Companies that conduct these layoffs don't just lay off developers. The tend to also lay off support, sales, legal, etc... Especially support, a chatbot is all you need right?

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.

And then the business learns how many of their customers were only there because of the sales rep, and jump ship to go to whatever vibe coded app the sales rep makes to specifically handle their "unique" environment.

I wonder if what we'll see instead is smaller startups replicating whole consumer value chains and replacing the whole industry at once.

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?"

Wait, you mean my vibecoded Facebook ripoff won't make me a billionaire like Zuck? Bummer.

>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.

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".

"MegaCorp clearly wants to buy out any competition, so we should just leave and build the same thing again."

And now you don't even have to use specialist knowledge, just describe the idea to AI and AI will implement it clean-room.

It's the VC/Silicon Valley mindset. They want to be able to call themselves "entrepreneurs" and "founders"; the product has little importance compared to that. It goes some way to explaining why the vast majority fail.

I could imagine that someone's plan could be like this: "Our current company has more managers than developers, and the software development is very ineffective because we spend a lot of time in meetings, doing various bureaucracy, and changing things over and over again, because the managers insist on making technical decisions, etc. We could do the same thing with a fraction of the workforce, and also work from home instead of renting an expensive place in the middle of an expensive city. Then our product could be cheaper and we would could still work less and have higher salaries."

Whether this is realistic or not, I can imagine some people actually believing it.

The market can't support it. The value of software will trend towards zero.

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!

> There is no obvious point where the microcomputer or the Internet made any major difference

I think it lags. There was a sag between the mid-70s and mid-90s, which is when computers and the Internet were being rapidly developed but weren't really hitting the business mainstream. But late 90s through today it clearly ramped up a lot -- my bet is this is because of IT. It just takes a long time, it's not a sharp jump because not every business gets on board immediately and productively.

My guess is AI ends up the same. But then again, I'm not an economist, only a developer, so I just think I can tell anything about that productivity graph.

Are we looking at the same graph? What I see is that there was a huge spike at the onset of COVID, and then it flatlined and even corrected a bit, and in the end seems to have resumed the same trajectory it had before COVID.

If I understand correctly, the spike in 2020 was not any kind of jump in real productivity, either, it is an artifact of how the calculation is made -- there was a sudden drop in hours from low paid workers who typically have a lower than average contribution to productivity (as measured), so laying a bunch of them off skews the per-hour calculation. Then as things settled down companies re-hired, and then over-hired.

White collar work may have been phoning it in (literally and figuratively), but the drop is probably more likely due to "Labor Productivity (Output per Hour)" being measured using revenue from things like the social, entertainment, and travel industries taking a hit in customer spend (an empty restaurant has less output per hour than a busy restaurant, for example). It's not clear to me from that page/graph alone that an increase in stimulus spending is a cause, vs a correlation, for the drop.

The covid productivity spike is because all the low productivity retail workers got laid off. Then as they came back to work productivity went back down