The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.
The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.
That's how it will eventually pan out, but I guess the company gets a bag before the collapse.
And what's going to be the result of that? Can the market really support that many competitors comfortably, and/or are you setting yourself up for business failure or Chinese-style involution and 996?
See, I want a comfortable happy life, not a stress-filled one of maximum market efficiency. AI + capitalism doesn't look like it's going to provide the former.
The less society spends on developers, the less valuable software is. If the day comes that we employ zero developers, then software will be worth zero dollars.
And yet, software will still be fulfilling an essential part of society, it just wont be a thing people are willing to pay for. So AI will still be around, and will still be essential (because somehow we have to maintain all this software), and AI will get better and better.
Eventually any knowledge work will be worth zero. Including the C-suite--especially the c-suite!
We don't need to buy movies, eat avocado, drink wine, wear new clothes, drive shiny cars, etc. We do it because we have been conditioned, over the centuries, to desire what rich people would want. Every time something becomes cheap (e.g. having a watch), capital owners simply redefine it so that it can be sold again as expensive (e.g. having a luxury watch).
1. I don't think the "c-suite" is knowledge work.
2. If "any knowledge work will be worth zero" what will workers do? Manual labor? That's a horrible regression.
3. I think the direction AI is taking us is world where the only thing that will be worth anything is ownership (basically being rich), and you either own stuff or you don't. And all the ladders to get from no ownership to ownership will be pulled up.
If there is no market fit, 100 man-years is worth $0.
On the other hand, if 10K customers are willing to pay $15/month for a tool that took 30 man-months to build you have a handy $150K/month revenue stream.
But also they probably want to use this app on their phone and other devices. So the either have to make it a web app, become a server admin and pay for hosting. Or they have to buy a Mac and pay for the developer program and hope they pass App Store review so they don’t have to reinstall every days.
Whether this is realistic or not, I can imagine some people actually believing it.
One of the experiences that stuck with my in my early career was when my coworkers heard talk of layoffs at their startup that was acquired by bigcorp, one of the first reactions was “maybe we should just do another startup.”
I was taken aback at how casually that idea was thrown around. They didn’t even have a specific idea, just the casual thought that they could just start another company.
And now you don't even have to use specialist knowledge, just describe the idea to AI and AI will implement it clean-room.
That's how a lot of companies are made, even huge ones. Not everything comes from a specific focus, it's just "let's see what works to build a business that can make us money".
For example, I know a few companies which at the beginning were just body shops, but the long-term plan was to develop their own projects after they figure out what exactly their customers need most.
It was more like “we could just build something.”
And they find out replicating the product means little, it's the customer base, industry reputations, connections, support, ecosystem, and stuff, that matter.
And that's how that "layoff Discord" can produce something that can matter to customers. It will be a smaller company, and small companies have a serious advantage when it comes to support: you can get an actual human, maybe even the main dev, he can actually do things rather than transferring you from chatbot to bureaucracy. It doesn't scale, but it may be enough to get a competitor started.
As for connections, you may have inadvertently let go of the guy who has the connections. And you may have fired a perfectly functional team, ready for from clever entrepreneur with connections (who may be one of the fired) to pick up. It is so much of a recognized problem that some big companies hire people just so that their competitors can't have them.
True. Also true that this was ZIRP phenomenon predominantly in big tech. And once mass layoffs started in big tech most of those ultra elite engineers/staff either retired or took job at lower pay instead of launching competitors to big tech.
And we here stories of "guy left big company to make his own startup" all the times. It is a common story for indie video game devs for instance.
The fact that they don't exist? You have to prove that they exist to make your point, and so far nobody's been able to actually prove their existence. And I'm speaking from direct, professional experience here.
Those stories if you notice are mostly from decades ago, or are from the wealthy csuite deciding to start their own company with rich connections. AI has supposedly accelerated massively in the past two years yet we haven't seen startups appear at that same rate, even with the level of layoffs in the industry. Well outside of AI startups all looking to buy shovels for gold.
On the B2B level, business is basically relationships, because you want to have a person that you trust who you can go to with any concerns about your multimillion-$ relationship. The relationships are the hard part, which is why the biggest department in any enterprise startup is sales, and requests from the salespeople usually dominate the feature roadmap.
But on a consumer level, most companies invest precisely zero in relationships, because it is far too expensive to build a relationship with 300M consumers who each pay you $50/year. The parts that matter are a.) building a brand image b.) delivering a "good enough" product and c.) doing it cheaply.
AI does extremely well at all 3 of those. It's great at generating fictitious but plausible-sounding content that makes you feel great about yourself. It's a passable approximation at explaining how things are made, enough that a small organization could probably deliver a good-enough product. And it replaces all of those pesky humans that require HR departments and legal employment contracts and sales relationships and customer service. A significant portion of the work in any industry is simply greasing the supply chain, making all those transactions that need to happen along the way happen. Vertically integrate and automate those and you could probably rebuild the industry in a much cheaper, more efficient way.
I think many people are thinking too small with AI, on the level of "how will this help me do a task?" or "how will this help my job?" or "how will this help improve my company by getting rid of jobs?" The real money is in "how will this revolutionize the industry by getting rid of all the other companies?" or even "how will this replace society so there is a fair playing field for new industries to get started?"
I benefit greatly from AI myself, but I use it to augment my capabilities, not as a slot machine for building things nobody will ever use, which seems to be the norm based on the products I use.