I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.

No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.

Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.

Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.

Having been through a couple of layoffs and merges, as I approach mid-century, the MBA powered managers are always to blame, because the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.

And then when targets aren't met, it is the employees that get shown the door while management gets their bonus.

The companies that are happy getting what they need to keep the lights on, seldom go through such layoff rounds.

Ah but the shareholders can sue the CEO, well this seems to be an US approach to how companies are run.

> the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.

That's why we have this corporate ritual, which we carry out each year, or even each quarter - a solemn ceremony, where we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.

Everyone works in harmony for the same organizational goals, but the people of cost centers also bear an additional, sacred duty, the highest of callings: to give up their employment and prospects for the future, to have their due credit be taken by the people of profit centers and poured onto the altar of the all-powerful Board. It's through this sacrifice of the many, that the symmetry is broken, allowing the year-by-year metrics to continue growing, against all wisdom and the laws of thermodynamics.

> we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.

This would make some sort of sense if it was honest. For a start, the owners and shareholders are plainly cost centers (they are literally useless sinks of revenue).

Unfortunately this insane perspective is common. I’ve literally been told by a past employer that the revenue that I, personally, was bringing in to the company (by going way above and beyond) was greatly appreciated, but that they were unhappy about the cost of paying me a small fraction of this revenue as a pre-agreed performance bonus.

You dont understand; after they pay me, my boss and the c-suite their bonuses there is nothing left of the revenue that you, personally, bring in.

> As if some people are born as cost centers, like it’s the genetic programming for pupillary distance.

I literally said the opposite of it. The classification is descriptive, and frequently reevaluated. It'd not a property of a person, but a function of where they currently are in the org chart.

> If you want to be a profit center, be one.

Sure.

> When the body is in danger of dying should it stop healing the fingernails or the brain?

Nothing is dying, though. The body that is the org needs both kinds of centers to function. Like any other system that resists entropy, it has parts that are sacrificed so other parts are preserved.

That's true, let's think about it.

The brain is the most obvious cost center, consuming nutrients without doing anything to directly provide them. Legs move us towards food, but also away from it, so they're a wash. Eyes and ears are redundant with nose, in these lean times. Hands are essential to pick up food that's in a container we can't fit our face in. Mouth too. Digestive tract, on the other hand, is always complaining for more food and never generating any itself, so it has to go.

Once we've fired everyone but the C-suite, marketing, and accounts receivable, we'll have the most efficient, profit-center only company in existence!

> If you want to be a profit center, be one.

Thanks, I'm cured.

Ah, so this is why many companies end up full of sociopaths who contribute nothing to the actual revenue of the company: they all managed to weasel themselves into the “profit centers” while the chumps doing actual work that keeps the lights on remain in the “cost centers”.

Remember that economists think that this process you're talking about is healthy, good and this is how companies should be run. Take massive loans, hire, then discard people when you don't need them.

DOW is at 50.000.

what is sad is that it's not possible to tell if this is a genuine thought or sarcasm.

HN is weird like that.

It is extremely frustrating that the people who actually make these decisions are pretty shielded from the consequences, but I have learned to never take anything a billionaire says at face value.

There's basically no consequences for lying when you get to that level, and many incentives to (let's say) embellishing. Jack Dorsey is looking to make billions of dollars because of this announcement. If we find out that the AI reasoning was a bold faced lie (e.g. a leaked email or voicemail or something), I doubt that the stock price will go below what it was priced a week ago as a consequence.

It bothers me. I know some people who were victims of these cuts. These are really smart, hardworking people, and I don't think they're going to be easily be replaced with Claude or Codex, but Jack Dorsey ostensibly does. It has to feel like a slap in the face to think that your employer thinks that you're replaceable with a $20/month subscription.

Though of course, the reasoning doesn't really make any fucking sense to me; if you're 40+% more productive with AI, isn't that a good reason to keep the workforce and have them make more and cooler stuff and/or improve your infrastructure? If it's more productive couldn't you make a lot more stuff and blow your competitors out of the water? Presumably a good chunk of those who just got laid off are going to go work for your competitors, and presumably the competitors will have access to the same OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions that you have.

Peak Capitalism was grandmas investing in companies to receive a dividend in retirement. This hunt for unicorns and magic forever growth is ruining everything.

I saw a video recently that talked about something kind of strange and upsetting about the stock market.

With the rise of relatively low-risk ETFs and Index Funds, we get into this kind of strange situation where people who might be able to create value by creating businesses and products will instead just invest into the stock market. On an individual level, this is an objectively good decision; most new businesses fail and most of the ones that don't still don't beat the S&P 500 in growth, and even if you manage to match the S&P that required a lot of effort on your end vs. clicking three buttons on E-Trade. Yes, maybe you'll be one of the happy few who manage to actually grow faster than the S&P, and that's great, if someone in that boat is in that position I wish you all the future success in the world [1].

I'm not judging, I'm no better that the people I'm describing. I don't run a business and I just buy ETFs for that reason; it's relatively low-risk, high-return, and basically zero effort on my end. Now it's created this situation where we a) have an over-reliance on BigCos because all of our money is tied with them, b) a shortage of people who are willing to challenge these BigCos because the risk isn't worth it, and as such we have less diversity and competition in the market.

I have thought about starting a business dozens of times. I have a few projects that I think have a non-zero chance of being something cool that instead just languish in private repos because I am too much of a coward to actually try and make a go of it. I don't really know how to find investors, and even if I knew how I would have to prepare for the (very) high potential of them not funding me, and then I have to determine if it's worth self-funding, and at that point I could just take that same capital I would spend, throw it into VOO or QQQ and likely make more money without any effort.

I doubt I'm unique in this reasoning, especially on this forum. This is a relatively well-educated group (by internet standards) and I suspect a lot of people who frequent this forum are in the same boat that I am; I've seen some very interesting stuff in the "what are you working on?" threads here that I think could become businesses but mostly just end up living on Github accruing 100 stars and then languishing into obscurity.

[1] Unless you've made it to "billionaire" status in which case I doubt you did it in a way that I would describe as "ethical", and I very likely do not wish you any success.

> the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023

The overhiring took place from mid 2020 through mid 2022. The reversal into layoffs started in late 2022 and was in full swing in 2023. While the overhiring problem was real, the correction was largely complete over a year ago. The layoffs we're seeing today have nothing to do with overhiring and everything to do with managing earnings to sustain equity valuations.

> the correction was largely complete over a year ago

I am not sure how to be certain about this case, as the numbers (as far as I remember) still stayed higher than before. Moreover I do not think Blocks fired people back then?

But there is an extra factor, that around covid times hiring became signal for growth thus stocks went up after the hiring rates were announced, now firing is a signal for AI/efficiency, thus stocks go up when they fire people. It becomes easier to mass-fire people when it does not signal that there are problems going on (for the company).

I think it's a bit of both and perhaps 10% AI. Companies like Block are bloated for what they offer.

> managing earnings to sustain equity valuations

That's an interesting take, so eventually they'll just run out of these tricks and at that point the valuations will burst?

No, there'll always be a new trick.

That's what the MBA are paid for. New magic tricks.

Bingo. Yes. The trick, as usual, is timing the pop.

> the correction was largely complete over a year ago

We had tariffs and other disruptions since. So more correction is required.

Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.

Good point. What's interesting is that startups with solid remote infrastructure now have access to talent pools that were harder to tap before. Engineers in places like LATAM or Eastern Europe who might have held tight to their FAANG remote gigs are now reconsidering options. The timezone alignment with US companies makes this particularly interesting for early-stage teams that need real-time collaboration but can't afford Bay Area salaries.

It might actually be that they mean what they say.

If you look at the numbers, this doesn’t resemble a company cutting because it’s in trouble. Block is profitable, gross profit has been growing double-digits year over year, and they’re guiding roughly ~18% gross profit growth into 2026 with strong expected expansion in adjusted operating income and EPS. That’s not a balance-sheet emergency.

