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Comment by abeppu

6 hours ago

> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now.

Why are companies seeing it purely in terms of "we can work with a smaller team so we must" and not "my existing team can do so much more"?

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abeppu

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Nifty3929  4 hours ago

There is not always a lot more to do. If your business is making typewriters then what? Or you mine coal that nobody wants to use anymore?

These companies could spin up entirely new lines of business, but why? It's much better for someone else to start that business and hire the best people for it.

There is no reason why businesses must continue growing, or even existing - even if they are run well and profitably. The universe changes, and business come and go to align with that.

dntrkv  3 hours ago

This has nothing to do with AI or any of that shit.

Their stock price has been flat for like 4 years and they have no advantage in this new AI world that would change that. These layoffs would have happened AI or not.

mkozlows  6 hours ago

Depends on the company, but I think it's fair to say that not every company has a roadmap to infinite growth.

  • abeppu  5 hours ago

    ... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.

    "Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).

    And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.

    But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?

    • mkozlows  43 minutes ago

      You can say yes to more of them, _but they still need to be worth it._ If you have an infinite well of ideas to grow your business, awesome. But there are a lot of companies that just don't have those ideas, where their growth is limited on some other factor related to the market they're in.