Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI? Bosses throughout the world love the idea of using AI to replace employees. They can talk all they want about how much more efficient everyone will be with AI, but the truth is if they can fire staffers, their bottom line looks better, their stock price goes up, and the CEO makes a ton more money. It's a win-win if your title …
The author has a massive blind spot here - layoffs aren’t always about AI at all. Big corporations have been running a well-worn playbook for years: hoard top talent so competitors can’t get it, overpay them just enough to keep them comfortable, then let them stagnate inside corporate process hell until their skills atrophy. After a few years, they’re released back into the market with a fat CV but out-of-date skills - useless to rivals.
AI hype is just the latest convenient cover story for this cycle. It lets execs frame the headcount shuffle as “efficiency” rather than a deliberate competitive chokehold. The real game isn’t replacing humans with machines - it’s making sure no one else can get the humans they need to compete.
elsergiovolador you have not disappointed with today's reply.
You (AI or human) are really unhappy with corporations' people, politics and profits in general. Just above paranoia levels, I feel.
Enjoyable and educational as always.
Replied from someone just above the scum in the pool of the corporate cess pit.
That's just tosh I'm afraid:
"Hoard top talent" - twas ever thus, for the purpose of outcompeting others rather than paying millions just so others can't have them.
"Overpay them just enough" - not to enslave, but to retain. The employment market is a free one, so employees can move to competitors for 'just enough' more.
"Leave with a fat CV" - not if they've stagnated in the same role for 2 decades!
Your thinking is way more paranoid than it needs to be, it's purely about money!
The idea that it’s “purely about money” and the market is “free” doesn’t survive contact with how these systems actually work.
“Hoard top talent” isn’t just paying for the best - it’s about denying that talent to competitors. Warehousing people in roles that don’t build portable skills is deliberate. If someone spends a decade inside one company’s bespoke systems, they’re far less valuable anywhere else. Stagnation becomes a retention tool.
“Overpay them just enough” also isn’t the free negotiation it sounds like. “Market rate” is a corporate euphemism for informal wage coordination - kept in check through industry salary bands, recruiter collusion, and the same benchmarking surveys used across competitors. You don’t need a cartel meeting when HR departments all drink from the same data well.
On top of that, in many sectors the “free market” exit ramp - starting your own business - has been narrowed or closed. In the UK, IR35 and similar rules have fenced off much of the services market, making it almost impossible for individuals to compete with large consultancies on equal terms. When employers aren’t competing for your skills, you can’t just create your own job - the ladder’s already been pulled up.
And then there’s the psychology. Workers tied to mortgages, school catchment areas, and family obligations will often stick with the devil they know rather than uproot for a 10-15% bump - especially when taxes, moving costs, and uncertainty eat the gain. Employers know it and design retention strategies around it.
None of this is new in human history. Control of labour has always been the foundation of power - from outright slavery to bonded servitude to today’s “captive” labour markets. The language has changed, the suits are sharper, but the underlying dynamic is the same: a C-suite that sees itself as owning “its” workforce in the same way plantation owners once saw theirs.
So yes, it’s about money - but it’s also about control: over the talent pipeline, over wage ceilings, over who can participate in the market, and over the psychological calculus that keeps people in place.
Your thinking is way more paranoid than it needs to be, it's purely about money!
Bull. Money does not - on it's own - make the world go round.
There's any number of reasons why people (do not) leave a job other than simple remuneration.
Examples might include:
* Not wanting to move house or take a longer commute.
* Forcing a spouse to move jobs as well.
* Distance to elderly relatives for whom you have caring responsibilities.
* The risk of moving your kids to a different school in an exam year.
* In the US, other components of the package such as medical insurance (and cover for pre-existing conditions) can be make-or-break. If someone has a dependent who may need chemo, it doesn't matter if a new position is offering a salary bump from $150k to $300k - that ain't going to be enough if the health insurance isn't adequate for your (family's) needs. This is money, but it's also not. It's security because sure, you could negotiate a carve out to say "you'll pay Timmy's chemo if they need it", but if your other child subsequently develops some other condition which isn't in scope of the inferior health insurance then you're screwed.
