Great article, super fun.
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.
You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6 times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.
Also that the US population is roughly 33% larger in 2025 than it was in 1993
Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your business. This works great for companies that are already a monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers and prevent competitors.
KTLO = keeping the lights on
> Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while
As long as you're
1) In a position where you can make the decisions on whether or not the company should move forward
and
2) Hold the stock units that will be exchanged for money if another company buys out your company
then there's really no way things won't be fine, short of criminal investigations/the rare successful shareholder lawsuit. You will likely walk away from your decision to weaken the company with more money than you had when you made the decision in the first place.
That's why many in the managerial class often hold up Jack Welch as a hero: he unlocked a new definition of competence where you could fail in business, but make money doing it. In his case, it was "spinning off" or "streamlining" businesses until there was nothing left and you could sell the scraps off to competitors. Slash-and-burn of paid workers via AI "replacement" is just another way of doing it.
We have more middle management than ever before because we cut all the other roles, and it turns out that people will desire employment, even if it means becoming a pointless bureaucrat, because the alternative is starving.
I don’t think a lot of people here have been in the typists room or hung out with the secretaries. There were a lot of people taking care of all the things going and this has been downloaded and further downloaded.
There was a time I didn’t have to do my expenses. I had someone just know where I was and who I was working for and and took care of it. We talked when there was something that didn’t make sense. Thanks to computers I’m doing it. Meaningless for sure.
My first boss couldn't type. At all. He would dictate things to his secretary, who would then type them up as memorandums, and distribute to whoever needed them (on paper), and/or post them on noticeboards for everyone to read.
Then we got email, and he retired. His successor can type and the secretary position was made redundant.
heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.
Well, I've worked as a developer in many companies and have never met a DBA. I've met tons of devops, who are just rebranded sysadmins as far as anyone can tell.
> Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc.
Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.
Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.
Because companies made models build/stolen from other people’s work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow. Shouldn’t we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world as well ? It’s just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge and should be given back to all people for free. No companies should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building things at all because it’s too expensive and too slow to do by hand ? It all should freely be made accessible to all humans for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.