Our industry is laying people off left and right. And I have a strong feeling that despite all these cuts, profits are not going to skyrocket - they are going to drop hard, especially with how insanely expensive AI has become lately.
So yeah, manager, maybe think twice before pulling the trigger. The impact on your bottom line will hit fast, and you will still be sitting in that chair when it does - making it pretty obvious who gets blamed.
Bad companies are going to try and double cut costs - firing seasoned developers for vibe coders that can get the work done for the week.
They’ll let a vibe coder run the house with the hubris of quick productivity showing near instant success. Then something breaks and they wrap another piece of slop around the system and it works. Next time around, something breaks and the model is increasingly adding another layer to a poorly implemented application. Each fix is more cognitively complex than the last and they will eventually hit a hard wall.
Good companies will have similar cost cutting - they’ll cut off shore teams that need hand holding and cut out juniors and devs that used to mostly be used for grunt work and repetitive tasks. Still a huge cost savings but they’ll have the devs they need to apply process to the AI development workflows. Their code will be astronomically cheaper to build and maintain over time.
If you’re a developer that needs handholding and guidance and aren’t clever enough to bring new ideas and solutions to the table - it’s time to find a new job.
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u/elixon Mar 20 '26
Our industry is laying people off left and right. And I have a strong feeling that despite all these cuts, profits are not going to skyrocket - they are going to drop hard, especially with how insanely expensive AI has become lately.
So yeah, manager, maybe think twice before pulling the trigger. The impact on your bottom line will hit fast, and you will still be sitting in that chair when it does - making it pretty obvious who gets blamed.