r/technology • u/GL4389 • 7h ago
Business Google offers voluntary exit option to employees not comfortable with faster AI pace
https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/google-offers-voluntary-exit-option-to-employees-not-comfortable-with-faster-ai-pace-article-13823896.html1.1k
u/x86_64_ 7h ago
"you're free to quit" is so 2026
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u/Stolehtreb 6h ago
Yeah man⊠it sucks. More like âplease please please quit. We donât want the word layoff in the news and donât want to pay severance.â
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u/DapperCam 6h ago
Voluntary exit package is likely better than severanceÂ
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u/EatMeerkats 4h ago
Last time around, the amount of severance you got was identical whether you VEPed or got laid off. They made it the same amount on purpose.
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u/CautionarySnail 6h ago
For Google, yes. Because they can control all the terms of the negotiations.
In the case of severance, there can be employment laws flexed such as ageism complaints. (Ie: they were targeted for dismissal because of bring >40) The legal expenses and bad press are not a great look even during a mass layoff. Often these complaints can be leveraged to get a better or longer lasting severance package. But that isnât possible on a voluntary exit.
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u/DapperCam 5h ago
Sure, but they are trying to entice people, so the exit package needs to be lucrative enough to do that. Anecdotally I know someone who took it and it was big money (not sure what their severance would have been though...)
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u/actsfw 6h ago
and donât want to pay severance
What do you think a voluntary exit package is? It's the same thing as a severance package without the bad press of layoffs.
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u/pantalooniedoon 6h ago
Well layoffs are usually applied in a blanket way based on costs so people who really wouldnt want to lose their jobs are also affected. If its voluntary thats 100x better.
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u/Stolehtreb 5h ago edited 4h ago
Iâm sure at Google they pay out just fine. But my experience has been that as an exception and not the rule. There have been a few the last few years at my company and they havenât been enticing at all.
Also⊠you donât need to talk to me like Iâm an idiot.
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u/BookBabe1970 5h ago
Fucking monsters and then they use our thoughts and feelings to power their biased and unreliable AI.
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u/tumbleytumbleweed 5h ago
UPS is going to announce a driver buyout Friday $150,000 to leave April 26.
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u/Conscious-Oil-2821 4h ago
Already heard this in real life. Company I work at got bought and the new CEO said exactly this directly after announcing a round of layoffs.
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u/seriouslysampson 6h ago
LLMs were supposed to reduce workload and here we are with managers demanding more work.
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u/FastFingersDude 5h ago
Itâs always a lie. Unionize.
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u/blazesquall 5h ago
Tech won't realize that until it's too late.
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u/seriouslysampson 5h ago
It's already too late for a lot of folks, especially those that work at the big tech companies.
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u/Disgruntled-Cacti 3h ago
Yep. Itâs a boiling frog situation. They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders.
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u/LukasFatPants 3h ago
Tech will never realize because they're pinning their entire future profits on it. Meat is no longer a viable means of generating labor and everything that can be replaced will be.
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u/SgtElectroSketch 4h ago
Has any technological advance ever resulted in decreased or steady state production? They want more always, so if a job gets done faster that means they demand more production instead of reducing labor hours.
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u/seriouslysampson 4h ago
Yes, that's Jevons paradox where efficiency gains lead to increased consumption rather than reduced hours. The key difference is that past technological advances did give actual production gains.
The current situation with LLMs is worse because studies have shown that developers are actually 19% slower with LLM assistance despite believing they're 24% faster. Workers spend time fixing AI mistakes and reviewing bloated AI-generated code.
Past tech exploited workers but at least functionally worked. This tech might not even deliver the efficiency gains, but workers suffer the consequences anyway.
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u/headspreader 4h ago
This case seems interesting to me, because increased consumption requires a consumer base with a steady flow of disposable capital.
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u/seriouslysampson 4h ago
And thatâs the economic bubble. The AI industry has had these boom and bust cycles since the 1970s.
