“We don’t have a contest culture”. Ok buddy, sure, but you:

- only hire “top talent”
- reward individuals, not teams
- fire low performers
- have a Wins channel where you “celebrate” individuals
- laser focus on KPIs/OKRs
- don’t hire juniors
- do RIFs vs retraining

Guess what! Contest cultures!

maybe sometimes it’s okay to gatekeep for the sake of the sanity of the people actually doing the work and not getting the credit 🙈 jk jk or am i?

AI today is literally not capable of replacing the senior engineers they are laying off. corps are in fact getting less done, but they're banking on making an example of enough people that survivors put their heads down and help them implement AI in exchange for keeping their jobs... for now.

longer version of my quote: the megacorps use AI as pretext for layoffs, but actually rooted in end of 0% interest, changes to R&D tax credit (S174, h/t @pragmaticengineer.com for their reporting), & herd mentality/labour market fixing. they want investors to believe AI is driving cost efficiency.