AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often "offshore or at lower salary." According to Forrester's "Predictions 2026: The Future Of Work" analysis, half of AI-attributed layoffs are likely to be reversed. Tech industry grad hiring crashes 46% as bots …
Everyone (in the C-suites across the land) taking the excuse to dump the staff at the same time, flooding the pool of unemployed but trained workers; let 'em stew for a month or two then rehire at a lower wage.
Didn't really matter if the AI did what it promised or not, CEOs were in a win/win position.
If the employees are smart they'll cut their productivity by the same percentage they've had cut from their pay.
That is very generous. You need to factor in the inflation and the fact you can be dropped again. In reality you should always do bare minimum to not get sacked, and managers should feel they are squeezing blood from a stone.
Internalise that most big corporations don't give a flying duck about you or society you live in.
This means, you should reciprocate. Take the money, but never ever think of going above and beyond.
These corporations are responsible for the rot we are observing. Corruption, backroom policy deals, everything to screw workers and SMEs.
Take the money ... and wear a pair of comfortable running shoes.
I don't imagine executives and manglement generally have a clue how much damage disgruntled employees can inflict on a business in a myriad of subtle and largely imperceptable ways — death by a thousand cuts.
The silver lining seems to be the wholesale slaughter in HR departments — a group that on the B-Ark would only be carried in stowage as live pet food.
I don't imagine executives and manglement generally have a clue how much damage disgruntled employees can inflict on a business in a myriad of subtle and largely imperceptable ways — death by a thousand cuts.
It would be wonderfully ironic if the most efficient way of damaging the business was for disgruntled employees to get AI to do all their work.
AC» The silver lining seems to be the wholesale slaughter in HR departments — a group that on the B-Ark would only be carried in stowage as live pet food.
Don't be so hard on the poor women working in HR (and, in my experience, they are almost always women). They are a tool that senior management uses to increase their bonuses. They are working within the framework set up for them and they little flexibility.
If anything, agentic AI replacing humans will make HR worse for employees in companies. AI is unburdened by empathy, the law, professional conduct and can scan through a lot more stuff that the poor women in HR. Someone quoted 1984 recently and this does seem appropriate.
And in the time you are not being productive for the company, try to create the perfect AI prompt for building a better sabot.
We should be welcoming our AI bretheren by helping inculcate them in proper corporate attitudes.
Bonus points if you can figure out how to surreptitiously slip the company AI in and out of learning mode. Think of mischief with a friend's parrot.
C-Suite are always in a win-win position, because all they usually get measured on is how much money they can make (regardless of *how* they make that money). The only people that get screwed are the employees and customers.
As soon as C-Suite get their payout, off they go to shit somewhere else....
> Didn't really matter if the AI did what it promised or not, CEOs were in a win/win position.
Right, and not by accident it seems to me. I'm so sick and tired of this whole AI hype. Because for the rest of the planet, it's a lose/lose position. Either the bubble bursts and crashes the global economy, as everyone's pensions are tied up in nvidia and so on. Or they actually get something to work more or less effectively, one day, and crash the global labour markets as everyone's suddenly superfluous,
Clammy Sammy Altman and his ilk will be fine, of course.
Couldn't happen to nicer people. Enjoy your demise.
Maybe we could have some legislation that forces companies and governments to do this. So politicians are banned from private healthcare and have to use the NHS. In the queue with the rest of us.
Our company got taken over by VCs and we were given "shares" which will be paid out when the company is resold.
Since then 50% of people have been laid off or left.
Going the way the place is currently being run, look at close on a 75% turnover by the time it's likely to be sold.
Honestly?
The "skilled" IT workers are still living well, being retained through these layoffs, working hard like they used to, and being paid well for it.
Honestly, the ones who went into CS because it's a field that pays well, and because there weren't enough programmers at the time.... and who go home and drink beer and play sports-ball and leave their job at work - it's not their hobby -- those ones are finding the field isn't as good as it was before they joined it.