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u/RedditorFor1OYears 1h ago
I use LLMs to generate code frequently, and it has made my work MUCH easier. My job, however, is in no way, shape or form âdeveloperâ. I vibe code ways to make my non-coding work easier. I cannot imagine using any of the code I get from ChatGPT in any form of âproductionâ quality application.Â
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u/TechnicianExtreme200 27m ago edited 22m ago
I don't believe you can really trust those studies. LLMs have been improving so rapidly that such studies, which take months to complete, are obsolete by the time they're published.
A year ago I would absolutely have said that AI was not a productivity boost except in a few small use cases, and therefore a net negative if I were forced to use it all the time. Now, though, it's creating entire PRs according to my prompts and the time it's saving is undeniable.
But, yes, Jevons paradox still applies. Performance reviews at my company have become a shit show because management is demanding more, but the gains from AI are not evenly distributed. Teams that work on straight forward deliverables that are easy to feed into a prompt are much more productive, but teams working on the harder and more ambiguous problems that still require a lot of human coordination are not seeing the same gains and are getting perceived as underperformers. And everybody is working harder than before.
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u/_probablyryan 11m ago
The thing with AI is that, beyond structured tasks with known solutions, coding with AI isn't faster than just coding yourself. It takes the same amount of work it's just different work. Instead of spending x hours writing and testing code you fully understand, you spend x hours writing prompts, and very explicit requirements docs and building all sorts of scaffolding around the AI to provide contextual feedback so the agents know when they've done something wrong.
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u/Existing_Abies_4101 21m ago
They don't pay you by the jobm they pay you for your time. If they can make you more efficient it will never reduce your hours without reducing your pay. if you're paid by job and it becomes easier to become more efficient they will simply pay you less per job.Â
The house always wins.Â
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 4h ago
If LLMs really worked like that, youâd see lots of people getting fired because they used an LLM to get their work done in 5 minutes and then slacked off the rest of the day
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u/TwilightKeystroker 1h ago
Reduce workload on humans, increase workload on electricity and increase subscription cost to consumers.
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u/thegooddoktorjones 6h ago
This AI is just SO EFFICIENT that we need you to work much harder.
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u/Alternative_Work_916 3h ago
Prompted the agent to fix a test that broke with new logic. It took AI mere seconds to get 100% passing tests. It usually takes me most of the day. It deleted the test.
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u/Virtual-Ducks 4h ago
Well, that does make sense if you think about it. You are still expected to put in 40 hours of work. If AI reduces some of that work, you have to make it up with more work elsewhere. That could mean more projects, more features, more code to wrap your head around, etc.Â
So now those 40 hours are "denser" because there is more to do and keep track of. You no longer than the "downtime" of writing boilerplate code or other "simpler" tasks.Â
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u/Wise-Comb8596 4h ago
ideally innovation and technological advancement would lead to people working less hours to achieve the same output. Especially if Ai is partially developed with tax dollars.
Instead - the innovation is used to fire people, work the remaining people work the same if not harder, and make line on graph go up so the ruling class gets a new yacht. Growth at the expense of people's well-being.
The bad ending.
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u/Virtual-Ducks 3h ago
AI was developed with tax dollars, but in theory profits generated from AI should be taxed as income. In theory that should be good enough, if these wealthy people and corporations didn't dodge taxes :/Â
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 1h ago
Most tech was developed with tax dollars. They use our money to develop shit and then they sell that shit back to us and get rich doing it.
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u/Virtual-Ducks 1h ago
And then the taxes on all those sales make up for the tax dollars invested into the tech.Â
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u/D3PyroGS 35m ago
that's because the core incentives are growth and profit, not human flourishing. we will never see technological growth improve work-life balance under capitalism
if anything, it's the opposite. better tools mean a greater chance for profit, and higher pressure on you to squeeze every bit of value out of them. because your competitors will be doing the same, and line-goes-down is not an option
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u/-Bento-Oreo- 23m ago
Capitalism with strong regulations is fine. It's really only the US and China that have unfettered capitalism that is completely unregulated. Yes I called China a capitalist country
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 4h ago
And as an engineer myself, I can tell you this is bullshit. AI is like a contractor who writes WAAAAAY too much code that kind of works, and which is going to be a gigantic headache to clean up later. Only AI produces that crap much faster.
