The end of coders is near!!!

Programmers bore the brunt of Microsoft’s layoffs in its home state as AI writes up to 30% of its code

Coders were hit hardest among Microsoft’s 2,000-person layoff in its home state of Washington, Bloomberg reports.

Over 40% of the people laid off were in software engineering, making it by far the largest category, Bloomberg found based on state filings. Relatively few sales or marketing positions were affected, Bloomberg added.

To be fair, coders are a big chunk of Microsoft’s workforce, although it doesn’t disclose the exact proportion. The cuts are part of recent layoffs at Microsoft affecting about 6,000 people.

Still, these cuts come after CEO Satya Nadella said last month that up to 30% of the company’s code was now written by AI.

TechCrunch asked Microsoft if the layoffs were motivated by the rise of AI-assisted coding. The tech giant declined to comment. Microsoft has said the layoffs are aimed at reducing management layers.

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9 replies (most recent on top)

Alvind won’t be getting rid of Microsoft anytime soon

"Elimination of management layers" is the exact concept IBM uses to justify mass movements of jobs from the US to India. We all know is about THE MONEY and not some futile effort by IBM to be more productive and efficient.

@dn

Millions of people hate 365 price hikes and switch to free LibreOffice. MS losing customers and money everyday then.

@a4+1jvjc9ne6 "This isn’t about AI. This is a puppet show to drive stock prices up and down."

Truer words have never been spoken. Every CEO out there is taking the approach of fire all the workers first, replace them with cheap Indians, tell the CNBC crowd it's all AI and you're an AI company now, juice the stock price. Everyone knows this is going to end badly but you can't get off the treadmill while it's spinning.

Agreed! Generative AI can only generate simple code patterns that it knows about. Knows about us key here!

If that is the case (30% of the code written by AI), then it is probably time to stop using Microsoft software... the quality is going to go down pretty quick.

The end of coders is near!!!

Might be the d-mbest thing I've ever read.

@a4

Alvind wrote a line of AI code which said "H3ll0 Alv1nd" (like the "Hello World" line first coders are expected to create). Of course, Krabanaugh made an excuse, as he is much too ignorant to use the keyboard and was busy stuffing his fat jowls with Limberger cheese.

Are you guys serious? Have you ever written a line of code in your life?

This kind of take only makes you look more out of touch.

Do you really think we were waking up like, “Oh, I guess there’s nothing to do today because AI wrote all my code. Might as well chill and do nothing.”

No. We were all doing real work.

Every single one of the 7,000 people who got laid off yesterday had a real job. We woke up with active projects, with tasks in progress - and then everything was suddenly cut.

Not even our managers knew. Not even their managers knew. There was no warning. No planning. No transition.

This isn’t about AI. This is a puppet show to drive stock prices up and down.

Any company claiming AI is writing all the code now is straight-up lying to you. AI can help us write code - sure - but it’s nowhere near the point where it can replace a software engineer, let alone 7,000 of us.

Don’t be d-mb.

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The end of coders is near!!!

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