The classic liberal and neoliberal axiom that actors are rational and imbued with market knowledge to take/negotiate the best job available has been thoroughly discredited - in particular the Chicago and Austrian school economists whose entire house is built on the sand of "rational expectations", which doesnt survive first contact with reality.
If people were rational, we wouldn't get market bubbles and crashes.
The theory of a free market assumes information symmetry. Your employer knows what everyone in the company is paid. Very few employees have accurate knowledge of more than a couple of fellow employees pay. They have even less knowledge of actual pay rates in other companies.
The labour market fails the even most basic features of a free market.
> "hoard top talent so competitors can’t get it, overpay them just enough to keep them comfortable, then let them stagnate inside corporate process hell"
Microsoft has *long* been known for hiring some of the most talented researchers at very well-paid rates and sending them to work in their labs where they come out with some very interesting stuff.... which is almost always completely sidelined in favour of MS's vested interest in the status quo and churning out more of the same.
It's long been assumed that the motivation was the one you describe- to keep them away from rivals where their ideas may pose a risk to MS's market dominance.
I don't think that goes so far as intentionally letting their skills atrophy, that's most likely just a convenient side effect of something they'd be doing anyway.
...then let them stagnate inside corporate process hell until their skills atrophy. After a few years, they’re released back into the market with a fat CV but out-of-date skills...
Yes!
It's just like in hospitals: top-level surgeons are being hired to cut out moles, so the competition can't get them.
They are being kept there, tied to a mountain of cut moles and peeled bunions with a rope woven from dollar bills, bitterly crying over their vanishing skills - while the competing hospitals watch from the outside, sobbing, their warm tears plonking two drops at the time on the tip of their alligator leather boots.
What an absolute pile of hot, steaming bull biofuel aggregate. Someone is attacking the bottom, drill in hand.
The hospital analogy is cute but meaningless - healthcare doesn’t operate in the same competitive landscape as tech. In tech, highly capable people aren’t just valuable for the work they do inside the company; they’re dangerous to the status quo if they band together or join a rival to build something that could disrupt profits.
That’s why it can be strategically smarter to keep them occupied on safe, inward-facing work rather than out in the market building the next competitor. Employment contracts make this explicit - most state the company owns any IP you create while employed. It’s not there for decoration; it’s there to make sure you don’t build a side hustle that could turn into a threat.
And if talent does escape and create something viable, there’s a well-worn playbook for that too: acquire the company and quietly extinguish it before it becomes a problem.
...The hospital analogy is cute but meaningless...
The cutest thing is how circular your reasoning is. Yet it's almost triangular from the flat spots beaten into it
- It mandates an infinite supply of talent for the evil corps to grind into fat useless blobs
- It requires top talent that would be genius level professionally but either won't realize they are being fattened into incompetent idiots, or would agree with it.
- It assumes there's more money to win - both for the company and for the talent - to keep them unused and degrading, rather than use the talent to its potential (which would automatically improve the skills of said talent), and bear the fruits from it, which are both some results for the company and more raises for the talent.
It is like someone read you the Dilbert principle while you were on very bad shrooms, with both Rubber's Lover and Saw playing full volume on two perpendicular video walls.
You’re missing how low the bar is for this to work.
“Infinite supply” - Not needed. A small surplus of strong performers is enough to selectively neutralise those who might cause trouble outside. Big tech’s hiring pipelines can easily sustain that.
“Geniuses who don’t notice or agree” - You’re picturing a flawless rational actor. In reality, even brilliant engineers can have messy personal lives, be risk-averse, dislike change, feed their ego by being the smartest in the room, avoid confrontation or simply go along because it pays the bills. Whole industries show smart people believing and defending policies that harm them - see the UK tech sector swallowing HMRC’s “tax fairness” spin on IR35 - when it’s really a corrupt mechanism for market capture. Intelligence in one domain doesn’t immunise you from being played in another.
“More money to bench than to use” – Sometimes yes, because the cost of letting someone strengthen a rival is higher than the gains from using them internally. That’s the same logic as buying a startup just to shut it down. You keep the asset out of enemy hands.
