It’s not dumb. They understand what they are doing. They think firing multiple people at once can flood the market with developers, and the situation could be used to hire new people with a lower compensation.
Don’t think the rationale behind this is work quality or developer productivity. This is a power move. For Google and many big tech companies devs are replaceable and are just cogs in the machine. The problem is that they became too costly with the advent of COVID.
After many years, after working like a slave in the industry for barely any recognition and for people that thought on profit was bigger than us human beings, I can only have respect for the man.
This is why we need to think on how to turn the AI usage to the workers. Thinking on creating AI models that are open source and do not depend on big companies. I’m thinking on exploring grid computing and p2p technologies, so we could explore computing power in a distributed way.
I don’t mean this layoff but all that are happening in the last months.