Some of these are obviously related to the closing of some of the retail businesses. And some might simply be middle management bloat that happens often at tech companies.
But imagine you're one of the people who remain (e.g., not impacted by the eliminated companies or products) and now there are fewer people to do the same amount of work? I've seen that movie and it usually has an economic impact 6-9 months later when people burn out.
It's almost like you can write the script:
Month 0–3:
Survivors are relieved, grateful, and over-perform. Leadership reads this as “proof the cuts worked.”
Month 3–6:
Context loss shows up. Decision latency increases. Domain knowledge walked out the door.
Month 6–9:
Burnout, attrition, and quality failures begin. The “hidden layoffs” start as top performers quietly leave.
Month 9–12:
Rehiring or contracting resumes (usually at higher cost)
The key misunderstanding here is assuming AI substitutes for organizational slack and human coordination. It doesn’t.
And sometimes middle management "bloat" is misdiagnosed. Remove them without redesigning decision rights and workflows, and the load doesn’t disappear it redistributes to the IC's.
Watch for Amazon "strategic investments" in early Q4 2026 (this will be a cover for the rehiring).
I've noticed at my company after a lot of layoffs and restructuring and moving people between projects, when I ask "who is responsible for X now?" there can be a lot of confusion getting the answer to that question.
That is not an answer to the "who is responsible for X now" question. Laid off Bill is not responsible for X now.
Also, it is not useful answer at all, it is an uncooperative answer. Whoever is asking about the responsible person is trying to work. They have legitimate question about who they should contact about X, sending them to someone who does not work there is less then useless.
But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was responsible, and now is gone. So what exactly are they supposed to say? In the context of the GP's post, that seems to be the point - there is no longer anybody there who is responsible for X anymore.
Several options, pretty much all of them involve being actually cooperative rather then intentionally unhelpful. If Bill was part of some other team, point to that team or its leader.
If he was in your team, you or leader can ask about what the person wants and move from there. Maybe you can actually answer the question. Maybe the proper reaction involves raising jira ticket. Maybe the answer is "we are probably not going to do that anymore". It all depends on what the person who came with the question wants.
> But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was responsible, and now is gone.
The other people are still there. And the team IS responsible for X. And without doubt, they are fully responsible for helping figure out who should be contacted now and what should be done.
That is normal part of work after any reorganization.
I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by anyone.
It doesn't necessarily even mean that the organization is "abnormal". Perhaps the reason Bill was let go was because X was not considered business-critical any more.
> I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by anyone.
I LITERALLY offered the "we are probably not going to do that anymore" option. In your situation, you can scratch the probably away. That answer is still actually helpful unlike the original answer.
I haven't detected overproduction after layoff I have seen. It was other way round, people who remained were sad, depressed and demotivated. What happened was general slow down of remaining people + organizational chaos as people did not figured out yet who should fill for missing positions and how.
HN is where I keep hearing the “50× more productive” claims the most.
I’ve been reading 2024 annual reports and 2025 quarterlies to see whether any of this shows up on the other side of the hype.
So far, the only company making loud, concrete claims backed by audited financials is Klarna and once you dig in, their improved profitability lines up far more cleanly with layoffs, hiring freezes, business simplification, and a cyclical rebound than with Gen-AI magically multiplying output. AI helped support a smaller org that eliminated more complicated financial products that have edge cases, but it didn’t create a step-change in productivity.
If Gen-AI were making tech workers even 10× more productive at scale, you’d expect to see it reflected in revenue per employee, margins, or operating leverage across the sector.
I have friends who make such 50x productivity claims. They are correct if we define productivity as creating untested apps and games and their features that will never ship --- or be purchased, even if they were to ship. Thus, “productivity” has become just another point of contention.
100% agree. There are far more half-baked, incomplete "products" and projects out there now that it is easier to generate code. Generously, that doesn't necessarily equate to productivity.
I've agree with the fact that the last 10% of a project is the hardest part, and that's the part that Gen-AI sucks at (hell, maybe the 30%).
> If Gen-AI were making tech workers even 10× more productive at scale, you’d expect to see it reflected in revenue per employee, margins, or operating leverage across the sector.
If we’re even just talking a 2x multiplier, it should show up in some externally verifiable numbers.
I agree, and we might be seeing this but there is so much noise, so many other factors, and we're in the midst of capital re-asserting control after a temporary loss of leverage which might also be part of a productivity boost (people are scared so they are working harder).
The issue is that I'm not a professional financial analyst and I can't spend all day on comps so I can't tell through the noise yet if we're seeing even 2x related to AI.
But, if we're seeing 10x, I'd be finding it in the financials. Hell, a blind squirrel would, and it's simply not there.
Yes, I think there many issues in a big company that could hide a 2x productivity increase for a little while. But I'd expect it to be very visible in small companies and projects. Looking at things like number of games released on steam, new products launched on new product sites, or issues fixed on popular open source repos, you'd expect a 2x bump to be visible.
This is similar to how I prompt, except I start with a text file and design the solution and paste it in to an LLM after I have read it a few times. Otherwise, if I type directly in to the LLM and make a mistake it tends to come back and haunt me later.
I agree wholeheartedly, and the technocrats are complicit with the GOP here.
