Is Artificial Intelligence the “serviceable villain” of layoffs?
King Lear had Oswald, and huge corporations like Meta have Artificial Intelligence to blame for their misdeeds.
Meta joins other companies in saying
Au revoir, auf wiedersehen
You won't see another morning, You won't see another evening
Buenos noches o señor Senorita see ya later
But is it really the fault of spending on AI?
Tech veteran, investor, and thinker Om Malik has a perspective that I think is worth exploring. Om writes:
I have been watching companies make announcement after announcement, and all I see are the sins of their past. Meta is laying off another 8,000 people. So many of them are coming from ill-fated projects like Reality Labs. It is a company that got bloated, over-hired, and, believe it or not, didn’t have a clear idea of its own sprawl.
For context, Meta has cut close to 36,000 jobs since 2022. The first rounds were honest about pandemic over-hiring. The 8,000 being slashed in May, plus 6,000 open roles closed, are now being sold as an AI story. The company still has 78,000 employees, give or take a few hundred. Same problem, new script.
Meta lost $4 billion in Reality Labs in the first quarter of this year alone. CNBC reports the unit has accumulated over $80 billion in operating losses since late 2020. That tells you how bad things are from a management and strategy standpoint. I don’t even need to call an insider to confirm the mess.
As I have said before, the greatest myth in this business is that the technology industry is some kind of mystical master of efficiency and modern management.
I’m not criticizing pandemic over-hiring, but that bill has come due. Smart Steve told me “since everyone worked from home during COVID, the costs of office space and effective onboarding for new staff were nil. So, like a bear getting fat before winter we saw companies staffing up (over staffing) as a hedge against an unknown.”
Friends, I’m retired but I live on my investments. So I try to stay tuned into what’s happening and it’s no surprise to me that companies are lying to us about the immediate impact of Artificial Intelligence on their performance. It sounds better than “we mistakenly hired thousands of people and failed to make them productive.”
If you find yourself looking for work, please don’t despair. You may end up working in a field you never before considered. But you will find work. Unless you’re a cold blooded Wharton finance bro bound for Singapore, the USA remains the last good place to work and live. Please also acknowledge that believe it or not, our country is now at war and that impacts many parts of our economy.
Meditations on technology, science, future, life, and photography Hi, I am Om. Photo by Chris Michel I am a San Francisco-based writer, pho
Smart Steve writes regularly on LinkedIn, but he’s practically family and giving out his information kills the anonymity I enjoy around here.
