David Maddock

@davidm54.bsky.social

108 Followers 289 Following

A Resume.org survey of 1,000 hiring managers found that 59% say they emphasize AI’s role in layoffs because it “is viewed more favorably by stakeholders than saying layoffs or hiring freezes are driven by financial constraints.” Only 9% said AI had fully replaced any roles. This is not a technology story; it’s a management honesty story that happens to involve technology. The reason it works is well understood. Decades of research on how markets react to layoff announcements have established a consistent pattern: Investors punish companies that frame cuts as a response to problems. But when a company frames the same cuts as proactive restructuring, the penalty disappears. The stated reason for the layoff matters more than the fact of the layoff. AI has become the most powerful proactive frame available. “We’re restructuring around AI” is a growth signal. “We over-hired during the pandemic and revenue softened” is an accountability signal.
As Raad makes clear, AI is not a cure-all. And even if AI does increase productivity, that productivity can be a mirage. How often are AI models producing shoddy code? And what if that shoddy code goes unnoticed? Maybe, as Raad suggests, ideas being “expensive to implement” was a good thing, because it forced engineers to think about a problem creatively. Not every impulse should be entertained. What’s a thousand ideas that were dashed off with an AI instead of a few promising ones that are honed and given time and attention? The former may seem more productive, when it’s really a collection of dead ends. Moreover, having employees become dependent on AI hardly seems conducive to rewarding and fostering creativity. As numerous experts have warned, it’s another form of cognitive offloading, in which crucial functions of our brain, including critical thinking, are outsourced to a piece of technology. This isn’t the line being peddled by tech companies, however. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly told his workers they’d be “insane” not to use AI to complete every possible task. Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman claims AI’s already so effective that virtually all white collar tasks will be automated within a year and a half. And Microsoft and Google both brag that over a quarter of their code is now AI-generated. But however useful these AI tools may or may not be, they can’t work miracles. At the end of the day, it comes down to humans to run a tight ship.
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