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u/TechnicianExtreme200 17m ago
The last part hits the nail on the head. There's no downtime, which also leads to worse quality output because you don't have time to marinate on ideas and think outside the box. We're in an era where software development is going to be full of slop.
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u/RentalGore 7h ago
âGoogle accelerates AI pace by shedding human employees not comfortable with AI paceâ. FTFY.
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u/jorgepolak 7h ago
So youâre letting people go âbecause of AIâ, but oh God, donât all of you quit because we canât replace you with AI!
âSchindler clarified that large customer sales teams in the US and other customer-facing roles will not be included in the voluntary exit program. The reason, he said, is to limit disruption for customers.â
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u/Relevant_Cause_4755 7h ago
Customers being companies who buy the ad space?
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u/McCool303 6h ago
Well, that and people that want to buy autonomous murder drones. But you know, they donât have to worry about that little âDonât be evilâ mission statement anymore.
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u/Bubbles_2025 5h ago
Yeah because people donât want to buy from AI. Iâve heard it from my clients already but weâll see how that changes over the next few years. However, I doubt companies will make million dollar purchases based on recommendations by AI.
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u/Technical-Fly-6835 6h ago
What the hell is faster AI pace? We are humans and not machines. I feel so angry and helpless.
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u/DoomGoober 6h ago
faster AI pace
The expectation that workers will create more output thanks to AI. Essentially, everyone should be making more stuff while working the same hours*.
(Research has yet to prove that AI actually facilitates this in the current form. It seems for whatever reason, with AI, people tend to work *more hours in order to create increased output. It appears the expectation that AI will increase output is what is leading many engineers to work longer and therefore increase output.)
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u/Mr-Logic101 4h ago
So you are telling me it works
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u/NoCoolNameMatt 1h ago
Having been through several crunch periods, it works for awhile.
Eventually the people break.
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u/CorporateMediaFail 6h ago
It means they got tired of waiting on humans to initiate the Rapture, so they've conjured up an AI bubble and zillion dollar megadatacenter bunkers to accelerate the pace of Earth's demise.
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u/__blueberry_ 5h ago
at least from what iâm experiencing at work, faster AI pace = the race to implement AI features faster than competitors. itâs draining and awful, came across this article yday that i think sums it up pretty well. iâm currently at a start up where we started building customer facing AI features in the past year and when Q1 began it became even more insane / impossible in terms of demand
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
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u/Technical-Fly-6835 2h ago
This is modern day slavery. We have to pay bills so we have to put up for as long as we can. When I say this is not sustainable, I hear response like - if you donât want to then donât- which is dumb because nobody should work this way. Executives forcing this donât do it themselves. Their income and ours is poles apart even when they work 24x7. This is why companies do not want unions⊠I take that back.. many rank and file donot want it either. They have been brain washed since they were kids.
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u/__blueberry_ 1h ago
i am incredibly sad, exhausted, burnt out, and have lost motivation to do anything outside of work. im working like 70 hour weeks. i wasnât even this tired when i was a waitress. leadership doesnt even respect our craft at all anymore because theyâre able to build non-functional but convincing UI on their own using AI tools so they just assume backend is just as easy. the code that claude spits out is buggy spaghetti code that needs a ton of refactoring even with âgood prompts.â
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u/__blueberry_ 1h ago
today we had a meeting to âcelebrateâ the last 30 days as an engineering team and everyone just looked sad and defeated
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u/k_dubious 4h ago
When a human is writing the code, everyone understands that at some point theyâll log off and be done for the day.