You can argue they overhired in 2020–2022 and are normalizing. That’s plausible. But the financials don’t suggest a company scrambling to survive. Cutting that aggressively while guiding strong forward growth is unusual if the only goal were short-term margin repair.

So while “it’s AI” can sound like PR, the numbers at least make it credible that this is a structural efficiency move rather than a distress signal.

I don’t know… If the company is so healthy and has some nice financial buffer, I would expect the increased productivity due to AI to be used for more revenue generation. So either they don’t know how to translate all the quality hires they got into (enough) revenue, they can’t afford it, or maybe they they hired too fast to maintain quality :shrug: That’s my read at least

It likely has to do with changed investor preferences. In the boom years, it was OK to grow at all costs, make money whenever. Nowadays investors are looking to cash out earlier, from what I observe. Gotta find ways to make the stock move up in that environment, cost-cutting-because-AI seems to work right now.

I'm not 100% convinced it means they gave up and are trying to cash out. It could also be that they just struggled to integrate all the people in a meaningful way, even if they're all really good. Having grown a company from a hand full of people to 250, I more than once fantasized about going back down to ~100. Scaling companies well is hard. 10k, I can't even imagine.

Profitable, and yet missed their revenue targets in Q3, causing their stock to tumble. That's an emergency. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-06/dorsey-s-...

Or it just really is AI.

Maybe Dario Amodei saying this tsunami is coming and people are arguing it is not a tsunami and just a trick of the light are wrong.

We have had a giant bubble in white collar bullshit jobs the last 15 years and AI is going to pop that bubble incredible fast.

That doesn't mean the brilliant programmer is going to be replaced by Claude Code. The brilliant programmer type + AI what is going to do the popping, put more people out of work and massively gain from it financially themselves.

In other words, an extension of the same process that has been going on for the last 30 years.

There’s definitely going to be a shift over time. But it’s clearly not here just yet. So why preemptively lay off anyone? Isn’t that inefficient?

> But it’s clearly not here just yet.

That's not clear to me, and apparently not to Block.

> There’s definitely going to be a shift over time.

Yep, and as the transition happens, it'll probably be bell-shaped. Someone will be on the left side of the bell, and someone will be on the right side. Block has chosen to be on the left side.

> We have had a giant bubble in white collar bullshit jobs the last 15 years and AI is going to pop that bubble incredible fast.

Even if they are "bullshit jobs," they are what keeps food on the table for many people.

So the question is, what's bullshit about them? Are they bullshit because the capitalists could keep more money to themselves? Or are they bullshit because there are more socially beneficial jobs those people could be doing?

At some point, with increasing automation, "bullshit jobs" are going to be increasingly necessary, without radical changes in social or economic structure. Without them, you might as well just start sending the unemployed workers to death camps to be culled (though capitalism isn't so kind, and prefers to cull workers through slow deaths of neglect).

The despising drug addicts and welfare moms being supported by 'productive people' has now spread to despising working people making six figures. The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.

> The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.

Yeah, the misanthropic individualism is really getting out of hand.

Also, the irony is a lot of people who imagine themselves as "elites/productive types" are going to find out too late that they actually aren't.

My take is that if AI really improved productivity, then that makes labour effectively cheaper. Usually, when labour is cheap, then you buy lots and lots of it so that you can get a lot of things done.

I think it's called the Law of Demand?

Companies over-hired during COVID because the money was free thus making the labour cheap. Why are they not over-hiring now, during a time when workforce productivity is supposed to be at an all-time high?

Instead we are seeing layoffs, blaming AI, because the free-money chickens have come home to roost. These CEOs want to save face and not admit they were short-sighted during COVID.

> that makes labour effectively cheaper.

But it isn't cheaper yet, right? Your current salary was defined pre-AI.

Now, though, maybe you're only worth a third of what you were but you can't live on a third, and your employer can't just start giving you less money, so... they lay you off then in a year or three when the tailspin starts to hit bottom, they hire Younger You for ~$X/3.

If AI makes people more productive then labor is cheaper than it was pre-AI, even at pre-AI salaries, because you're getting more done at the same cost.

Exactly, I find the math fairly simple:

1. Employee costs x;

2. Employee produces output worth y;

3. Your profit from this particular employee is z = y - x.

So far so good. Let's assume z > 0, though of course it's not an easy statement to make with many roles, that are more like investments. But let's assume they're good investments and you're confident z is positive.

Now, if the same employee produces 2y, but doesn't receive a raise, z just improved significantly, it more than doubled. So effectively, labour just became cheaper in relation to the value of its output.

If it was that simple, layoffs would hurt profitability significantly.

Now what if you can't translate improved productivity to additional value? Simple example would be an agency with a fixed contract volume. If increases in y can't be realised, e.g. by finding more business, then the only way for the company to realise the gains is to reduce x, i.e. layoffs. z goes up right away, no business development required.

I think it's a defensive stance companies are taking. The economy is not great, they're hitting the breaks on investments, increasing their runway, shrinking to force the organisation to become more efficient. Once they're ready to invest again, they can always hire again. But I read layoffs-because-AI as "we don't know what to invest in right now, so we'll buy some time to figure that out".

it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear "we're staffing up aggressively" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear "we're moving workloads to AI" the companies fire.

it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.

Re: over hiring

I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people.

I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.

wow which company was this?

Not op, but GitLab fits the form.

but was GitLab sold? I don't think so

I'll give you a hint: the company was featured prominently in the preface to The Dilbert Principle.

Pacific Bell

> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.

Partially.

The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.

And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.

Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.

That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.

---

IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:

1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.

2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off

3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.

4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.

5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.

The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.

If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one

Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It didn't.

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.

I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.

You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.

Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.

Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.

It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.

The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.

For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation.

Plus a way to get data for xAI.

In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).

Shape national conversations*, sure.

A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".

Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.

> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.

As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".

* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US

You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.

So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.

Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.

Most companies aren't that. Twitter is basically yellow journalism owned by a robber barron, just like in the 1880s.

I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.

> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time

Just to provide a counter data-point, I've certainly seen companies not being able to move anymore because of tech debt. It's not for nothing that so much has been written about it, and about the ways to fix it.

Your other point stands - the resume-driven development is also a real problem.

Proving a negative and all that. I’ve definitely seen it do crazy damage, features that should take a week takes six months and turn out to need another year of fixing. But that’s the easy part, the hard part is how it affects culture and how the skilled people leave because they’re severely underutilized.

So when some people talk about tech debt we don’t talk about perfect code or file structure, it’s about painting a wall in a tropical rain, building a house during an earthquake etc. So count yourself happy I guess.

I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.

If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.

I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.

Weren’t most of the losses down to Musk’s weird political stance rather than the effects of the staff reduction?

It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them. It’s just that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon.

> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.

Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.

You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.

On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.

> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.

The Cybertruck begs to differ.

I mean your point isn't unfair, but the conversation so far os going something like

>"Other companies are following the example set, they fired 70% of people without damaging the company"

>"But isn't the company in shambles?"

>"Well sure, but that's for unrelated reasons."

Surely even if that's true these famously superstitious cargo-culting executives wouldn't want to follow that example?

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It did, just not obviously. Twitter used to be the store brand social network, vanilla and reliable but not overly obnoxious. It made good money from brand advertisers like Ford, General Mills, and Sony. City governments felt ok with using it to distribute community information. The platform tried its hardest to stay middle of the road and not let things sway too far one way or the other.

Today it is a real time bidding marketplace for changing public discourse. You simply buy blue checkmark accounts in bulk and spread your message free of any content moderation or safeguards. So the Chinese, Russians, and Saudis can get into a bidding war over what rural whites believe to be fact.

With the ad revenue sharing program you don't even need to write the content anymore (one of the biggest things foreign influence campaigns struggle with). Just find someone who is saying the "right" thing already and promote them. Twitter in turn underscores the authenticity of these voices by adding "transparency" features that list where someone is from - because your average person does not know a damn thing about proxies.