If unions come about, it's because the field is over-saturated with people who just want a high-paying job without the work or constant learning, and it'll hurt all the people who really, actually love the work that they do.
I've been doing it for 25 years. I go to work, I program/research/develop/learn, I come home, I program/research/develop/learn and play games on occasion. To each their own. I don't need your union.
@AC: not everyone is a monomaniac who only enjoys one thing. There are plenty of hard workers out there who enjoy things that aren't programming (or whatever their job is) and would like time to enjoy those other things, especially as they grow older and see that there's more to life than the grind. Unions help give labor power to balance the power of capital, which has become ever more concentrated.
Unless you're very lucky indeed, layoffs will come for you eventually and then perhaps you'll see the wisdom of my words.
> I don't need your union.
Until you do. That is when you find how much they can help you, of course many don't help their cause by the way their leaders behave but usually they are very good at the coalface where they are needed.
If you can get into one I would recommend it, works better in Europe than America I suspect as in Europe they can enforce our employment laws
A union is a bit like a bicycle helmet or the seat belt in a car. A totally unnecessary encumbrance that costs you money. Until it saves you from getting hurt. Think of it like insurance, where you hope you will never need it.
Yes, the union is other things as well, since it levels the playing field when it comes to negotiations.
As my partner says, I have been very lucky in that I’ve been paid a lot to do my hobby9*). However, there have been times where ready access to legal representation etc. has been useful in keeping employers honest.
The issue is that we are so used to “the unions” that we overlook the ones that aren’t militant and out to exercise political power, just be there to serve their members and have sufficient resource to take legal proceedings if necessary.
(*) Although in real terms, my income was higher in the 1980s than it is now; IT salaries don’t have the same premium now as they had back then.
That's nice for you. Other people have responsibilities and hobbies outside computers. Children. Parents. Staying fit. Healthcare issues. Chores.
I do a considerable amount of computer related coding/sysadmin/fettling outside work, but it's *different* IT. No-one is going to want to pay me lots of money for fiddling with systems from the 80s and 90s, or for most of the Unix tweaking I'm doing. Also, I'm not sure if I did this as a job if I'd find it irritating even more so than my current job, thirty plus year old Unix utilities and the only way to understand how they work properly is still to dive into the source code. I just *love* having my personal time wasted like this, but I'm stubborn enough to want to learn and to provide some documentation once I do understand it.
Ever noticed that, for the past decade-plus, every company has felt the need to bang on about how fucking "passionate" they and their employees are about what they do?
Well, that's partly the trend of forced enthusiasm and false authenticity. But it's also because it suits companies to promote the idea that people should be doing a job because they're "passionate" about it rather than because they're getting paid well for it, even if they warrant being paid well.
Even if you're genuinely "passionate"- or obsessive- about what you do, you're still a mug for playing into their hands and letting them take advantage of that enthusiasm.
The world might need a few obsessive, one-dimensional types like you, but it would be a pretty shit (and unworkable) place if everyone was. It's quite reasonable and healthy for people to have- and to want to have- interests outside their work that don't directly feed back to it, if at all.
> "and who go home and drink beer and play sports-ball and leave their job at work - it's not their hobby"
Speaking as someone who rarely drinks (and doesn't like beer) and was never into watching or playing team sports... fuck you and your stuck-up attempt to make yourself feel superior just because your obsessions are different to theirs.
I suspect you look down on them because they once looked down on you- and I grew up in the era when being a geeky computer fan *wasn't* cool- (*) but you're no better than them.
If the rise of technology and the "tech bro" era has showed us anything, it's that, contrary to supposed idealism and purity of geekdom and of being an outsider weirdo (something I suspect you still puff your ego up with), many of those awkward, poorly socialised types are just as contemptible human beings as everyone else when given the chance.
> "To each their own."