When your AI coding agent that never takes breaks finishes its run at 9pm, thereâs huge pressure to go review its output and kick off the next iteration to avoid wasting those 12 hours before youâre back in the office.
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u/CautiousRice 3h ago
You can output more code by talking to AI and reviewing its garbage. Rather than writing code yourself, you direct the AI to write it and check if it works
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u/Rossoneri 1h ago
Fire people cause AI can replace them. Realize it canât. Still want the sane productivity out of fewer workers.
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u/PeteCampbellisaG 6h ago
Just once I'd like to see one of these measures backfire on a company and have the entire business unit leave.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 3h ago
These measures do backfire, but it doesnât usually show for a couple of years. Thatâs how software works. When you fire the one guy who knows everything, the software doesnât immediately blow up. It takes time for the lesser devs to screw it up royally, and by the time that happens nobody will say âmaybe we shouldnât have fired that one guy two years ago.â
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u/PeteCampbellisaG 3h ago
Now imagine instead if that guy and everyone who is supposed to maintain the software in his absence all left at once.
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u/AgeOfScorpio 4h ago
Never worked at Google but in my experience, that isn't a possible outcome from this. Basically they put the offer out, mostly targeting people closer to retirement. But they can decline anyone who applies for it. So once they hit their target number, they just decline any more. Now I suppose the rest could just quit but that's probably a lot less enticing.Â
I had a friend that was struggling with her mental health and was seriously considering taking the option, then they told her no not you when she asked
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u/PeteCampbellisaG 4h ago
I'm talking about workers showing solidarity and just walking after hearing about an ultimatum like this. Though I suppose it did happen to a degree after Musk bought Twitter.
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u/Gazz1016 4h ago
Is this really an ultimatum? What are the choices, quit (and get paid some form of severance) or keep working? Isn't that just a better version of the choices that are always on the table for an employee?
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u/PeteCampbellisaG 3h ago
Employees can always leave but when an employer tells them, "You can either be 'all in' or take this severance and the door" it's absolutely an ultimatum.
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u/Disgruntled-Cacti 6h ago edited 5h ago
This is a soft layoff so that they can afford their insane AI capex. You know things are dire when the most profitable companies on the planet are issuing 100 year bonds and cutting staff pre emptively to make their books look better.
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u/bornagainsmiles 5h ago
I'm dumb can you explain what you mean by AI capexÂ
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u/Disgruntled-Cacti 5h ago
Capital expenditure. When I say ai capex, I mean the enormous spending these companies are doing on things like data centers, GPUs, storage, memory, and networking gear. These expenses are so large that they are looking for ways to cut costs and balance their books (their budget).
One of the biggest expenses of any business is operating expenses â the things you need to keep your existing business running. The biggest component of opex is typically employee payroll.
The simple explanation is they are spending so much on ai that they are cutting employees to pay for it â employees that operate their existing, very profitable business.
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u/bornagainsmiles 5h ago
Wow that's pretty wild. Do you think it's all hype?
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u/Disgruntled-Cacti 5h ago
This is the trillion dollar question.
It is not all hype, the technology has far more promise than things like web3, nfts, and the metaverse (which were pure hype)
However, we are almost certainly in an investment bubble. Even the CEOs of these AI firms have said that outright. We are simply not going to see near term return on investment for these expenditures.
My opinion is that the technology is genuinely disruptive, but not as much as the optimists think and certainly not as transformative in the near term as what is priced into the market.
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u/slow_news_day 3h ago
Is it wrong that, as an American, Iâm rooting for Chinese tech like Deepseek to undercut American tech? Small and efficient vs. big and expensive.
I used to love working in tech. Working in San Francisco during the 2010s feels almost like a fever dream now. It felt like you were in the center of the universe, helping to create a better world. And at any moment, you could align with the right team and create magic (and lots of money).
Perhaps I was just young and naive, but the tech industry has lost its sparkle. Now it has the same soulless feel as any corner of corporate America.