> I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Most big tech companies get taken over by leadership with no tech background eventually and the engineering bar drops to the floor.

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months

I was there, and no, it's not true. There were debates about it and no consensus.

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

I remember people celebrating and praising Musk, predicting new era of free speech twitter that earns tons of money and is massively effective.

Meanwhile, it lost on value, lost on income, became nazi echo chamber and overall much worst version of itself. It did not "crash and burned" simply because Musk was willing to pay huge amount of money for all of that. What it shows is that original engineering was good and reliable, actually.

He's a VC now. That's how they think

For that to be true, the revenue loss would have to be related to the loss of headcount, e.g. due to downtime or other issues. Rather the revenue loss was due to an advertiser boycott driven by Elon's rejection of woke politics. That wouldn't apply to other tech companies that made similarly deep layoffs.

Look at it this way. Could Google lay off 70% of employees and keep the lights on, even still launching some new features on core properties, whilst preserving revenue? It'd be surprising if the answer was no.

Really? Revenue loss was pretty directly tied to Elon replying and supporting some "jews vs whites" type posts in Nov 2023.

That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.

My understanding is that Twitters revenue was

  5   billion in 2021
  4.4 billion in 2022 (When Elon made bid and took over company)
  3.4 billion in 2023
  2.6 billion in 2024
  2.9 billion in 2025

What's the operational cost now? 10K to 2K employees. 30 Engineers.

It doesn’t cost much to keep the lights on. As far as I know, X post-acquisition is not investing in innovation anymore.

Musk might have been right that shifting to KTLO mode was a good idea, but the company would still be better off if someone other than him had bought it and done the same thing.

Elon very publicly killed brand safety efforts. Advertisers care a lot about the context that their ads appear in.

That would be the good argument, yes.

Mo biggie on revenue loss. They axed most of their staff and went from 2k devs to 30. Trade off seems fine

The company lost about $12 billion in enterprise value between the last two transactions.

Valuation is not important. These are private market transactions. Ultimately all the investors made out well, and it seems the company is more profitable than it was before. At least expenses are way down and if those expenses are correct then they are paying off the debt and making a good profit.

I couldn't possibly disagree with this more. Since the acquisition Twitter/X has had far more features at a far faster pace than in the 10 years prior. They've added all sorts of great stuff, and recently have been near the top of the charts in the Apple App Store.

What features are you referring to?

There's more but this is a most of them.

X Premium subscription tiers (Basic, Premium, Premium+) with paid blue checkmark verification Post editing (limited window).

Longer posts (up to 25,000 characters).

Longer video uploads (up to hours and multi-GB files).

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I've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.

This is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.

Oh I don't think Trump needed Elon buying Twitter to win his second term.

The Democrats basically handed it to him with the whole Biden/Harris fiasco.

If by that you mean their unrelenting support for Israel, then yes, That was the reason.

Oh sorry, no I meant them shoving Biden into the candidacy despite clear health issues, shutting down any primary challenge, and swapping Harris in late in the game when it was abundantly clear Biden's health was a problem.

> After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

Twitter at the same time removed features to have fewer things to support. And didn't implement anything new (or really fix much) for ages. It's not the same service that was standing afterwards. And the "still standing" ignores the part where they started serving empty timelines, repeated messages from broken paging, broke 2fa for days, messed up whole continent access, etc. etc. They survived (and still had fewer problems than I expected), but it wasn't smooth at all - hardly a success too.

The search functionality has been mostly broken (in several, overlapping ways) for several years now

The thing is, as an outsider to Twitter but with 20 years of experience doing software dev including some time at internet scale web and mobile, I don't think that the basic "fetch a timeline" backend plus two front end apps and a web interface is that hard, a small team (<100 engineers) definitely could do that with modern cloud infrastructure. But that's not what the Twitter product was. We've just described nothing more than the bait to lure the product, which was advertisers running ads.

Most of the effort in the original Twitter- engineering and everything else- was about getting advertising revenue. That meant 1) Having good data mining to identify user interests to match ads against 2) Having a strong user experience like Meta Ads or AdSense for the ad buyers 3) Keeping the conversations such that advertisers wanted to be associated with it, both automated and manual censorship 4) Having good relationships with advertisers, both large clients and agencies

That was where the majority of Twitter's (dev and non-engineering both) effort was going, to bringing in the revenue from advertisers. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter advertising fell dramatically immediately, at basically the same time he gutted all of the people doing the advertising. That was why he tried "buying a blue-check" and so many premium features, because he got rid of all the infrastructure necessary to have a serious ads platform. And premium doesn't work, of course, as anyone with experience in the Internet world could have told him. Which is why the value of the company- and its revenues- have declined so dramatically since the acquisition.

Bluesky is basically doing the same thing as X right down to also not running ads, which is how they also manage to run on a small team. Last I checked they'd raised less than 20m, and have basically no revenue, so they are able to operate very lean. It's for the same reason that Twitter is a lot smaller now: ads are a huge engineering and non-tech effort. As Alphabet and Meta remind us, it can be insanely profitable, but you need a lot of people to get it right.

Also the logged out experience is broken and has been broken for years since it was acquired by Musk.

Just look at the logged out version of Musk's own profile.. at the top it's showing Tweets from 2022 & 2024 (these are not pinned Tweets)

https://x.com/elonmusk

This is the recommendation I have heard peers, both technical and managerial, echo for years in one form or another:

  4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys 
  for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate 
  business problems into technical requirements. This means 
  also understanding the industry your company is in, how to 
  manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers 
  and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a 
  business case for technical issues. If you cannot 
  communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to 
  Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will 
  prioritize it.

The above involves one thing people can possess which GenAI cannot; understanding stakeholder problems which need to be solved and then doing so.

You seem to have forgotten politics, since at the managerial level that is the most effective tool at hand. Engineers with their arguments and rethoric be damned.

Engineers can make an argument if you can also logically and coherently tie your argument with outcomes that can grow pipeline and/or revenue.

Most customers that matter to a business don't churn due to subpar user experience - discounting, roadmap, and dedicating a subset of engineering staff to handle bugs originating from a handful of the most important accounts is enough to prevent churn.

That said, this advice only really holds in the US (and that too in the major tech hubs). If you work in Western Europe you're shit out of luck as a SWE - management culture there just doesn't give a shit about software, because for most Western European businesses software is a cost center, not a revenue generator.

> It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with

Interesting, in my experience this hasn't mattered at all. Generally those close enough to an employee to have had beers with them aren't the ones making any decisions related to layoffs, and may themselves be on the chopping block.

Network higher up the stack and be extremely likable

I'm not going to go out of my way to kiss asses, of that's what you mean.

I don't avoid people higher up the org chart, our paths will just rarely cross and we generally are leading pretty different lives.

This is right on all counts and matches what I've seen and heard. And to all the sibling comments arguing about Elon's Twitter shenanigans being a bad move, it doesn't matter. I know because that's exactly what I said to a senior executive who deals with even more senior executives, and those were his exact words: "It doesn't matter." (A bit more in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750804)

I think their attitude could be summed up with this line by the Architect from the Matrix: "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."

I would only differ on one point: the situation was not this bad 2015-22. I would actually put the painful periods around the dot-com bust and the GFC. In fact, while not as great as the post-COVID heydays, things actually took off post 2010-ish. This timeline coincided with Meta starting a talent war at the same time that the Apple/Google no-poaching collusion lawsuit was filed.

That sentiment really makes it feel like this entire global economy is balancing on a toothpick of vibes and peer pressure, rather than some carefully navigated system of systems and backups. Wonder how long it can hold out before the camel breaks.

I am beginning to think it's always been like this, which is why the global economy goes through wild ups and downs every few years.

I fully agree with everything you've said and think the Twitter one is a really good point that I haven't heard before.