It's funny how “free markets” keep producing the most expensive solar prices in the developed world. Don't get me started on Healthcare (I just moved back to the U.S. a couple years ago after 18 years in Canada, what a cluster*ck).
Oil and gas buy politicians, foreign oil money buys media influence, and social-media bots keep voters angry at the wrong targets.
Saudi capital helps shape the messaging, Russia helps amplify the noise, and Americans get stuck paying more for clean energy while being told it’s patriotic.
If even a Democratically-led California is doing this, how can you point fingers at just the GOP? It's endemic to the system, and not restricted to just one party.
Republicans are always trying to increase and protect oil subsidizes, cheer "drill baby drill", and have social media tools peddling their bs who are funded by foreign influence campaigns. The Democats may not be perfect, but they are much more likely to cut oil subsidies or at least subsidize solar and other renewables to balance. This is especially true as the next generation takes over by primarying the tepid fossils currently in office. Meanwhile, dear leader Dumpty likes to suggest windmills cause cancer because he doesn't like what they look like on the horizon of his golf dumps. Saying this is a "both sides" problem is laughable.
Yup. 46.8 GW photovoltaic in California and 22.8 GW photovoltaic in Texas. Over twice as much PV in California even though they have higher standards for new construction in general than Texas does.
The US doesn't have a free market in either health care or electricity generation. An actual free market in solar power would probably result in more or less what we are seeing with the actual highly regulated market in electricity, namely extremely cheap prices for additonal solar energy in the middle of the day when the sun is shining, higher prices for additonal solar energy in the evening when demand is high and the sun has gone down, and some fixed cost to pay for physical electric grid infrastructure that needs maintenance regardless of whether it is being used at any particular moment.
Oil and gas don't buy polticians more than any other industry does, but voters do get particularly angry at politicians when the price they pay for energy suddenly spikes.
Cannibalizing a <product/industry/etc.> is a common phrase to describe the act of a new thing outcompeting an existing thing to another thing to the degree that it significantly harms the market share, sometimes to the point of figurative extinction. Redundancy is a very common reason for this to occur.
"Back then, the minor inconvenience of seeing a few ads seemed worth all the benefits of access all the internet had to offer"
Yes and no. I complained about ads to a partner back in 1999. He seemed surprised, and said something to the effect of "well that's how the content you are consuming is paid for".
My argument (25 years ago now) was that it wasn't the ads as much as it was the ads blocking content, slowing the page load, being intrusive, etc.
So, even "Back Then" it was an issue. Now, it's on steroids with all the aforementioned behaviours being even worse now (e.g., reload an entire page on mobile in order to load a new ad, pages jumping around as new ads are loaded, more pop-ups, etc.) but exacerbated by the privacy nightmare of weaponized data collection.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I just think the underlying issues were evident very early in the "www" environment.
I have a lot of opinions about LLMs, and most are not positive due to the error rate, the security nightmare, the IP issues, the ecological impact and the hype, hype, hype that stands in direct opposition from my years of experiments (starting in 2019).
But, I have to admit that a few years ago LLMs became part of my daily workflow for low-risk repetitive tasks, and sometimes even "sound boarding".
That was sort of my experience as well. I already had more than a decade of development experience, asked maybe two questions in a 6 month window (not easy ones), and instead of answers got negative remarks. Never logged in again.
I should note that the first time I asked question, I also spent hours reviewing other unanswered requests - and if memory serves me - while I didn't have solutions for any of them, I gave concrete examples of how to debug the problem(s) to narrow down the variables.
I'd estimate that this was around 2012. Never went back after that.
I've met all sorts of people and they're generally not dumb, so it’s not mass stupidity but maybe narrative capture. When media incentives align with wealth and power, propaganda becomes pervasive and people absorb it without realizing it. Social media algorithms and echo chambers amplify this.
The myth of the American Dream (reinforced by the prosperity gospel and fused with the modern conservative movement) has turned greed and hierarchy into “virtues.”
What’s strange is that the people selling it (Trump, Musk, etc.) come across as profoundly miserable.
I've met all sorts of very rational people, but when you bring up immigrants their brain reasoning centers turn off and they start frothing over Haitians eating dogs.
You have to know how to trigger it, cause Trump knows it extremely well. Studies have shown for a long time the human brain is often wired to prioritize group loyalty over factual accuracy.
Prior to Trump, most white americans only encountered this if they brought a black girlfriend home.
But imagine you're one of the people who remain (e.g., not impacted by the eliminated companies or products) and now there are fewer people to do the same amount of work? I've seen that movie and it usually has an economic impact 6-9 months later when people burn out.
It's almost like you can write the script:
Month 0–3: Survivors are relieved, grateful, and over-perform. Leadership reads this as “proof the cuts worked.”
Month 3–6: Context loss shows up. Decision latency increases. Domain knowledge walked out the door.
Month 6–9: Burnout, attrition, and quality failures begin. The “hidden layoffs” start as top performers quietly leave.
Month 9–12: Rehiring or contracting resumes (usually at higher cost)
The key misunderstanding here is assuming AI substitutes for organizational slack and human coordination. It doesn’t.
And sometimes middle management "bloat" is misdiagnosed. Remove them without redesigning decision rights and workflows, and the load doesn’t disappear it redistributes to the IC's.
Watch for Amazon "strategic investments" in early Q4 2026 (this will be a cover for the rehiring).
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