy on us, to create memes or worse, political influencers using Deep Fakes Research centers, pharmacompanies, medical centers, had made big advances in new medications, treatments in diseases before not curable, new materials, better designs, improved research in physics, astronomy, with results impssibles without AI, researches in days which in traditional manner would have need years.
But this, the AI as tool in the hand of experimented employees and scientists. This is the problem, not really the AI as such, but greedy companies abusing and biasing it, to control, manipulate and scam the users
º
typical attitude of the still employed, nonproductive caste
I work with many people like this. They’re not wrong. AI and agentic AI in particular has vastly lowered the barrier for entry. It’s a reality I think many of you are not willing to admit.
The difference, and what scares me, is an older person like me using Agentic AI because it’s quicker to QA code than write it from scratch because I can is vastly different than a younger person using Agentic AI because it’s easier and they don’t understand the fundamentals of what they’re doing.
The future is scary yo.
I’m glad you highlighted that little snippet because ironically, this entire story sounded like it was written by AI. Is it even a real person lamenting their former coworkers, or is this just an AI false flag trying to normalize it and fluff it up, or maybe just someone farming karma?
Lots and lots of em-dashes. The rule of threes. A semicolon even. “And that’s the floor.” is a very Claude kind of thing to say and I have no idea what that particularly emphatic sentence is even trying to accomplish in that paragraph. What does it mean the floor? What floor?
Also is anyone actually getting offered voluntary retirement packages? That seems like a complete anachronism these days. This is the software industry. It’s not unionized. Why would they give you anything other than minimum severance (or exactly the amount less than it would cost you to fight it?) I’ve been laid off from this industry before, and I know how it works, I’ve never even heard of anyone being offered a voluntary retirement package.
I strongly believe this is AI slop. Me highly sus.
Just from the language up top and the reference to multiple orgs I assume this was in reference to the massive federal layoff last year that was presented as a voluntary retirement, but with the implicit threat that you’ll probably be laid off in 6 months if you don’t take it. One of the justifications from DOGE was that we were all more productive now.
I mentioned to a coworker the other day that a spreadsheet of “requirements” were sent over by someone, filled with em-dashes. He had no idea why I was so critical of the requirements, because on the surface they sounded legitimate. I pointed out that the guy who submitted them probably had no idea what half of them were, and just went with the plan submitted by AI.
“But how do you know”… my brother, it’s the em-dashes. Nobody fucking used those in emails, spreadsheets, or whatever prior to AI.
I did.
I don’t anymore, but I used to. Some of us read books.
Microsoft Word also used to autoreplace them in if I remember correctly, but that’s also a red herring because nobody used Microsoft Word by choice either, and nobody sane is copy-pasting shit out of Microsoft Word into the real internet.
As for the “And that’s the floor.” I assume it means “and that’s just the ground level people, not counting higher ups and management”
That’s the floor, meaning the very bottom of the number (200, is those he personally knew), because he knows there’s way more knowledge leaving than those he knew.
humie-slop, ai-slop, slop is slop. Either you get that this non-productive bullshit is a complete dead end, or you remain open to the scam.
Also, yeah, severance packages are still a thing. My buddy just got 6 weeks when he got laid off.
It’s got to be AI. I can barely parse it.
Cit CTO etc are suffering with AI psychosis. They will probably self isolate and we will have to build a parallèle society or something
The idea of summing up “years of experience” between multiples of people always feels like one of those “lies, damn lies, and statistics” type of statistics.
Like brain drain is a real thing and they are still making an important point but “200 years of experience, maybe even more!” doesn’t really feel like it means anything concrete for an argument.
Fuck, I am commenting on one of those mindless images of text with absolutely zero information on it. Why am I engaging with this? This is worthless.
The irony is this is almost certainly AI generated. Look at the emdashes.
Outside of AI this has been the situation for the federal government for the last 18 months or so.
My little org lost 70% of the senior people in the purges
The way I put it is this: making a thing work the first time is easy. Juniors and AI can both do that. Try figuring out why a thing quit working three years later. AI fails miserably, junior devs just start crying, and the senior devs who took the buyout laugh in your face and order another mojito.
hahahaha
Well, now they all have part time jobs training AI, so now we’re just harvesting information without knowledge of experience.
Yeah! This is AI’s fault! Inserting itself into our lives.