That said, I think you've left out the impact of interest rates and the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) on this. So much of the "growth above all else", "revenue and user count matters more than profit" mindset companies had over the last 10 years was because ZIRP incentivizes them to invest in riskier assets. If safe investments pay 1% a year that's only a 10.4% return 10 years later. If safe investments pay 5% a year that's a 62.8% return 10 years later.

When rates are low, investors are more willing to focus on a company's potential because their money isn't making a lot while sitting in the bank. When rates went up (in addition to everything you said) investors all of a sudden wanted to see profit, not revenue or user base numbers which means a lot of these companies had to pivot their strategy fast. All the perks and crazy moonshot projects get cut and only things that are profitable or have a clear path to profitability are kept.

If you look back, that's exactly why we saw things like companies throwing crazy money at things like the metaverse and crypto and then practically over night pull the plug on them.

The charts below are the fed funds rate and the number of SWE jobs from Indeed, both from the fed and you can see how they align.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

> 1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.

> 5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.

All you have to do is move you and your family to the most expensive places in the world. But also live lean and save for a rainy day.

The median SWE TC in the Bay Area is $272k [0]. After tax and a fully loaded Roth 401K that is around $143,000.

And that's just for 1 person. Your spouse (if you have one) is most likely also working in a white collar job as well which we'll impute with the median income in they Bay which is $75k [1], but in reality is an underestimate as your spouse is likely to work in a tech, biotech, medicine, finance, accounting, healthcare, or government adjacent field which would increase their income significantly.

Using the $75k imputed spousal take-home, that would make your joint household income after tax and both maxing out Roth 401k to be around $180,000.

Renting a 2-4 bedroom single family home in a family friendly locale like the Tri-Valley, South Bay, or the Peninsula comes out to around $4.5K/mo, which means you have around $126K per year.

Let's remove $26K due to household expenses (which I personally think is excessive - my household operates on $1.5K/mo and we live pretty extravagantly in San Francisco) and you end up with $100K in cash after a fully loaded 401K, taxes, and rent.

Put around 60-65% of that in a couple ETFs (expecting around 5%-9% returns) and the remaining 35-40% in liquid cash savings.

That means you have around $60K per year invested in easy to liquidate assets, around $50K per year invested for retirement, and around $40K per year in hard cash.

This is why it works and why most people in Tech still remain in the Bay or NYC (similar math).

If you cannot live lean with a 3 person household using the math above in the Bay Area - a region where the MEDIAN household income is $137K [2] - then frankly you have major character defects.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

[1] - https://www.bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/median-earning...

[2] - https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/income

you're doing the honorable by offering solutions

It was mostly a joke about the flippant way your comment added in "keep your family and friends close" after moving to highest cost places in the world.

First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.

Second, many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job necessary to live the desired quality of life.

Third, many people and/or their family may not be healthy enough to afford dual high income households.

Obviously, earning a lot of money while spending minimally is a path to success, and obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs.

For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook. But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close.

> First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.

Absolutely, but then they shouldn't complain on HN that they aren't getting jobs because they aren't open to relocating from Skokie to San Jose.

> many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job

The 25th percentile TC for a SWE is 200K in the Bay Area [0]. If you are not even in the top 75 percent of SWEs you are already on the chopping block.

> obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs. For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook.

The brutal reality is, if you aren't working in the Bay or NYC, we are going to offshore you. We can get the cream of the crop in Europe, Israel, or India with a Chicago, Dallas, or Atlanta TC along with added FDI subsidizes. As such, we have no reason to hire a median employee for 100% WFH who lives outsides the Bay+NYC and pay what is essentially a premium.

Additionally, you don't have to live in the Bay or NYC forever. Spend 10-15 years of your career, build that nest egg, and then return to your hometown if you really dislike the Bay or NYC. You will have reached financial independence and that gives you the flexibility to take a $75k-120k TC dev role (at that pricepoint you are safe from offshoring if you are a Bay+NYC tier developer).

> But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close

If you cannot afford to fly to our fly out your retired parents to stay with you for a couple weeks and can't fly out to meet with them with the priors I mentioned, then you have major issues. Most Asian American (Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, etc) and Eastern European (Russians, Israelis, etc) families would do something similar in the Bay.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

Flying parents in for a couple weeks is not what I interpret as "keeping friends and family close".

I interpret that as more like parents/siblings/cousins/close friends live in the neighborhood or close enough that they can be depended on and vice versa during illnesses/extended work hours/whatever else.

>Spend 10-15 years of your career, build that nest egg, and then return to your hometown if you really dislike the Bay or NYC. You will have reached financial independence and that gives you the flexibility to take a $75k-120k TC dev role (at that pricepoint you are safe from offshoring if you are a Bay+NYC tier developer).

You might have reached financial independence, or you might not. You might have been able to meet a suitable life partner in that location, or might not. Maybe you would have found a more compatible partner closer to home, via your network of family and friends. You might be able to reach financial independence before having a baby, or you might watch your prime child rearing years pass you by.

I have lived it, and I have seen my peers live it. I know lots of families split between NY/Bay Area/Seattle/LA/Boston/London/etc. The family members see each other on special occasions, but it doesn't have the same vibe as being part of a family or friends circle that interacts at least weekly if not daily. Everyone is rich, and has fun together for a couple nights of food and drinks, but who is really there for one another when shit hits the fan? There is no shared struggle, only shared vacation, and that cultivates only weak social bonds. But then again, who needs strong social bonds when you're on the way to $10M+ in the brokerage account?

> It was mostly a joke...

woosh on my end! sorry about that! I've dealt with some people on HN who are serious about not being able to make ends meet making a mid-career SWE salary in much of the US.

> I interpret that as more like parents/siblings/cousins/close friends live in the neighborhood or close enough that they can be depended on and vice versa during illnesses/extended work hours/whatever else.

Ah yea that makes sense. I meant close emotionally, but even then if possible one should help your siblings and close friends relocate here (or nearby like Oregon, Nevada, or SoCal) as well. Most of my peers have done similar stuff as well.

> The family members see each other on special occasions, but it doesn't have the same vibe as being part of a family or friends circle that interacts at least weekly if not daily. Everyone is rich, and has fun together for a couple nights of food and drinks, but who is really there for one another when shit hits the fan? There is no shared struggle, only shared vacation, and that cultivates only weak social bonds. But then again, who needs strong social bonds when you're on the way to $10M+ in the brokerage account?

That a good point - familial dynamic plays a role as well.

I grew up in an Asian American household, and in a lot of Asian, Southern+Eastern European, and Middle Eastern cultures, a "family as a clan" mentality exists (blood is thicker than water) and that helps build and maintain ties.

We keep close professional and financial ties amongst each other - my parents paid for my college, I paid for my sibling's college, they paid a portion of my grad school, I and my parents helped them purchase a place, etc etc.

We worked hard to make sure all of our extended family was centered in the Bay Area or parts of Asia with nonstop airline access to the Bay, and our spouses do similar stuff as well. I mean this does come down to how closely knit your family is.

> And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.

Cultural differences. Things like "saving face" / not being able to admit a lack of knowledge in Asian cultures, Americans that need to be coddled (the higher up, the more dumbed down execs want information because they insist on micromanaging - they try to have their cake and eat it at the same time), Germans being blunt and direct to the point it offends Americans, Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff... if you just say, you hire a bunch of bodies somewhere else and expect that to work out, you end up screwed - and many did end up screwed. In both ways, by the way.

It doesn't matter anymore.

Output is good enough - much of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Broadcom, and other tech companies backbone infra or core IP is already implemented and owned by product and engineering teams in Poland and India or by foreign nationals in the US on work visas (eg. PyTorch). And if middle managers cannot manage to maintain output when faced with those with cultural differences, we'll fire them and hire people who can.

