I don’t doubt that AI is making a lot of programmers more productive, sometimes amazingly so. But the company where I work (Bill.com) just announced 30% layoffs (about 600 jobs cut) with a bunch of AI-related justification and, let me tell ya, this company does not know how to use AI. We haven’t even had access to Claude this whole time. Basically their AI strategy has amounted to “fine, fine, if you must use AI, here’s Amazon Q/Kiro, use it, I guess”. No orchestration or coordination between engineers, no investment in internal tool sharing or integrations, nothing like that. But now we’re apparently going “AI Native” and cutting 30% of jobs so we can “move faster,” blah blah blah.
The real story is that the CEO wants to sell the company and the activist investors want to get a return on their investment, so they’re trying to gut the company’s costs. They only want to make the balance sheet look as good as possible to prospective buyers, nothing else.
At the same time they announced these layoffs, they announced a $1 BILLION stock buyback. I don’t know much about finance, but for a company with a $4 billion market cap, that seems like a lot of money to spend on your own stock.
Anyway, if you need an example of a company saying they’re making an AI related cut, but it’s very very obviously not about AI, there ya go.
I don’t doubt that AI is making a lot of programmers more productive, sometimes amazingly so. But the company where I work (Bill.com) just announced 30% layoffs (about 600 jobs cut) with a bunch of AI-related justification and, let me tell ya, this company does not know how to use AI. We haven’t even had access to Claude this whole time. Basically their AI strategy has amounted to “fine, fine, if you must use AI, here’s Amazon Q/Kiro, use it, I guess”. No orchestration or coordination between engineers, no investment in internal tool sharing or integrations, nothing like that. But now we’re apparently going “AI Native” and cutting 30% of jobs so we can “move faster,” blah blah blah.
The real story is that the CEO wants to sell the company and the activist investors want to get a return on their investment, so they’re trying to gut the company’s costs. They only want to make the balance sheet look as good as possible to prospective buyers, nothing else.
At the same time they announced these layoffs, they announced a $1 BILLION stock buyback. I don’t know much about finance, but for a company with a $4 billion market cap, that seems like a lot of money to spend on your own stock.
Anyway, if you need an example of a company saying they’re making an AI related cut, but it’s very very obviously not about AI, there ya go.