Das KI-Entlassungsgesetz steht vor der Tür und CTOs werden es doppelt bezahlen
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/05/14/the-ai-layoff-bill-is-coming-due-and-ctos-are-going-to-pay-it-twice/
Das KI-Entlassungsgesetz steht vor der Tür und CTOs werden es doppelt bezahlen
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/05/14/the-ai-layoff-bill-is-coming-due-and-ctos-are-going-to-pay-it-twice/
34 Kommentare
Cynical Summary:
1) The same analysts who confidently told leaders they should go ‘all in’ on AI or lose to competitors are now saying that CTOs who listened to them are dumb dumbs.
2) CTOs who went all in on AI and dulled their company’s strategic trajectory faced some heat from their board, but no lasting damage to their careers. Zero lessons were learned.
3) Nobody is interviewing the CTOs who didn’t fuck up, which feels like the real missed opportunity.
Desk jockey executives who can’t tell a mouse from a cat make decisions about technology, then disaster ensues. Rinse, repeat.
The article does have C-Suiters saying what I feel I’ve been mentioning for years now;
The people at the top don’t know how to do actual work.
I bet a Kalshi Coupon that 99% of the executives that wanted to inject Ai into their business units for “efficiency” all have gotten their MBA’s in the past 20 years.
So, that just means that the next class of C-Suiters and leaders will be the least intelligent and informed ever. Once that bubble of narcissistic greed pops, then we can start building a better world for our kids to inherit.
But not now. Not with the leaders we have today.
My wife is the CTO of her midsize company, and a few months ago her CEO told her, “Let’s incorporate AI in what we do.” That’s it, no further vision. She pushed back and told him that she would do a needs assessment, evaluate security concerns, cost-benefit analysis, etc. He didn’t like it, but eventually agreed.
It literally was a situation when he heard “AI” and was immediately ready to shoehorn it in the company with no forethought.
My Org is going through this exact process. Our old CTO believed AI would replace a traditional Dev/QA team. He was wrong.
> That is not efficiency. That is a wire transfer with extra steps.
The “that’s not x it’s y” pattern is the biggest AI dogwhistle there is. And it’s in this article. Sus.
So those who jumped on the bandwagon are watching it hurtle to a cliff and are panicking. I’ll try to act surprised [dgaf]
Sadly might be to late
I couldn’t read this article without being convinced it was written by AI. Maybe it wasn’t, but I think AI has ruined my reading experience.
What I’ve found useful from AI (using it pretty extensively for a wide variety of tasks).
Creating throwaway website „tools“. „Claude, build me an HTML page that I can drop a fixed width file, a specifications file, and receive a CSV file back“.
Scanning a book for typos or overuse of words. Scanning a historically set book for anachronisms.
Doing coding for relatively simple projects with relatively straightforward tech stacks.
Scanning documents for a specific bit of data
Creating unimportant graphics (i.e. throwaway things that don’t need to be tweaked to be „exactly“ right).
Brainstorming certain ideas (it’s hit or miss at this… Terrible at some subjects, excellent at others).
Data tracing if you have good source code
Telling you what’s happening in a particular part of a code base
Creating power point shells that look professional.
For those use cases, it’s really pretty good (some of that is platform dependent… Claude sucks at graphics but is excellent at power points. ChatGPT is the opposite)
But the executives that think that it’s as simple as „Claude, build me an automated system to handle our wire transfers“ are basically insane.
I can’t truly wrap my head around the way that people who aren’t tech savvy at all are hired into executive positions. It’s fucking mind boggling.
I work for a company that has had multiple layoffs and then immediately after they invest hundreds of millions into AI. It’s so fucking dumb since our team has rehired 3 people back since the layoffs last year.
There’s some productivity theory that says productivity tools are more likely to slow down productivity than actually improve processes.
People don’t like hearing this, but what I have seen is that for each example where AI didn’t work out, there are several that did. Moreover, the places AI hasn’t worked are mostly due to bad implementation. That’s just my direct observations. Maybe my experiences are unusual.
> A Careerminds survey went further. One in three employers spent more on restaffing than they saved from the original layoffs. That is not efficiency. That is a wire transfer with extra steps.
Any time I see “that’s not x, it’s y” I have no clue whether this was just written by AI.
The AI debt will haunt a generation of tech decisions.
I don’t think it was really the CTOs so much as the CEOs
Most CTOs I know have a pretty pragmatic view of it all. It’s a non deterministic primitive that sometimes makes a lot of sense
AI people never heard of spam filters.
I’m so glad I work in a small company that is so far behind. We just got out of using paper.
How do these mediocre people keep failing upwards into high level executive roles?
Yeah – my new CTO came in January, fired a whole bunch of engineers/TPMs, and has delivered his strategy/vision for the company…. AI everywhere and everyone to build agentic AI. Literally that is the strategy.
I’m guessing he’ll be looking for a new job this time next year 🤷♂️
Y’all fooling yourselves if you think c suites are going to pay anything
Fk those AI dogshit I am rather happy to see AI downplay news everyday
lol ai was an excuse to lay people off, not the reason. AI was used to pivot to pay the c-suite who invested in AI themselves before pushing it down lol
Make it illegal to layoff employees and do pay raise for CEOs and see how quickly the job market corrects in favour of growth.
I’m sure they will come up with a way to make the government ie you and me pay to cover their failures.
>MIT researchers found that only 5% of companies fully embracing AI saw measurable profit from the investment. So the remaining 95% are cutting people to fund infrastructure that has not paid for itself.
And bear in mind, this is while we’re still *at the start* of AI’s enshittification curve, when they’re burning investor money practically giving the service away to build a market foothold. Just imagine how much worse it’s going to get when the investors decide it’s time to flip the “start making a profit” switch.
An analyst on one of our earnings calls a few months back asked why we don’t seem to be investing in AI as heavily as our competitors.
Now we’ve dropped all development on things people actually will use and that are useful to integrate “AI” everywhere. Places it has no business being, doing things you don’t need “AI” for. Rules engine with the magic AI diamond icons make stock go up.
Low effort AI generated content. How ironic.
> That is not efficiency. That is a wire transfer with extra steps.
Was that article written by AI?
I work for technology company. They are not replacing anybody with AI – they are simply making it a job requirement to learn and use AI.
We used AI to go thru menu planning and extract ingredients and populate food stuffs orders. Cut the work load from 30+ hours a week to about 20 minutes.
Except… they won’t. They’ll move to a different company and be able to show all sorts of cost reductions to prove they’re good at their job. Ugh.
r/worldstiniestviolin
I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating. There will be a day when they FINALLY figure this out. And every single worker out there needs to demand massive pay increases.
Make them double the salaries. Fuck em.