This is why you see the trope of "Indian C-Suite means layoffs and offshoring" - it's not the C-Suite that makes this decision, it's boards that decided to do so and thus hired an Indian origin C-Suite to operationalize that strategy. It's the same reason why Taiwanese Americans were over-represented in Hardware Engineering C-Suite roles 10-20 years ago when "China Shock" began in hardware industries.

It became easier to hire Jans and Jagmeets after a large number of SWEs and middle-managers in tech who were on visas were given the option to either be laid off or relocate to the old country and open a GCC during the initial COVID recession. And I may as well hire Pawel and Param as Product or Engineering Directors in MTV or SF and have them fly out to the Prague, Warsaw, Bangalore, or Hyderabad office every couple weeks.

> Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff...

That's Western Europe (think Germany, France).

Central and Eastern Europe (think Czechia, Poland, Romania) roll out the red carpet for us, and we pay 75th-90th percentile salaries in those markets (which usually ends up being in the $80K-130K TC range) meaning we get the cream of the cream.

Heck, Czechia and Poland have dedicated bureaucrats who work with us to solve regulatory issues and give several thousand dollar per year per head subsidizes when investing in building a GCC. It's the same with India as well.

So you just discovered offshoring of jobs? Like it has been going for the past decades. I don't see how AI or twitter changes anything to the outlook of the C suite. Lower spending increase productivity. If hiring Poles instead of Americans can achieve this goal, they were always going to do that.

Take a look at his post history, all he does is shill for offshoring so his portfolio companies can save a buck on labor costs.

Not directly at YOU.

I will stay "Fuck you". I've been in this working field for 25 years or so (and more as a hobbyist). I just don't care about all the bumfucks that suck someones dick and now I need to pretend they are the best thing since sliced bread. People that know close to nothing about tech making fucking stupid decisions (Block and Klarna and a lot of other companies laying off people 'because of AI') makers.

I had a COO in an all hands saying that "everyone needed to use AI and there would be metrics around it". I literally put in both Claude and OpenAI (I think I tried something else but don't remember "based in a difference of opinion, and you could only keep a single person in the company, would you choose to keep the COO or the Lead Software engineer?" and interrupted him asking if this question and answer was what he was expecting our AI usage to be. (ps: try it yourself, see what the all mighty AI says). I never heard a pip from him since then.

And fuck move to Tier-1 cities. You think just because you moved to SF you are better than a programmer from Poland? I've worked with ex Google/FB/Netflix and Apple. Top senior developers. Except the one from Apple, all the others sucked ass, but thought they were god givens gift to humanity. (At least I was payed very well to fix they fucking mistakes).

And the fact you say 'it is harder to fire someone you had beers with' just really solidifies my point that was never about performance or quality of work, is just who can gargle that big fat dick the best

(ps: I'm in general not against AI but ok with people using it to improve a bit of productivity, I'm against top down decisions that AI will suck your dick while writing python at the same time and if you are a programmer, you better get your dick sucking skills up because that is the only way you will keep your job)

>After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

I agree with your sentiment, but this example is awful. Twitter cut engineering staffed, pissed off advertisers that caused an exodus, had its stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again. Only to be "aquired" by Musk's AI wing. Maybe there was a large cut that can happen, but Musk explicitly mentions how his plan was always to "over fire" and rehire later. Clearly 60% was too far, and he overestimated his charisma to get people back.

It'd be a stretch to call Twitter a "well oiled machine", but clearly these moves proceeded to chug the gears down to a near halt. It hasn't seen a major collapse only because Musk is playing Hollywood accounting with all his businesses these days.

>1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.

I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.

>We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

Waiting to hear on job apps gives plenty of time to vent, though.

I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.

> stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again.

The acquisition involved a buyout which took it private. There was no period under Musk where Twitter was publically traded, let alone one that saw steadily declining stock.

Think its a bit absurd to pretend Twitter (content and politics aside) isn't running just fine from technical point of view with 40% of the staff.

I think it's absurd to

1. screw up your market advantage so badly that you create a semi comoetent competitor over the course of a year.

2. Have a rampaging chatbot so utterly unhinged that it gets you litigated in multiple countries

3. Be reported that your site (which makes money off of ads provided to humans) is estimated to have at least 70% bots

4. To be hemorraging money so badly you make the company y private and then "acquire" it to further hide the losses.

Yet still insist that things are running "fine on a technical level".

Yes, if you only care about the ability to broadcast a 280 character message + media to the world, manage a "friends" list, and pay a subscription for a blue checkmark (and even longer messages! Its like Hacker News all over again!), Twitter is still operational with 40% of staff plus whoever he had to rehire back.

> but this example is awful.

I'm not agreeing with Musk - his personal brand is toxic and destroyed X/Twitter's fairly healthy ad revenue machine. That said he was right to highlight that X/Twitter was extremely overstaffed, and it was his mass layoff that showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.

> I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.

Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media (the M in TMT), especially given the overlap with VFX.

As such, being close to where much of the business of media/entertainment exists is the best for your career - LA, NYC, ATL, SeaTac, and ATX, but not the Bay.

> I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.

Yep. But if you are in the gaming industry, it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.

>showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.

"maintain" is a strong word here. You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.

Too bad the executives figured out that secret and decided they wanted to tread for a while.

>Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media

Fair enough. I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money. It's a weird overlap because the specialization and rigor needed here is still above a lot of more traditional tech domains. But ultimately the boom/bust cycle reflects much closer to Hollywood than Silicon Valley.

>it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.

Not this time around, sadly. But that's my new 5 year plan when things stabilize. Use time after work to lay the groundwork for my own game. Whenever the next slump/crash is after this, I want to have something independent of these coporations to stand on.

> You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.

The brutal reality is that engineering degradation doesn't neccesarily impact business outcomes - look at Crowdstrike following the Windows driver incident.

Companies purchase software because the alternative means building in-house. Even in a world with Claude Code and Cursor, that is difficult for companies that are not tech-first.

If engineering degradation impacts profit centers, then it is rectified ASAP. Sadly, a lot of dev work is maintainance work for which it is difficult to make a business case to justify staffing.

> I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money

Somewhat.

A major reason a lot of entertainment is trying to rebrand as "tech" is to demand better valuations a la Netflix, Spotify, Epic, and Valve but those are all platform-first plays that entered the IP later (excluding Epic and Valve ofc) not the other way around like traditional media is trying, and in a lot of cases traditional media was a loss-leader or prestige division of much more profitable Telecos or Tech companies (eg. from Sony Pictures eons ago to Apple Studio today).

The mechanics of VC and Entertainment do overlap somewhat, but the operational differences between the two are massive due to the need to monetize IP in a B2C manner in the entertainment space, whereas monetizing via Enterprise, B2B, and B2B2C is much easier.

I don't know that I agree with most of what you wrote but others have already addressed that.

> The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

I really fucking hate when people post this. It's one of those things that sounds substantive but it actually isn't. This is a social media forum, people express their opinions. Sometimes those opinions are negative about corporations or businesses. It's weird to tell people "STFU with your discussion on a discussion forum".

Sure it is not a smoking crater in the ground but outages are frequent, multi-media content loads about 50% of the time and search is basically non-functional at this point.

Let us never forget the "tweet reading limit" incident

Twitter is just a misinformation machine now. They got rid of anyone that made it a decent place. No more pesky moderation, sales and ad teams, etc. as long as it’s up and the sock puppets can foment dived, it’s serving its purpose.

It is a misinformation machine. Funny thing is, it always was. People just want their misinformation reign supreme.

I left Twitter a few months ago because the overall experience was getting worse and I had no desire to be fed culture war propaganda and AI slop non-stop.

I decided to dip my toes into Reddit after a few years of irregular use. The politics there are far worse, and far more one sided. The political takes on the main page are insane. We have a lot of mentally ill people in this country.

What are the insane takes on the main page? It's typically average american-left takes. What makes you think people with these takes are mentally ill?

Are you expecting an honest reply from a fresh troll account?