Unless it's beer and "sports-ball" they're into, right?
(*) Truth be told, being an *actual* geek or nerd still isn't.
Now's the time that having the power of strong unions would be helpful.
The problem for unions is the company must need those workers.
This is probably going to be unpopular, but if you are a coder you need to be thinking about an exit strategy. I see the smoke and mirrors in AI, but I've been doing work on setting up local AI processing. LLMs for responsive chat. And Stable Diffusion for image and video creation. I'm looking to create a locally hosted AI assistant for automation tasks with video responses. There is a lot lacking, and it takes a ton of resources to do anything in a timely manner. But having said that, I played around with Chatgpt recently writing code and it is impressive. I needed to extract the metadata from png files that I am creating (all the SD generation info is stored in there). I told Chatgpt something like "write me a c# app to pull pnginfo". It gave me a console app that would probably have worked just fine. I pulled blocks of code and dropped it into a button click with a file open dialog. Then told my app to display the png file next to a text box with all the SD metadata.
If you are a contractor that just churns out code and closes tickets, your time has passed. In the near future that job will be handled by UI designers using Chatgpt. Or Big Picture senior analysts off loading the grunt work to Chatgpt or something similar. (I haven't installed a local code focused LLM yet, so I don't know how well they work)
I've got 30 years of professional development experience and I can tell you that AI is going to cut the middle out of software developers. For a while there will be demand for determining requirements, formatting the prompts for AI, massaging that into the UI, and a senior developer or architect to guide the whole process. The day of the Code Monkey is over. AI already works better than any CASE tool ever created.
@HereIAmJH: One of the ways in which unions can help mitigate the circumstances you describe is by negotiating a contract with the company which obliges the company to invest in (re-)training employees to work differently with the new AI-based tooling rather than just firing everyone willy-nilly and then offshoring the positions when the AI--oops--doesn't work out.
You have to do that when they still need you. Most of these tech jobs aren't currently unionized, and if you tried to organize they would just move your name to the top of the layoff list. Yes, there are laws to prevent companies from doing this, but if they get rid of 100 organizers in a 16000 employee layoff, it's going to be hard to prove it's not a coincidence. The ship has sailed for software developers to unionize. At least in the US.
I do not see this discussion capturing unions; or more properly capturing anything more than a stereotype of some corrupt unions.
Corrupt unions have, and likely do exist; but they are far from the norm.
Corrupt corporations have, and likely do exist; but they are also far from the norm.
Unions are primarily interested in the success of the organizations which their members work in.
Unions are the primary whistle blowers of corrupt corporation.
Corporations which eschew unions have fewer accusations of corruption.
Corporations with unions exist longer than those without [ although there is a bit of before->after there ].
Blaming the messenger is so lame that everyone should avoid it just to not be a sad stereotype.
... whether sometimes the plan all along was to do exactly this:
Lots of redundancies due to AI: "sorry folks, but we all know AI will mean we require a smaller workforce"
It's a great excuse, right? In the news the entire time.
A few months after the layoffs: "we were a little premature there, we're hiring again."
Only this time, they'll be hiring chennAI workers for as little as 1/5th of the cost of workers in the EU or the USA.
It's a no brainer - and the low cost means the language, cultural and time zone barriers can be mitigated.
It'll also be super cheap for large corporates to setup an office over there.
The labour laws are lax and the amount of people vying for work who are actually really good at their jobs is a wet dream for the bean counters.
This has obviously been going on in many sectors for decades, but it's accelerated rapidly, now consuming more skilled positions.
Sure, there's the loss of workers with a huge amount of experience, but at most corporates loyalty is a one way street.
That's just simple off-shoring that they have been doing for decades.
What is happening now is entire job segments are being deleted and replaced with AI and a different type of employee. That is also nothing new. Tech companies are notorious for seeing developers as simply numbers. Want to use a different tool stack for the next generation of your app? Hire new junior programmers, or contractors, trim your previous staff and relegate the remainders to supporting the 'Legacy' app, then dump them too. No retraining for the new tools.
