Comment by passive
8 hours ago
My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view:
Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.
Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.
GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:
- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI
- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering
- They made sure to include a special section for investors
Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.
Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
I agree with you. Putting myself in the shoes of a tech CEO, I see other companies laying off and saying that their AI strategy made them so productive that they don't need 20% of their employees anymore, I see investors flocking to that company, I look at my company and feel investor FOMO, I layoff as well.
It's nothing personal, it's just how the US works. If this were to happen in Europe, your company would burn to the ground. The amount of compensation you'd have to do would eat your gains from the layoffs.
Meanwhile in Korea:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-offi...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employee...
SK Hynix is making an absurd amount of money from the RAM shortage, and the employees are not unreasonably demanding their cut from it.
Yeah but when you get old enough you get sacked and cant get employed anywhere and have to start frying chicken. So..
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People forget that all the training data to make these things was harvested with little concern for copyright or proper licensing.
A dividend or basic income or something funded by a tax on this stuff is not at all unreasonable.
The technology is cool but it’s basically mass piracy.
We use GitLab. They are no way in an incredible position to moonshot anything. They are yet another git provider with a management plane around it.
> to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
GitLab has just as many outages, just nobody notices/cares so much
Our GitLab has fantastic uptime, because it's self hosted
Then you should compare to self-hosted GitHub
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It's not cynical, it's accurate. If you give corporations a free excuse for staff reductions most will grab it with both hands.
> GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software.
I don't think they offer anything unique. Forgejo[1] offers a similar platform.
[1] https://forgejo.org/
I don't think Fogejo offers CI/CD out of the box, for starters.
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/overview/
It absolutely does and a very good effort of compatibility with GitHub actions. It’s not perfect but migrating is far less of a pain than I experienced moving to others
It's simpler than that.
It is in their class interest to try and beat workers that have gotten too uppity down and AI is a tool they see fit for purpose.
>My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view
1. FAANG does something that's relevant to their company.
2. Everyone thinks that this is an universally good move because they're FAANG.
3. Market rewards copying FAANG regardless whether that strategy also applies to your company.
Simple as that.
> But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
I think it goes a little deeper than that. In ways that seem to echo in your description of GitHub vs GitLab too.
Big Tech doesn't seem to attempt to generate value. The most positive attribute you can ascribe to a silicon valley startup is "disruptive" which in effect means eating somebody elses lunch. I think this is pretty natural for an industry that has pretty much achieved perfect penetration, but we're still dimensioning the industry for massive growth.
In that framework, silicon valley startups have to identify some sort of frontier they can expand into, and with pretty much all productive enterprise already interfaced with technology. They have to expand into simply replacing labor.
Yours is not just cynical but also wrong and naive. Here's a simpler one: all evidence points to AI bringing at least 10-20% more productivity. This means some companies will lay off. You don't need sophisticated cynicism when a simpler explanation is available.
Maybe this is the reason why I will never be a C-suite person. But if my product/service workforce became 20% more productive I would direct my sales department that we have more capacity to overtake our competitors and/or deliver more from the backlog of requests from existing customers which we can invoice for. And at the end of the year celebrate a double-digit growth.
Lol, so much "productivity" bullshit from the LLM-crowd but hardly any new innovations or products. Something is off here.
> all evidence points to AI bringing at least 10-20% more productivity.
No, actually all evidence points exactly to a ~20% slowdown> https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
The "evidence" that you think about is probably that dopamine hit you felt when the shit-generator spat out a complete half-finished react app. But that's not evidence of increased productivity, unless we now measure productivity by the size of the codebase bloat.
Does that productivity increase translate into monetary gains for the company that are greater than the token+compute+other new inteoduced expenses? For smaller companies I can believe it, but massive orgs like Cisco I’m really not so sure. You can be extremely productive and not actually contribute to the company cash flow
I think you make a point that is worthy of discussion, but the first sentence is unnecessarily hostile. The comment you responded to already made a caveat that they might be too cynical.
Fair
All the recent academic studies disagree with you.
ALL evidence?
I have seen data going both ways.
But if you are the company delivering those productivity gains, why would you layoff and thus lose an opportunity to grow?
Can you link to any actual evidence about this 10-20% productivity increase? And I don't mean anecdata like "I'm totally like 8200% more productive!1" that the AI bros love to spew.
From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.