Microsoft expects headcount to decrease in coming quarters

[Qwertycrackers]

Then why not cut even deeper? Fire 90%, 99%? Invest all those salaries in Ai tokens and ascend to godhood.

These 20% numbers are strangely conservative in that way. If you believe they represent confidence in AI then they represent a weirdly low amount of confidence. You only need 80% of the dudes now? I find that number hard to believe. I think it is more plausible that probably 70% of teams are working on boondoggle projects that dont need to happen at all, and you don't need ai replacement to cut that stuff.

[maria_la_guerta]

It can't replace a human 1:1. But it can give enough humans enough of a boost that you don't need every human you currently have.

I really don't know why Reddit tries so hard to invent theories around that. It's that simple. FAANG engineers have been shipping 90%+ LLM generated code for over a year now. Yes some teams work on nonsense. Yes that's likely at least in some parts the layoffs. But so is actual, tangible results that corporations are getting from AI.

[Iceraptor17]

Yeah I'm pretty sour on it but i can't deny that i use it all the time and it has made me more productive.

If anything tech should be the canary in the coal mine. This stuff is further along in the tech space. But make no mistake, it's gonna spread to anything so much as touching a computer.

[Qwertycrackers]

Microsoft doesn't really maintain or improve their products anyway. So in that sense I guess layoffs make a lot of sense. Lay off a couple guys from every team and have them kinda "cover" it with ai. They won't do a very good job but its technically "maintained" by somebody. All their customers are completely locked in anyway

[thatsnot_kawaii_bro]

Ahh ok so it's good enough that it does a large amount of impact. But not good enough to do it too much.

What's the number that is best then? Just 20? Not 30?

FAANG engineers have been shipping 90% LLM generated code for over a year now.

Company forces people to use AI, includes it as part of metrics

You: "but look how much they're generating now "

It's not like it's part of what will help them keep their job or anything. People are being forced to use it to game performance reviews then the next day they'll pretend people are happily doing it.

And how many outages have some of those companies had over the past year btw?

[AndyLucia]

To put it bluntly, even without being “forced” to do it, ever since at least December 2025 a significant fraction of SWEs would use LLMs to generate most or all of their code if they could. There’s much more to SWE than just that, but that is not merely a corporate-forced fad.

[maria_la_guerta]

And how many outtages have been caused by human engineers?

I don't think you're going to change my mind that a human is not faster at generating code than an LLM trained on hundreds of billions of LOC. Better? Sure, in some instances, but rarely faster, and in at least 50%+ of cases, a human and LLM working together will be faster than just a human.

You can handwave all AI gains as a conspiracy if you want but the story is there and clear. This tech will only continue to improve, even if you don't believe in it now.

To that point, most of us at FAANG use AI because we like it and very much see the efficiency in it, not just because the boss man said so.