None of this needs a Dilbert cartoon or conspiracy theory - just basic competitive strategy, applied to people instead of products.
CEOs have reason to point to (or let others infer) that layoffs have to do with AI, because that helps justify their AI related spending. Especially CEOs of companies that are themselves developing AI, like say Microsoft.
Microsoft would love for every CEO to think "wow if Microsoft is able to start replacing coders with AI obviously we should be able to do the same, and we should contract with Microsoft for their AI services since their AI is clearly is up to the task!"
Between overhiring during the pandemic and wanting to start trimming jobs in anticipation of the obvious economic headwinds coming our way, there are plenty of reasons for job cuts that have nothing to do with AI. But "I screwed up and hired too many people a few years ago" or "I'm cutting people because I think the economy is going to get worse, sucks for those people losing their jobs in an economy that's about to get worse" aren't such good stories to tell.
It's grandstanding to call this a "Huge blindspot". The adoption of AI is driven by the C-level desire to cut headcount. Let's not muddy the cause and effect by suggesting that the layoffs from corporate AI programs are part of a general trend. It has not been "business as usual" for MS to layoff 15K developers in a year, 9K in a month.
"Funny. GPT-5 will confidently tell you that Willian H. Brusen is a former US president. For those of you not from the States, there's no such person, never mind a former president."
I'm sure in no time at all search engines will all agree that there was such a person and that he was US president.
If Prokofiev were still around he'd write an orchestral suite about him.
Most likely ChatGPT will tell you that Prokofiev *is* still around and link to the suite he wrote about Brusen.
I'm sure in no time at all search engines will all agree that there was such a person and that he was US president
Maybe my mom's old school bound Encyclopedia Britannica set from the 70s will have value after all. I was kind of assuming when the day came to get rid of stuff like that we'd be damn lucky to find someone willing to haul it off for free.
The search engines will probably ressurect him and AI confabulating a protège Mlle Circe Keija to assist in muddying the already turbid waters further.
"Lamentations on the Resistable Rise of the Villainous Willian Brusen"
Between search engines and the AI menace the level of complete nonsense is already incredible.
Yesterday I was searching for other appearances of an actress from an old Tom Baker Dr Who episode (State of Decay) viz Rachel Davies and among the more informative results this site: https://www.howold.co/person/rachel-davies was rather peculiar "She was 172 when she starred in this movie [Peterloo]."
The AI manage to conflated an extant person of the same name with a woman who was born in 1848 and died in 1915 but was still making movies in 2019 which is slightly more amusing when you consider her role (Camilla) in State of Decay.
A bottomless well of utter bollocks.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/powerful-new-ai-models-knock-wind-out-european-adopter-stocks-2025-08-15/
The markets are becoming hawkish about companies who have "bet the farm" on AI..
But I suspect Rotters has the wrong analysis here. It's not so much because the models are improving rapidly (so apparently early-adopters will be left behind) but because it is NOT improving - if anything the more recent models are getting worse (and becoming "ever more powerful" only in terms of how much energy they waste) and everyone is starting to move out of the hype-fog and realise what the "fundamental limitations" of bullshit generation are.
If the markets are punishing AI customers now, then they will go for AI suppliers next.
Yeah, that's some good s**t man, do you want some more? I got a little more, but it will cost ya a bit extra...
reminds me of a Robin Williams skit a the NY Met, he talks about shoe dealers giving away basketball shoes. but only one shoe, the other costs you! Try that one on, do you like it, the other will cost you...
If there was a drug with the cognitive and societal impacts we have seen from AI it would be banned in a minute.
Not passing judgement on the quality of that decision, but it's interesting to see how differently our governments respond to software that affects our brains rather than chemicals.
My cynical comment seems to be much closer to the truth than one might think.
Soon these AI companies will make sure you must use their "service" by law...
The Artificial Ignorance bubble was always nothing more than a hype-bubble. "AI" has failed miserably at almost everything I tried to do with it, requiring multiple models and many days of prompting just to figure out how to set up multiple JPA repositories in a Spring application. That's not "efficiency" - I could probably have done the same with online searches in about the same amount of time, but I'd never really tried to push any of the "AI" systems to actually create complex code, and I wanted to see how it would do.
