'Something really shifted': Inside the software company that laid off 40pc of its staff

Comments

• PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Block — the company behind Square, Afterpay and Cash App.

  Since it’s not in the headline

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• HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  So if you say you are laying off employees as necessary for cost cutting. One of the problem with fake jobs is companies that are seeking employees are seen as healthy and growing so it looks better for them to be seeking them. Cutting looks bad. Right now though we have this gift to corps. Its a horrible global economy but if you say you are laying off because you can make it all up and more with ai then your stock won’t just not fall but actually rise and you will be looked at as next gen smartz super good company. If its not clear I think many layoffs now is kinda being blamed on ai when that is not what its about at all.

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  • hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Cutting looks bad.

    unless you look at the stock price which nearly always goes up after job cuts are announced.

    so to owners it looks good.

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  • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If its not clear I think many layoffs now is kinda being blamed on ai when that is not what its about at all.

    Blaming AI makes AI sound like a legitimate technology. Silicon Valley had a good run, they took all the proven analog tools of society and digitized them, but once all that was done, there has been no real innovation in software other than enshittification with ads and subscriptions, which people are avoiding. There was a boom during lockdown but people are getting away from the garbage on social media…Facebook, X, ticktok, insta etc. is for losers. Typically all the same people.

    In the long run AI will have as much impact on work as Google’s original search engine, but that’s it.

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    • hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Blaming AI makes AI sound like a legitimate technology.

      CBA got caught out, bunch of layoffs announced, stock price up, they say “because ai”, turned out they just offshored the jobs to India.

      news.com.au/…/855cf33c0a63773afd0de91c92649292

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    • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      nah it means blame something besides the company is doing poorly.

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• NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Writing code never has been and never will be the bottleneck. What we’re finding is that the actual bottlenecks come under a lot more pressure from all the code that is being produced.

  Of course, in this case the actual operational capabilities are vastly less important than what the c-suite believes to be true, or at least what they want to protect to their shareholders.

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  • slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If people can’t explain what they want their software to do to another person, how do they expect a regurgitation machine prone to hallucinations and trained on Stack Overflow questions to get it right?

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  • uuj8za@piefed.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Writing code never has been and never will be the bottleneck.

    YES! I recently completed two code-heavy projects at work. My bosses kept asking me if I could use more AI to get the project done faster… -- and I kept telling them no! The bottleneck wasn’t my typing speed. The bottleneck was me _thinking through the design, thinking about edge cases, running experiments to validate hypothesis, testing out different API designs.

    Typing out the code took like 1 day out of the 2 weeks. Code generation is not the bottleneck.

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• No1@aussie.zone ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  OK, this is a general thought that I’d had many years ago, and doesn’t necessarily relate to this article specifically, but I thought I’d mention it.

  One of the trickier things to do is cut your workforce. In a lot of cases what you want to do and what you legally may be able to do are not be the same thing.

  Arguably, AI provides a plausible reason to do this.

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  • leoj@piefed.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Also cuts costs without spooking investors.

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    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Exactly, makes a company in decline sound CUTTING EDGE.

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  • eureka@aussie.zone ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    AI is absolutely being used as a pretense to cut jobs. They’ll axe 1000, say “oh whoops that was a mistake” and hire 500 back.

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