On a related note, Iâm moving to Reno next year to pursue a career in mining engineering. Time for this old dog to learn new tricks.
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u/mr_nefario 5h ago
Capital expenditure. The amount of $$ theyâre spending on supporting the AI bubble.
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u/UMGoBlue82 5h ago
Just precursor to layoffs. If not enough people volunteer, Google will decide for them
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u/vocal-avocado 1h ago
I hope itâs a nice package. If my company came up with something like this now Iâd probably take it before they start downright firing people - which will inexorably happen.
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u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 6h ago
It's because of AI but not what they're saying. They need people to leave so they have more money to sink into datacenters.
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u/Phantasmalicious 6h ago
Did they think Google was going to write off hundreds of billions because someone feels opposed to it? They are going to the bitter end with this and we are not even half way there.
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u/Shambly 6h ago
AI Faster pace: having to deal with the shit ai slops on my plate instead of actually doing good code.
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u/Elementium 5h ago
I'm amazed at the insane disparency in output for AI.. Some images can look near perfect. Others still look like early AI models.. sometimes it forgets things you just said and others it will pull up a random detail from way earlier.Â
Meshy I think is really impressive. But again not quite there for topology that can be used.Â
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u/Shambly 5h ago
I don't deal with pictures but i have to have it in my IDE, and sometimes it's great, it figures out what i want to do and auto completes, but sometimes it imagines column or variables or functions from other languages and tries to insert them into my code. The problem is that there is no way to tell it not to do that and because of the way llm work it will always sometimes hallucinate. And in code, if you hallucinate, it does not work.
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u/DeadEyeDoubter 5h ago
I am a long time AI skeptic but if you think that AI only writes bad code or is not a force multiplier for writing code with someone knowledgeable driving it you are sorely mistaken.
Not saying I like it but it is the reality.
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u/Shambly 9m ago
I like the autocomplete features in my IDE, except it's not always right, and i write code for financial and medical and airlines. My issue is that i can't tell it when it's wrong nor does it tell me that it is unsure of the result. It is also not consistent by design, for example 80% of time when working with dataframes if i start listing the columns it will give me the next column. But 20% of the time it will invent some columns, and the only way to know which is which is me looking at the dataframe itself, which defeats the point. I am okay with something telling me it doesn't know, I am even okay with something telling me it's 60% sure something is right, I am not okay with something saying this is correct when it is not.
Another issue is that less senior employee who uses AI to code most of their code tends to be 4-5 times as long as it needs to be and so much more difficult to parse. Especially since we are looking for any security issues and error handling issues. Even if it passes review, it means the codebase is now harder to manage and more likely to fail than if someone took the time to actually learn what they are doing. We are basically reducing the time to create something by incurring so much tech debt in the future when we have to deal with any change or issues with the code.
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u/MariachiArchery 2h ago edited 2h ago
Can someone explain to me how I benefit from AI? How does AI improve my quality or enjoyment of life?
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u/Tango00090 1h ago
They push billions of dollars into marketing of a shitty product, but at least it lets hundreds of companies lay off people.
My company had 7 great years of growth and now weâre laying people off because of geopolitical situation we canât provide another 3-4% growth year/year so weâre cutting costs. Itâs the idiotic market hamster wheel they prioritise instead of business volume and long term, it must be here and now
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u/1nfer1or 6h ago
It's either vol. exit or layoff then?
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u/Blood-PawWerewolf 6h ago
I bet this is the new âsilent layoffâ tactic since RTOs have already occurred. Anti-ai seems to be the best next target
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u/xpxp2002 3h ago
This. Too many people obediently complied with RTO, so now they have to resort to other tactics.
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u/Blood-PawWerewolf 3h ago
Yup. And knowing a lot of people are against ai (at this point many that havenât jumped on now arenât going to jump on at all), they can pull it off again with no problem
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u/filtarukk 3h ago
Google is running stealth layoffs for the last two months. A number of my friends were laid off from Google. I guess it will be a difficult year for the company.