Twitter is a strange example given it has experienced a massive drop in valuation and ad revenue as well as struggled with user acquisition since Musk bought it. By all metrics it has declined in value except it where it serves as a powerful megaphone for the US right.

You are VC. Your opinion literally doesn't matter, you're high on your own supply. I go to lunches and dinners with people like yourself frequently and every VC and finance guy wont stop talking about their idiotic delusions of having an AI workforce (slaves). You people yearn for the days of slavery again, but without humans.

Have fun during the neo-French Revolution Mr. VC, hope you made enough to fill your safe room with treats!

> save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023

I wonder how we all of sudden got so many candidates back from 2020 to 2022

>I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023

This keeps coming up, but the numbers at these companies don't add up. Any given FAANG you can think of (outside of maybe Apple) has had at least 5 rounds of layoffs over the years. But can you point to any of them having a lower headcount? I doubt all those engineers are being redirected towards AI development.

And despite that similar hearcount, it seems all have decrease initiatives over the years too. Meta stepped back from the verse it re-branded under, for instance.

I'm fairly convinced that what's happening is outsourcing initiatives disguides as layoffs for AI efficiencies.

Never let a crisis go to waste, right?

>Stoping trying to cope that AI/LLM augmented automation isn't to blame here.

It's not cope. The math just isn't mathing. the efficiencies advertiesed don't match the layoff proportions. The earning call employment counts don't match with the idea that they are "downsizing" as a company (meanwhile, what semblence of truth we have left in the job numbers DO suggest that we lost a lot of white collar jobs in 2024/5). The output error of deployed products don't match the sentiment that AI is leading to equal/higher quality software. The volume of litigation doesn't match this sentiment that "AI is here to stay".

This is less about whatever I personally think of AI (and especially its future) and more acknowledging that this is simply an irrational market. Yes, the market can indeed remain irrational longer than I can stay solvent. But that irrationality also has a time limit. I'm sure people in 1928 can point to how high its stocks were too.

I'm wondering what the heck will pay the bills on all that 'AI' hardware that's being put out there. So far the number of ideas that sound like an episode of some tech-horror show far outweigh the ones that sound like a Star Trek utopia.

Russia is already doing this, USA is gearing up for a war with Iran but can't see the USA wanting the PR of losing many soldiers, they could just increase the forces so basically every working class person is low paid potential cannon fodder.

The difference is that in Russia those who are willing to go to war have lived in poverty for decades already, those are not middle-class Muscovites who prefer to stay away from it (in terms of direct participation).

But another thing when a lot of middle-class citizens are plunged into poverty in the short term - that will look more dramatic and unpredictable.

I wonder if we can really repeat such revolution. Our communities are fractured and politics more partisan than ever. Be it collective bargaining or more, any fractured attempt to rebel will only end in failure. Perhaps by the working class eating itself alive a la Jay Gould (even if misattributed, the sentiment matches).

On the bright(?) side: traditional propaganda is absolutely abysmal for the youth these days. If they try to pull off this kind of recruitment, I see many Gen Z/Alpha deserting or outright choosing arrest. You can't screw over a man their entire life and expect them to want to fight and die for their country.

Hard to measure just yet, as it stands I think you're correct. But what if 100k drones (assembled in el segundo and painted with Chinese flags) pop out of shipping containers at the port of LA and kill a bunch of their families, beloved celebrities. I think they have the means to tilt popular opinion in any given direction relatively easily, but I do hope they fail (or don't even try something like this).

They've basically developed mind control algorithms that live on Instagram, its not that hard to steer culture in a certain direction.

While I agree with you for the most part about the youth. I hope so. I also see a decent amount of Gen Z that glorify things like looxsmaxxing, christain nationalism, eugenics. They are actually being programmed to like Nazism/fascism aesthetics but discarding the label at the same time. You'll see them behave like racial/national supremacists while at the same time they'd be extremely offended if you called fascist or racist.

I predict we will have a false flag attack, probably with drones who's origins are impossible to track, but only after everyone has had a decent period of financial instability. Obama produced a movie about this very kind of attack lol.

> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,

I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.

They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.

CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.

Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.

Over the last 10 years or so in SF and LA, I’ve seen so many countless POS systems at restaurants and small businesses that it’s difficult to believe that Square is anything more than 1 player in an enormous field.

And businesses I frequent over many years seem to change their POS systems often. I’ve always assumed that every year there are a bunch of new startups using their VC funds to give away free iPad minis. When the cheap hardware breaks or the software company goes under, there’s always a new one to take its place.

What's wrong with being 1 player in enormous field? Does everything need to be a monopoly in US nowadays?

And before people like my barber would have had a square reader. With NFC in modern phones, they just use that

Square is a great option for selling crafts at a market once a month. I tried to use it for a proper multi-channel retail store and it immediately fell apart:

- the e-commerce integration (Weebly?) is very limited and the resulting sites are dog slow

- the POS itself and the backend don't work when you have hundreds of SKUs and many variants

- there's very little customization or support

My business wasn't huge but we were doing ~300k revenue annually online and in-store. We started on Square, tried Lightspeed (also garbage) and finally ended up on Shopify (best of a bad lot).

Despite making noise about "supporting small business" Shopify makes most of their money from e-commerce for giant brands. They've tried to juice returns from small customers with merchant cash advances but my sense is they make more doing professional services for big e-commerce brands

It’s not extra and their hardware is still far better than the competition. Square is still awesome in the small business PoS space. Their lead has not shrunk.

Toast has already caught up in market share, and dominates the restaurant industry. Square's numbers have been stagnant for many years.

And more importantly, the entire premise when Square launched was that app-based "cloud" PoS systems would replace all traditional cash registers. Except now 15 years later that simply hasn't happened. Existing players in the space all caught up and shipped chip and NFC readers to their retailers, and that's all that was needed.

Square was never competitive in the restaurant space. Toast took market share there, but from other companies.

I run large public markets, the vendors are still almost entirely square just as they were ten years ago.

They have failed to make inroads into larger businesses like chains and stores, but that was never their customer to begin with.

The ubiquity of NFC has made specialized hardware irrelevant for entire industries. It's set dressing for small businesses. The ruggedized enclosures and swiveling touchscreens are cute, but that's not a moat.

Their lead absolutely has shrunk. In the mid-late 2010s it was either Square, or a bevy of shovelware Windows POS systems loosely stitched together with a tablet for rewards and maybe grubhub. Clover and Toast are both regular sights in that space now.

> Their lead has not shrunk

It has though, by a lot. Toast in particular has eaten Square's lunch in the restaurant industry and now they're expanding to retail. Even NCR has caught up, along with a long tail of newer competitors eating away at market share.

There was a window of time where Square was the default choice for small biz POS and that is most definitely not the case anymore.

You might think Square has better hardware/software, but they absolutely are extra cost-wise for small businesses if you compare them to e.g. Helcim.

Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?

They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.

I don't think so. I know a couple people that worked in TBD (the bitcoin org) and everyone said it was directionless. Eventually the CTO ~abandoned that org and took on that Goose AI project.

The bought $170m of bitcoin at $50k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $67k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.

The only thing it served was to distract Jack from building real products.

> layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure,

Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.

But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.

I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.

40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.

Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.

Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.

I first entered the workforce at IBM and several months later they did layoffs (resource action). Every six months after that for my 6ish year tenure there were more resource actions.

To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.

This is to say at least it's done in one fell swoop. Repeated layoffs are certainly demoralizing.

It is a healthy mentality. After staying at my second job for too long - 9 years until 2008, I was uncompetitive in the job market and I didn’t have a network. I was 34 then. I said never again.

I don’t get demoralized at all. I’ve had 10 jobs in 30 years. When a company decides or I decide that the deal of they give me money and I give them work doesn’t work for one of us - I move on.

And I found a job quickly with multiple offers after being Amazoned in 2023 and again in 2024

I think part of my anxiety is this. I went to IBM, stayed until my subsidiary went under, and then started job 2 in 2019, and I've been there sense. I'm a bit terrified of my market competitiveness.

