Writing has been on the wall since before LLMs took over. Companies invested an incredible amount of money into "big data" over the past 15 years, and the returns are still nowhere to be seen. Data science and data engineering departments have been among the most impacted in all the layoff waves since covid.

As far as I know OpenRouter has <100 employees, maybe even <50.

1-2% headcount on data is below average for a tech company but not unbelievable either.

It is true you can get a lot further than before with "just" a clean semantic layer though!

It was always a pointless job. I’d watch data people manually put together PowerPoints by hand when it’s the same powerpoint every week and could be entirely automatic.

But they don’t, because they want to look busy. And it’s not like they actually understand the data anyway, because they’ve never worked in the area the data comes from.