AI productivity myth: AI layoffs are destroying productivity | Natasha Bernal

My company has an "AI" assistant. It's impossible to put into words how bad it is. If it was good - fantastic. Instead, it's more work and more stress as it outright tells clients false information, talks in circles, says vague general things instead of directly answering questions, and sends wrong confirmation times for appointments. If I was that bad at my job, I would be fired!

Of course they backfired lmao. Maybe they shouldn’t have replaced their employees with advanced predictive text that literally has no idea what it’s doing.

Older workers are not struggling to learn the tools, they are correctly identifying that AI produces inferior work product so they have a different cost benefit calculation.

Man, burning people months before vestiture is gross.

How can you be legally terminated with zero compensation 4 months before a £1 million payout.. There must be grounds to sue

I drag my feet to get my work done knowing that tomorrow i can get laid off and my company stock will be rewarded for it

My team was already overworked and they fired me and a few others because they "didn't have the finances for it" while they focus on AI. I called them out on how they are killing the next generation of senior devs and how this is going to make everyone left behind depressed and the manager just smiled and said that's not my concern now.

Losing institutional knowledge is the key problem with these so-called 'AI-layoffs', no doubt. I still believe many companies are using AI as an excuse to layoff staff that they wanted to find a way to layoff to begin with. Either way - it's a brain-dead short-term decision that loses institutional knowledge and costs them in the long-term.

I was once fired and told they could hire 5 devs for what they were paying me. They hired 4, and 6 months later offered me double what I was getting before to come back as a contractor and train them. I refused, I already making 3X what I was making when they fired me and getting paid for every hour i worked.

Stop saying employers need to convince employees to accept it and start saying employers need to give up on trying to force it.

A lot of these tech executives are running the same playbook we’ve seen for decades... privatise the gains, socialise the losses, call it “innovation”, and cash out before the consequences arrive. The difference now is scale. AI isn’t just coming for repetitive factory work; it’s coming for accountants, coders, analysts, paralegals, designers, customer service reps, marketers, the white-collar economy that believed it was insulated... And that’s the great miscalculation... For years, blue-collar workers absorbed the shocks of globalisation and automation while much of the professional class watched from a safe distance. AI changes that equation overnight. The same disruption that hollowed out manufacturing towns is now aimed directly at office towers and laptop workers. Millions of people who thought they were future-proof are about to discover they were simply next in line... What’s remarkable is how casually some of these companies talk about it. If AI wipes out huge sections of the labour market while a handful of firms capture the upside, many of them will still frame it as progress. But economies don’t function in the abstract. GDP is not society. Markets need consumers. Businesses need customers with income. You cannot automate away mass employment and then act surprised when demand collapses... That’s the contradiction at the centre of the AI boom: they’re building systems designed to reduce dependence on human labour while still relying on humans to sustain the economy. At some point, the maths stops working... And when the backlash comes, they’ll offer symbolic fixes, small redistribution programmes, public apologies, “reskilling initiatives” - anything that avoids confronting the core issue: concentration of power and wealth on a scale modern democracies were never designed to handle... The deeper problem is cultural. A lot of leadership in tech has become detached from the real economy and from ordinary life. When people are insulated by billions in wealth, private networks, and ideological bubbles, empathy becomes optional. Risk gets exported downwards. Everyone else lives with the consequences... And if a country continues rewarding that behaviour, election after election, cycle after cycle, eventually the public owns part of the outcome too. There’s an old saying: you made your bed, now sleep in it.

I work at a major distribution food distribution facility. They tried to automate the warehouse along with AI. We call it the robot. It constantly smashes things, bury them. There is no way to bake the AI out of the cake . Our division is pissing millions a month we’ve been told but the stock keeps going up. Our biggest rival is bigger than us and has never even considered it. In the end we are hiring more just to try to fix the problems. We are also pissing off and pissing away regional customers.

AI = aholes incharge

I hope the entire IT industry collapses, the Internet crashes and burns (figuratively), and everyone just forgets that social media ever existed. Yeah, I'll miss some aspects of it, but it would be wonderful! AI is snake oil.

Why work hard when you are going to lose your job? I'd be sabotaging anything I could tbh.

I am DISGUSTED that the US has laws against age discrimination yet apparently companies are now allowed to completely disregard them.

Never ever trust stock options or anything that takes longer to vest than 3 years. Do not throw your life to a company with a retirement promise because it’s all a lie.

I knew a lot of people in tech who considered their RSVs and other benefits/stock buyins, etc as part their salary. So they'd say "I'm making $250k a year!" when in reality they were making closer to $75k in take home and now they're absolutely hosed

US companies don’t care about the downside of layoffs because they are only interested in the next quarterly report where they claim reduced overhead and increase their stock value. Employee satisfaction and engagement are irrelevant even if it hurts company goals. The goals are far less important than the perception of success.

Companies avoiding to pay those stock compensations by laying employees off should be sued. That's straight up robbery. If the incentive is to keep the employee motivated, it should be the employee quitting that removes that compensation, not the employer.