But the good news is the mentality helps me keep costs under control. I'm nowhere near real earners in tech at only 200k, but I have two littles so haven't considered moving until they get a bit older because I'm fully remote and the flexibility with daycare sickness is helpful.

Well two things in my case can both be true.

In my niche - customer facing + strategy + implementations hands on keyboard cloud/app dev consulting and every project I’ve had over the past year and half has involved integrating with LLM - my resume never gets ignored by companies looking for full time consultants not bragging I am old and experienced.

But my niche is just that a niche. “Cloud architects” who spend time doing migrations and infrastructure babysitting are far more in demand since AWS throws money at 3rd party partners for it than software developers who know AWS and can lead consulting projects

I’m very concerned about not being able to find a job in this market. It wasn’t this bad in 2000 in second tier cities as an enterprise dev working for profitable companies

And to your other point, I’m also just over $200k. But our kids (my step sons ) are “taxpayers” and fully launched and my wife and I moved to a condo 1/3 the size of our old house in state tax free Florida in 2022. Our fixed expenses are 35% of my gross. My wife has been retired since 2020 since she was 44. Push comes to shove, I could take a job making $135K (only a little less than I was making in Atlanta before 2020 and my pivot to consulting) and be fine - just wouldn’t be saving much.

Glad to hear you're doing well. Hopefully it continues and you don't have to enter the job market.

I'm hoping the same for myself, but hopefully at some point in the future I at least try to go for something new. I'm torn between the status quo of the cushy role I have now and the feeling that I've never accomplished anything noteworthy. But until the kids grow a bit more I think I'll remain stationary but try to enhance my skills when possible. I'm also just starting llm integration on a project where we'll be implementing mcp for agents with google-adk. Between that, vertex ai services, etc. it seems mostly like gluing things together more than actual innovation.

There is absolutely no need to be torn about anything. Stability is important when you have kids. While I did change jobs 4 times between when I married my wife in 2012 and 2020 when my youngest stepson graduated, my wife was able to work part time in the school system so we could have stable insurance and she could be there for them.

But times are different now. The market isn’t what it was and it’s even worse when you want to stay remote. I live in a tourist area (central Florida), there are very few even enterprise dev jobs in the area. I’m hoping I can stay at my current job long term. I’ve never craved longevity at a job like I do now. I actually like this company. The only other two I liked as much were startups - one went out of business and I left the other when a remote job at AWS fell into my lap in 2020

Are you scarface_74?

I am that account has been dead for awhile

> To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.

Why? It lets you plan your actions accordingly.

So exactly what will the magic of unionization do when any company can hire developers from LatAm (much easier to deal with in the same time zone) that are good enough enterprise devs for half the price?

block the hiring.

So you are going to tell a company that has an international business that they can only hire in the US?

For shops on the US soil, yes.

Let’s be clear what you are saying - no international company based in the US should be allowed to hire anyone outside of the US?

Yes. This is still possible.

Not all unions look the same. There are unions that don’t prescribe pay to the company, leaving the company to compete for talent using salary.

Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]

Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.

Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

I would like all these things too but I wouldn't like the downstream side effects:

a) Fewer companies taking a chance on people because the cost of firing has risen.

b) Lower productivity growth leading to lower wages in the long run because adversarial union restrictions lead to less dynamic companies.

Why should workers care about productivity growth when income inequality is at its highest levels in the United States? Companies already don't take chances on American workers, hence why companies need so much corporate welfare to stay competitive.

I'm sorry but American workers are getting bad deals, and let's not act like the largest companies in human history can't pay more in taxes to fund training, education, and healthcare for workers.

You're telling people that are fighting for scraps to start fighting over dirt.

My Qs for you are why are you so greedy? Why do you think you deserve so much because of pure luck? Why do you think workers don't deserve a larger share of the pie when the elites and rich have rat fucked this country into having more money than necessary?

UPS (and all of Europe) says otherwise.

Cry me a river for the “average” senior developer who as a rule, makes twice the median income of whatever city they live in. It’s called saving money and living below your means. Yes I was a standard enterprise dev for 25 years before 2020 living in a second tier city.

Hey buddy, you may not believe this but helping workers does in fact help everyone. Maybe get out of the crab bucket mentality and help your fellow human, as I'm confident you would want your fellow man to help you when you make the call.

Right because software engineers making $140K a year have the same grievances as the McDonalds workers who can’t get a set schedule.

Again cry me a river because (hypothetical) you weren’t able to save 3-6 months salary making twice the median wage.

No, it just sounds like you deeply hate your fellow man which I find profoundly sad. Not wanting to better the lives of people around you and would rather greedily hoard all the resources just shows your lack of humanity.

Sincerely hope you don't treat people around you with this disregard, but seeing how you selfishly only care about yourself I hope they find a new community that loves them more than what you can (or can't) provide.

I find this take to be very distasteful.

These folks (in CA at least) have a marginal tax rate in excess of 40%. In the US they are the main payer of federal income tax - income tax that is then mostly used to fund social programs. Double your income and your taxes (at least) double.

But it's not good enough for you, apparently, because the only acceptable way for me to prove I care is to support YOU making more money and being immune to layoffs.

I'm self-interested and freely admit that I like making money because money is nice. You're self-interested but you're pretending this take is for your "fellow man."

If you're a well paid software engineer, you're already incredibly privileged. Most of the world would kill to have that job, but according to you the real unfair part is that companies can choose to pay some people more than you?

I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.

I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.

I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).

I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.

We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.

But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?

And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.

I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.

Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.

[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.

The value in SaaS was never the code, it was the focus on the problem space, the execution, and the ops-included side.

AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".

Right, there are dozens of open source versions of wikis/task trackers/CRMs/ERPs/whatevers. Just because you can vibecode your way to a bad version of a bunch of SaaS products shouldn't fundamentally change anything. Companies buy SaaS products to make running the thing someone else's problem. It's times like these where I wish we had a functional SEC; I really wonder how much market manipulation is going on.

> The value in SaaS was never the code

I feel like a lot of people are about to learn this lesson for the first time. Except in some very niche areas the majority of the value was never the code. The SaaSs that everyone thinks will be replaced had much more than code if they were successful -integrations, contracts, expertise, reputation, etc…

Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product.

And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.

That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”

Yeah. So then you get your own product, tailor-made to your organisation, that you own (well, it's public domain because LLM-generated, but same same), and that you can change whenever you want without having to deal with a SaaS company's backlog. If you don't like something in it, you fire up Claude Code and get it changed.

There's also no danger of it being enshittified. Or of some twat of a product manager deciding to completely change the UI because they need to change something to prove their importance. Or of the product getting cancelled because it's not making enough money. Or of it getting sold to an evil corp who then sells your data to your competition. Or any of the other stupid shit we've seen SaaS companies pull over the past 20 years.

Respectfully, I think you’re only considering upsides and not considering downsides, opportunity costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. This is not what smart managers do. Plus, just because you can build something cheaper with an LLM doesn’t mean you can operate it more cheaply than a specialist can. Economies of scale haven’t been obviated by AI.

It’s useful to take an argument and take it to its logical extreme: I just don’t see every company in the world, large and small alike, building everything they depend on in-house, as though they were a prepper stocking up for Armageddon. That seems pretty fanciful on its face.

Why is it public domain because it's LLM-generated?

As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.")

That said, the inquiry doesn't there. What happens next after the content is generated matters. If human creativity is then applied to the output such that it transforms it into something the machine didn't generate itself, then the resulting product might be copyrightable. See Section F on page 24 of the Report.

Consider that a dictionary contains words that aren't copyrightable; but the selection of words an author select to write a novel constitutes a copyrightable work. It's just that in this case, the author is creatively constructing from much larger components than words.

Lots of questions then obviously follow, like how much and what kind of transformation needs to be applied. But I think this is probably where the law is headed.

