Job cuts in October worst in 22 years

[mister_coffee]

People are missing why the tech sector is shedding jobs right now. And it isn't because of AI. At least not directly.

If used judiciously, the current AI toolkits can produce a pretty modest (on the order of 20 percent) productivity win. While impressive, this is nowhere near the productivity gains that you'd need to be showing to justify layoffs on the scale we are seeing. And unfortunately in practice a lot of people aren't being all that judicious and getting sucked into enormous time sinks repairing the damage AI has caused to their codebase.

There is enormous pressure from management to use these tools as much as possible, which inevitably leads to some pretty impressive catastrophes. Most of these happen far from public view. So far.

When I said "not directly" what I meant was that most of the big tech firms are building out enormous AI infrastructure right now, and they are building it out rapidly at enormous expense. So one way they are trying to balance the books in the short term is letting people go.

I have been thinking about upgrading my AI training setup here, and for the moment I've concluded it is best to wait for the inevitable crash and I can buy that fancy Blackwell GPU for pennies on the dollar (ref https://www.amazon.com/NVD-RTX-PRO-6000 ... 44FQ/?th=1 ).

[Rideback]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/job-cut ... ToFacebook