It was very misleading, producing erroneous and bug-ridden code styles along the way that completely refactored what the previous LLM had come up with, but not actually fixing anything in most cases.
"AI" is statistics and averages gone mad. It produces plausible output for a prompt, not correct output, and no wonder - it's not actually "intelligent" in the slightest, with no understanding model of what you are actually trying to accomplish, just the "knowledge" that "90% of the time you ask for foo, you want code that looks like bar."
I vividly remember the "new economy" during the 2nd half of the 1990s. Venture capitalists would sink million$ into companies that had never even designed, much less made, a single product, and tiny start-ups would go IPO and be valued astronomically overnight.
None of that made sense to me, but Those In The Know told me at the time that that was because I lacked vision and business acumen. This was the New Economy, and this was how it worked. Silly me.
And then the wheels came off.
Looking at the current AI playing field, I get a hauntingly familiar feeling. Value and investments are once again purely based on hype rather than actual performance or commercial viability. I suspect it will end the same way as it did the last time.
There once was a company named Dell
Whose leaders thought AI was just swell.
So they gave engineers the boot
And sent support down the chute
Why have NPI and CSAT gone to hell?
(NPI = Net Promoter Index; CSAT = Customer Satisfaction; measurements of internal and external satisfaction with the company)
This is a good discussion of "what comes next"
The first thing I see is that many IT shops have no ability to evaluate the cost effectiveness of human developed code, at the upper management level. And they don't care. At that level all the decisions resovle to (as the author succunctly states) share price. Quality, productivity, correctness, robustness, scaleability ? Bah, just throw $ at it, and call it ops.
Instead the C-suite will adopt a flawed AI strategy out of the need to feed their innate lemming spectrum disorders ( IE thoughtlessly conform to what the rest of the industry is doing). They will not question the proposition that they are increasing profits by using AI to replace people. There will be no meaningful "what if" comparison to a human-developed alternative. They will be sold the idea that no matter the licensing costs, they are still better off. That will be sufficient justification.
And that sales pitch will be made by one of their corporate partners, very likely MS. They'll all be imbibing from the same coolaid pitcher.
MS will also answer the problems of disparate, overlapping tools by pushing a single does-it-all copilot.
There are very few realistic scenarios I can think of where AI will not displace tonnes of knowledge workers, at least in the near and mid term.
I encourage people to try AI on their own machines with graphic card. It's pretty good. So how will these big corporations ever charge a big fee? What will happen is the smart companies will come along and produce compact more distributed systems that can be run locally or in dedicated clusters. Effort will go into integration, maybe some standards. They wont be quite as good but they will be economically viable and good enough. Those over investing will have served their purpose and many will go to the wall.
We will end up with choices; large shared, smaller dedicated and even personal.
"Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 people. The funds Microsoft is saving from all its ex-staffers are helping to pay for Microsoft's spending $75 to $80 billion on its AI CapEx this year."
Assuming the average TC of a Microsoft employee is $250,000 p.a., the total savings from firing 15000 employees works out to $3.75B. How will that even begin to pay $75B for AI CapEx? If the devs I'm paying $250K suck so badly at maths and logic, I'd happily pay $100K to replace them with AI.
Companies deny they're doing this, of course. Take Microsoft, for example. CEO Satya Nadella claims AI tools like GitHub Copilot now write up to 30 percent of Microsoft’s software code. Simultaneously, Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 people, nearly 7% of its workforce. Coincidence? I think not.
This is the biggest open lie in the industry.
Microsoft is laying off staff, claiming "they were replaced by AI" , and then bringing in an equivalent number of H1B indentured servants at a tenth of the cost.
It'll be just like cloud. C-level sold the story about savings but ignoreing the part that it needs work and investment to realise those savings and just doing a cut price lift and shift will cost you dear. Five years later they complain that their cloud service is sucking down money like crazy but they've sold off the data centre and can't go back.
For AI they've already got targets on the backs of whole departments. Those guys will be gone long and bonuses banked before there is any realisation that it will cost much more in the long run whislt delivering much less.
