Hacker News Reader

Comment by aussieguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what you mean here, but the only real jobs at risk from AI right now are middle/upper management.

Not a single engineer has ever been laid off because of AI. Any company claiming this is the case is trying to cover up bad decisions.

"Were automating with AI" sounds better to investors than "We over hired and now need to downsize" or "We made some bad market bets, now need to free up cash flow"

View on HN

> Not sure what you mean here, but the only real jobs at risk from AI right now are middle/upper management.

> Not a single engineer has ever been laid off because of AI. Any company claiming this is the case is trying to cover up bad decisions.

I don't suppose these assertions are based on anything. If "AI" reduces the amount of time an engineer spends writing crud, boilerplate, test cases, random scripts, etc., and they have 5% more time to do other things, then all else being equal a project can be done with 5% fewer engineers.

Does AI result in greater productivity for engineers, and does greater productivity per person mean demand can be satisfied with fewer people?

It does improve productivity, just like a good IDE. But engineers didn't get replaced by IDEs and they haven't yet been replaced by AI.

By the time its good enough to replace actual engineers, any job done in front of a computer will be at risk. I'm hoping that will happen at the same time as AI embodiment in robots, then every job will be automated, not just computer based ones.

Your assertion was not that "an engineer has never been replaced by AI". It is that no engineer has been laid off because of AI.

You agree AI improves engineer productivity. So last remaining question is, does greater productivity mean that fewer people are required to satisfy a given demand?

The answer is yes of course. So at this point, supporting the assertion requires handwaving about shortages and induced demand and demand for engineers to develop and support AI and so on. Which are all reasonable, but it should become pretty apparent that you can't be confident in an assertion like that. I would say it's pretty likely that AI has resulted in engineers being laid off in specific instances if not the net numbers.

this is true

AI powered developer make 3x times the workload of "traditional" dev into one single developer

therefore company didnt need to hire 3 people as a result, it literally kills job count

> Does AI result in greater productivity for engineers, and does greater productivity per person mean demand can be satisfied with fewer people?

Between the disagreements regarding performance metrics, the fact that AI will happily increase its own scope of work as well as facilitate increasing any task, sprint, or projects scope of work, and Jevons Paradox, the world may never know the answer to either of these questions.

There's a problem with the idea that hiring works efficiently. Twitter ran with thousands of engineers for a long time and clearly it did not need to.

"Not a single engineer has ever been laid off because of AI."

are you insane??? big tech literally make one of the most biggest layoff for the past few months

That's because of overhiring and other non-ai related reasons (i.e. Higher interest rates means less VC funding available).

In reality, getting AI to do actual human work, as of the moment, takes much more effort and cost than you get back in cost savings. These companies will claim they are using AI, even if its just a few engineers using Windsurf.

The companies claim AI is the reason they laid off engineers to make it look like they're innovating, not downsizing, which makes them look better in the eyes of investors and shareholders.

in my own experience, using Claude gives me about 5-10% productivity increase because it's really good at writing boiler code or surgically modifying some code I didn't write.

But not because of AI, they only use that as pretext for normal layoffs. Sometimes they also use it to hire cheaper workers fresh from school or a cheaper country, so just replacing expensive seniors.

From what I'm seeing, it's become more and more difficult for fresh grads to get hired over the last year. If anything, I see that the preference for experienced devs is now even stronger. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd appreciate it.

The Shopify and Cloudflare intern thing is interesting: both companies have committed to hiring way more interns, on the basis that an intern armed with AI-assistance can get productive way faster (plus they are more likely to be "AI-native" than older engineers.)

Shopify interns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-3IILWQPRM&t=1970s - talking about planning to hire 1,000 interns.

Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/ - announcing Cloudflare’s goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com