Instead of saying words to one of the many tens of thousands of religious comments that would presumably annoy you, you could also help research on this topic instead of dumping on someone trying to be encouraging who already hedged that not everyone agrees with them.

Businesses are incentivized to say it’s because of AI because it makes them look better. So not saying that when actually asked by a government entity is meaningful.

How does firing people resultant of the most disliked and unpopular technology on the planet, and avoiding marking it off on an obvious entry-point into regulatory burden "make them look better"?

Because it sounds better than saying "we're firing people to suppress wages and make even more absurd profits. oh, and we invested a collective $1.4T as an industry so far in AI but can't find a path to profitability".

Anecdotally, we (humans) appear to be more accepting and less critical of companies giving AI-related layoff excuses, vs. perhaps telling a more truthful story like "we are losing money and are scrambling to reach profitability" or "we'd like to make the stock price go up."

Though I do agree there are a vocal group of people that are loudly outspoken about AI. I would guess that those people are a minority of the total population though, and tend to skew either techy or geographically local to areas hardest hit by data center build-out.

No, the majority of the population is hostile to AI. This has been surveyed time and time again. I definitely disagree with your premise.

The majority of shareholders (not retail 401k) are not as hostile at all.

That may be true and I'm absolutely unfamiliar with the data, so I'll take you at your word.

Regardless, whether or not the majority of people are hostile to AI was not my main point. My point was that regardless of the public sentiment about AI, it seems that the general public is more accepting (or perhaps forgiving) of a CEO saying "We are laying off people because of AI" than, for example, "We are laying off people to save money and preserve shareholder value." (I am paraphrasing in both of these cases; obviously a real statement would be more obfuscated in corporate-speak in either case).

That seems odd to me, _especially_ if the majority of the public is hostile to AI.

Wow I’m so glad that didn’t happen.

You'd rather we end up with Chinese humanoids? Because they're coming either way.

Why not?

Not the poster to whom you are questioning, but I would argue that inspiring and encouraging are much better than coercing, especially if the goal is to educate, as I am skeptical that coercion is ever going to work to get true learning.

Not ever hiring juniors and eventually mids is just replacing labor with extra steps.

Throwing bodies at a problem doesn't always scale. There are many difficult problems that do not get easier by throwing more juniors or mid level engineers at them.

Having just worked my behind off for the last months to deliver on an impossible deadline, successfully: more bodies definitely would have helped.

Even just to keep the fluff off my back and to allow me to fully concentrate on what's important.

The situation will repeat itself in 6 months and I'm not going to do that again. Hiring now would fix that.

I think the message you responded to already refuted your point of view.

I guess if you think about your teammates as purely inputs and outputs and not people that can improve and contribute in the workplace in other ways.

It's genuinely hilarious how the same leadership pushing for RTO because getting people together creates magic, seems to have no issues trading those same people out for LLM's churning at specs.

Haha nail on head so the motive for ‘get your ass back in the office’ was never the motive we all heard

Respectfully, After a certain level of compensation, you are indeed judged purely off of input and output. Workplace improvement does not justify your salary.

You will also find that many problems in the harder sciences do not get easier by throwing more bodies at them. Comments like these remind me that some project managers think they'd be able to delivery a baby in 1 month if they simply had 9 women.

> Respectfully, After a certain level of compensation, you are indeed judged purely off of input and output. Workplace improvement does not justify your salary.

I'd have to disagree. There's a narrow band in the middle where that's true, but once you exceed that, your personal inputs and outputs matter less and less, and the contributions you make to the overall workplace, and how well you enable those around you, make a larger part of why you're compensated.

Even as an IC, the more you're able to mentor and elevate the people around you, the more your compensation will grow (if you're in the right place, and thus already at the right earnings bracket)

> you are indeed judged purely off of input and output

That's not how successful (software, in this case) teams are made.

I would agree if the team im on were still growing/scaling. However we are well past our scaling phase, and at this point our concern is maintaining multi-million dollar contracts with a tight well-compensated team.

You can still borrow a lot at your local library and rip them yourself.

That’s still pirating.

Is it though?

He wouldn't have paid for it either way, or would have either way due to taxes and how a lot of libraries work.

And it wouldn't have taken anything away from the library itself or other library customers.

The phenomenon of google dorks would say otherwise.

That is the low bar, there are millions spent in searching for Google Chrome exploits

You don’t have to completely avoid it, reducing exposure is helpful. It’s not hard to get rid of it in your own home where you probably spend most of your time and eat most of your meals.