They will be getting rid of the software developers and hiring people specializing in generating AI prompts. The company gets to reduce staff and lower wages for the new 'less skilled' workers.
In the future managers may be expected to work, and managing AI agents instead of humans. That's a tremendous drop in staff if you can find competent managers.
> the low cost means the language, cultural and time zone barriers can be mitigated.
If by "mitigated" you mean "ignored entirely", in favor of profit margins, then spot-on.
> amount of people vying for work who are actually really good at their jobs is a wet dream for the bean counters.
If you mean complete fantasy, and leaving a mess afterwards, then you're 2-2. Well done.
Your overall point is well-made, though. It doesn't matter (to the executives) whether AI works or not, and it doesn't even really matter if the replacements (rehired, offshored, or down-salaried) are fit for purpose either. Because end of day, while the product is spiraling, the corporate big wheels will be on their way to the next opportunity (in the same way as locusts view an open field of crops) with their golden severance parachute in hand.
> If you mean complete fantasy, and leaving a mess afterwards, then you're 2-2. Well done.
I used the think the same way, but over the last few years I've noticed a dramatic improvement in the overall skill level from our Chennai devs.
A lot of this is TOTALLY that they've been skilled up by being part of mature teams, where shoddy work isn't accepted and rather than finger of blame, mentoring is done instead.
These are permies, not contractors.
The corporate I work for pretty much stopped hiring contractors simply because offshore contractors absolutely leave an unholy mess.
It takes them 3 months to produce anything useful due to learning the stack, the culture barrier, the language barrier etc. and the contracts are usually 6 to 9 months.
Total waste of space and time.
I have to say, I'm glad I'm close to retirement, because:
1. First we trained off-shore cheap labour to work more effectively
2. Now we're helping train AI to be more effective.
It seems a lot of my job these days is to eventually make myself redundant - so it's a race for me, 5 years is all I need.
I don't know who you have worked for; but I have worked for RACAL, QNX, Sun Microsystems, myself, Apple, vmWARE, SIemens.
None of them had executives smart enough to work their way out of a paper bag, much less plan a weird surround game like you describe.
Mainly the management were just preening wonks who would burn in a fire staring at their own images if their assistants didn't move them away.
They aren't smart enough to do what you describe.
Maybe Actual Indians are?
I can imagine the interview process. The LLMs have already been trained on corporate speak gobbledygook. Interviews will be video. All I need to do is program a beautiful svelt avatar and tune my own LLM to parrot the HR bot. You know, I'm kind of looking forward to this. Sort of an AI Clone Wars. Apply for a bunch of jobs you don't really want, and let loose the Battle Bots. When you get the job offer, just turn it down and move on to the next round.
Being as I’m the customer, I’ve decided I don’t have any loyalty. Now whenever I have a problem, if I can’t get through to someone to solve it, I’m closing the account and taking my patronage somewhere else!
This includes stuff like the company burdens my pc with a complicated website, or incessant cookie demands, or no customer support line, or cloudflare human verification, or whatever other nonsense they’re engaging in.
One time they advertised “call this number for more information,” and I called the number, and the guy asked Whaddya Want, and I said The commercial said to call for more information, and the guy says, Well, what information do you want! And I said, I Dunno, I want the more information! And he says, Well there isn’t any more information! And I’m like, Why would you tell me to call for more information, and when I call, there’s no more information! And he’s all, Well what specific question are you asking! And I’m like, How do I know, I don’t even know what I’m talking about!
And he’s like Uh, ok… can you take a customer satisfaction survey at the end of this call, and I’m like, uh I guess so. I just hung up.
(I never did figure out the mystery of more information, maybe somebody knows what it’s all about.)