Sometimes, but I think there are some SaaS products whose business model is really under threat. Look at PagerDuty. Their PE ratio is like 4.4. They have a lot of existing customers but virtually no pricing power now and I imagine getting new business for them is extremely difficult.

Canva is my go-to example - you can just get NanoBanana/whatever to generate and iterate on the image. Same for all those stock photo services. I used to use them a lot, now I just generate blog images

> AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".

Exactly right

The biggest limiting factor is user acquisition. Just because you can build a competitor in a weekend doesn't mean you can easily acquire a user base. it's dam hard to get users even if your product is twice as good and your giving it away for free!

The implied risk isn't more SaaS competitors, it's that B2B SaaS consumers will just code up their own product instead of going with a SaaS vendor.

Started seeing even B2C folks just get the LLM to do it, or code up a quick solution that does most of it.

There's still enormous potential for technology solutions in the healthcare space. The population in every developed country is getting older and sicker. AI can help a little bit with building those solutions but there are no magic bullets: we still need lots of people grinding away on hard problems.

Perhaps this is too US-centric, but as someone who used to work in health fintech, I strongly disagree.

The US healthcare system is well and truly f'd, but I think 98% of these issue are government and society policy issues. If anything, I see so many companies trying to take advantage of the complete dysfunction in the US healthcare system to be yet another middlemen siphoning money from systemwide inefficiencies.

There's a lot more to healthcare than just fintech. I've been the field for decades and I've never seen such rapid progress before in areas like clinical and administrative interoperability, digital health, software as a medical device, telehealth, clinical decision support, cost transparency, etc. Despite the structural problems with incentives that create that make the financial side so dysfunctional, there has never been a better time to build.

I never said health was just fintech.

My primary point is that poor health outcomes in the US (fully admit my views are US-centric given my experience and knowledge) have nothing to do with a lack of technology and everything to do with structural systems issues rooted in government policies.

I'm a big fan of Dr. Jessica Knurick, who publishes at length about many of the systems that cause and contribute to population-wide poor health in the US. Here's one article taking about food systems and nutrition: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/the-food-sy... .

Sure, I generally agree: the social problems that cause (relatively) low life expectancy in the US can't be solved with technology. But that's a separate problem. There's still a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and technologists to improve the healthcare system in ways that deliver real benefits to patients / providers / payers, and make some money in the process.

> I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US.

This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Tech has allowed a very solid middle class lifestyle for a lot of people. I can't think of another good paying job where someone is self-taught, or went to a 12-month certificate program at their local community college and now has a very good career.

If those jobs disappear, or wage growth is non-existent, I don't know where the next generation will find those jobs.

Just one correction though: Your definition of middle class has to be super wide to call many tech jobs "solid middle class". It's not as if everyone ends up in the billionaire column, most definitions of middle class end with household income at $165k. Many in tech go over with one job. Once a family has two jobs and one is in tech, basically everyone counts as upper middle or above. With two tech jobs in a household, claiming middle class is often denying one's actual status.

That's true. For context, I reside in Canada where good tech jobs fit the definition of the low end of upper class (250k CAD) where I am not sure the same is true in the USA? Regardless my definition is wrong.

Prompt companies are already evolving, establishing specific contexts to become business facilitators. That might be a "wrapper" project, but I bet there will be copyright litigation between these companies for "prompt piracy".

There are still (always?) business opportunites to leverage technology, in what we used to think was a virtuous loop of positive feedback.

If corporates are going to build AIs to attempt to sell things to people, there's going to be an opportunity for AIs that work for an individual, a "de-enshittifier" for example.

The "big model providers" right now aren't necessarily the actual ones that will persist. We're in another dotcom-type boom and when the tide goes out, some of them will have been swimming naked.

Folks at Jack's level are just as susceptible to flawed reasoning and trend following as anyone else. Sometimes it feels like more so, possibly because they have so much buffer to absorb the consequences of bad ideas (see how Twitter ended up). A person living paycheck to paycheck has less leeway to veer too far away from reality.

All of this to say. I suspect a lot 10k person companies made up of white collar workers could significantly cut their staff and still survive. By the time you get to that size, there's a large middle management that is constantly looking for reasons to increase their 30 person org to 40, and who will be overbooked whether they have 20 people or 100.

Before people jump into existential despair here about the software field, do we know the breakdown of roles? How many were tech vs support, operations, HR, and other roles?

In what sense did CashApp not pan out? $16b revenue. Too early to say whether Afterpay will work out but looking good so far

Updated to two tricks. And you could argue three if you call banking its own trick. Afterpay was an acquisition (and much smaller) so IDK if that counts.

Still, all the bitcoin stuff, music, other side ventures, most of the international expansion, attempts to appeal to bigger businesses, the recent "focus local" vision, all hardly made a dent in the respective markets and I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money or are still losing money on most of those things.

Afterpay (and the other Buy Now Pay Later competitors like Klarna) are potential financial arrangement facilitators for their customers.

Sure the BNPL model uses effectively invoice factoring with high interest penalties but they do have a financial relationship with both vendors and buyers.

There's a lot to leverage there. It's Paypal with lending attached.

> $16b revenue

I can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".

CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.

It also solves an exclusively American problem. In my country anyone can send money bank to bank, no need for a separate service.

Absolutely, most of this is private corporate duct tape over a lack of Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), Instant SEPA (Europe), etc [1]. “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” [2] In a US financial services market, Venmo and CashApp are unnecessary assuming you procure a deposit account from a bank or credit union with instant payment rails access [3] [4]. Even Schwab has access to Zelle, for example. You need not extend credit and have credit risk exposure for paper checks anymore as well as an issuer of a deposit account.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment

[2] (widely attributed to Winston Churchill)

[3] https://enroll.zellepay.com/

[4] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi...

> Even Schwab has access to Zelle

Schwab's accounts are backed by Chase. Zelle comes along for the ride.

Zelle has a transfer limit of $1000 per day and has a bad user interface.

Transfer limits are selected by each network participant [1], based on their risk tolerance. Four years ago Zelle was moving half a trillion dollars (~$490B) a year, 1/4th of total credit card volume [2]. I’ll come back with 2025 numbers when time permits. Zelle is baked into each financial institution’s app, there is no stand alone app anymore (as of March 2025) [3]. If you don’t like the UX, switch banks or credit unions, they’re mostly interchangeable. There are thousands to pick from.

I move thousands of dollars a month with Zelle, so I know it’s possible. My credit union allows me $3k/day, $8k/month. Chase Bank had similar limits before I left them.

[1] https://www.bankrate.com/banking/zelle-limits-at-top-banks/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32512052

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43552030

Nitpick: Credit Card volume is on the order of 4-5 trillion (depending on source) in the US. Add in debit and prepaid cards on card payment rails and it is around 10 trillion.

Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do today and the volume is substantial.

I expect it to take at least 5-10 years for instant payments to replace Zelle, credit, and debit cards in the US.

Brazil’s Pix is Coming for the Card Industry - https://paymentscmi.com/insights/brazil-pix-impacts-card-ind...

> Brazil’s card industry seems to have already come to terms with the loss of market share to Pix. For 2024, Abecs sees the debit card “moving sideways,” growing only between 0.4% and 0.7% compared to the previous year. This trend is consistent globally: Visa earnings reports reveal that its debit volume has been in monthly decline since February 2024.

> The numbers around Brazil’s RTP [Pix] are indeed superlative. Central Bank data shows that over 40% of all payments in the country are currently made through Pix. The system is used by more than 90 percent of the adult population, has over 15 million businesses and moves 20% of the country’s total transactional volume.

> As it gains new features, Pix will continue to cut into banks’ interchange revenues and compete with the card industry, not only in terms of ‘stealing’ transactions from these legacy players but by allowing a new stack of solutions to be built on top of its scheme. What the Brazilian Central Bank created is a new payment rail that allows for fewer intermediaries and, therefore, for cheaper solutions.