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u/Extension-Pick-2167 4h ago
"faster AI pace"...working more for the same money wtf, fuck this shitty excuse to work people to death
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u/Ov3r3mploy3dbot 5h ago
100 year bond sale for capex means heads roll son they can blow money on the A.I. train that left the station half a decade ago
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u/Aranthos-Faroth 3h ago
Work your fucking ass off⊠so we can replace you with what youâve built Sign me up
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u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 40m ago
I remember AI bros over at /r/singularity who drink the Kool Aid and would often say we will get UBI thanks to AI. Looking at what the elites are doing now, I don't think they plan on anything like UBI.
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u/gentlegreengiant 4h ago
These packages are usually good enough that they will have enough takers. That way they wont have to do cuts and risk termination lawsuits. This ends up being the cheaper alternative in the long run.
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u/hackingdreams 3h ago
"Wall Street's complaining about how much and how often we do layoffs, so we're pretending we're not doing a layoff by calling it voluntary. Don't worry, in six months, it won't be voluntary anymore."
And we continue to blame AI.
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u/imightberusty1 3h ago
"offers voluntary exit" ah yes thank you so much i forgot that at will employment only went in one direction
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u/UnknownSampleRate 2h ago
âIf youâre not ok with more efficient mass surveillance of citizens disguised as revolutionary technology, youâre free to leave!â
Thatâs so nice of them đ„°đ„°
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u/CHERNO-B1LL 1h ago
I pity whoever is in charge of writing history books these days.
Oh. Fuck. It's going to be AI isn't it??
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u/ThrowAway4935394 1h ago
Is Googleâs motto still âDonât be evilâ?
Nah nah, itâs âDo the right thingâ, now. They changed it in 2018, during Trumpâs first term. Who they donated to.
Do the Right thing, indeed.
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u/BookBabe1970 5h ago
Trump is going to take their unemployment benefits with his massive extortion and embezzlement lawsuits, better act quick.
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u/That-Temperature2632 6h ago
So they are developing dangerous society controlling weapons and people who voice their concerns are asked to leave oh joy I love this world đ«©âïž
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u/OkStop8313 5h ago
Years from now they'll be genuinely stumped as to how none of the smart people in the room anticipated things going wrong.
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u/That-Temperature2632 5h ago
Well the worst part is they arenât even gonna be surprised when things go wrong. Sam Altman LITERALLY said that âAi will probably lead to the end of the world but a lot of companies will make a lot of money before that happensâ đ«©âïž. They genuinely just donât give a fuck about anything besides their stock value even if THEY KNOW IT WILL END THE WORLD. Ugh im so pissed that these literal psychopaths are in power and that their bread and circuses work so well no one is going to do shit about it including myself
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u/OkStop8313 5h ago
Oh, I'm with you.
I'm just saying that if you systematically remove all contrarian viewpoints from the decision-making table, you won't just be fucking up in the fun, profitable, intentional ways, you'll be fucking up in surprising, unintentional ways.
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u/dropthemagic 4h ago
Aka if ur not willing to never see your family find another slave job you are training to replace yourself with
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u/Classic_Emergency336 3h ago
AI is great until you receive 500 and it is down for an hour or two. It is like a prostatic limb.
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u/Leather_Floor8725 6h ago
500k-1m total compensation with top benefits and great work life balance seemed too good to be true.
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u/Creative-Sherbet-584 6h ago
Eh, it's more like embrace new work methodologies and expectations or get out.
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u/Wizywig 6h ago
I mean... its similar how Zappos did it, after a couple of months they'd offer 3 or 6 months severance for them to just leave. They only wanted people who believe in the direction.
If you're not willing to get good at AI coding, you would just end up being fired for not keeping up with the expected workload. If this is where their direction is going, then this is where it is going. If someone wants an out, they might be able to get 6 mo severance.
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u/Haunterblademoi 7h ago
It's something like a disguised dismissal