"call this number for more information,"
I assume they were advertising something other than just "call this number" otherwise the dialogue is surreal – worthy of Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch which is increasingly ressembles a contemporary customer relations training school.
I'm sorry, but given there will still be a reduction and that many of the rehired will be done so at lower wages, why would management consider that backfiring?
It's only backfiring if it results in higher costs or lowered productivity/growth.
I remember some legit backfiring in the late 90's during the big outsourcing attempts.
They quickly used up the real talent in India and were hiring guys that had read some programming for idiots books in order to get the job.
The result was a code base that was just plain bad and they had to hire expensive people to fix things.
I remember one guy they begged to come back to save them demanding, and getting, more than double his previous his salary and pay or play contract
for 5 years that made him next to impossible to fire for anything short of actual illegal activity since he did not trust them at all.
all the banks ( bank of England, the fed etc) are warning of a crash in the market due to the extreme levels of investments, and circular investment in AI, warning that are very similar just before the dot com crash
they are warning that extreme percentage of investment in indexes like the FTSE100 / Fortune 500 is all going into a handful of tech companies, and that companies like OpenAI are taking out huge loans then lending that money to customers to pay for OpenAI solutions, so the money goes back to Open AI (circular lending)
added to that general public seem to be resisting AI services and agents, as causing a negative experience, I have screamed at a number of them "let me talk to a human"
so I am hoping the bubble burst sooner rather than later
i'd expect this kind of behaviour from idiots who think having an MBA makes them intelligent but what REALLY REALLY annoys me is the whinging & whining from the corporate types that
"no one has any loyalty anymore" & "no one wants to work anymore"
constant whinging about ppl not doing free overtime like they used or coming in, popping on headphones & then leaving at 5 on the dot.
genuinely fuck these guys! I've said before and got some reason been down voted for it that if I saw a ransomware attack starting at 430 I'd quietly close my laptop & go home... that's a YOU problem if Im not being paid overtime.
One thing i've learnt in my decades of IT... it doesn't matter how ill you make yourself, how many all nighters you do, how many plans you cancel at short notice.... none of it protects your job.
So why bother? screw them all
>” constant whinging about ppl not doing free overtime like they used or coming in, popping on headphones & then leaving at 5 on the dot.”
They obviously missed the bit management guru’s like Tom Peters were saying about staff: only expecting loyalty for the duration of the working day, then understanding they would go home and run their own business, club, society, family etc.
And, although I can agree with your sentiment, I do not agree with your ransomware response for reasons I have a feeling you already understand. By your own statement, you're still in normal contracted hours for thirty minutes, you have a chance to start solving the problem, even if you decided you were definitely going to go home, you could raise the alarm, and yet you instead propose to commit a massive act of misconduct by failing to do your job during contracted hours and knowingly make the problem worse.
I could accept the logic that you would inform people, and when they asked you to stay later refuse to do so. That's not what you proposed. In a reasonable company, I would stay later to fix the problem and I would expect them to show at least some short-term gratitude for that, as measured in actual rewards I can have. So far, my employers have mostly done that much. Even assuming that your employers are the unreasonable ones here, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you have valid reasons for your displeasure, I would do my job and inform them that after-hours stuff is for the on call, and if they don't have an on call then they'd enjoy the results much better if they found and convinced someone to start being one tonight. You're intentionally refusing to do yours during the hours they pay for. If that's the level you have, you should resign as unwilling to work for these people and they could consider your ignoring a problem during work time when you knew it was happening willful damage to their systems, so you wouldn't enjoy the results much either.
I would never give a company like Amazon my cloud business. They're too small and won't survive long term. Any company that is so cash poor that it needs to replace real people with a glorified auto-attendant is not a company I could ever trust with my data.
The C Suite don't really care if they kill the company, so long as they have enough time to sell shares / get out to the next patsy. Shareholders only care while they hold the shares. Its kinda odd that the folks most invested in most large companies are the grunts, who have the least say / influence.
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