It's nothing personal, it's just how the US works. If this were to happen in Europe, your company would burn to the ground. The amount of compensation you'd have to do would eat your gains from the layoffs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-offi...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employee...
SK Hynix is making an absurd amount of money from the RAM shortage, and the employees are not unreasonably demanding their cut from it.
A dividend or basic income or something funded by a tax on this stuff is not at all unreasonable.
The technology is cool but it’s basically mass piracy.
But that's not all that relevant to the opportunity in front of them.
The opportunity, generally, exists because of their place in an industry that most folk believe will be very different a decade from now.
That belief is going to lead a lot of CTOs to try new things. When a company tries something new, it almost always picks a new vendor to work with, rather than adding complexity or risk to an existing vendor engagement.
Yes, there are other alternatives, but they are less well known, require self hosting, and/or are secondary products of companies with very broad focus.
Atlassian might be another, given how much of the rest of the software development cycle they have their hooks in, but many tech leaders have unresolved JIRA trauma. :)
1. FAANG does something that's relevant to their company.
2. Everyone thinks that this is an universally good move because they're FAANG.
3. Market rewards copying FAANG regardless whether that strategy also applies to your company.
Simple as that.
GitLab has just as many outages, just nobody notices/cares so much
GitHub does provide self-hosting via GitHub Emterprise Server.
I'm not so sure, and I'm looking at the friggin' thing: https://enterprise.github.com/trial
For the small, small price of your business email address, it's yours.
It is in their class interest to try and beat workers that have gotten too uppity down and AI is a tool they see fit for purpose.
I don't think they offer anything unique. Forgejo[1] offers a similar platform.
Also if compensation has come down over the last couple of years sometimes you have to do this instead of lowering salary because for whatever reason our industry doesn't ever lower salary.
I do personally believe it would be wonderful if companies invested more in helping people retool and move to new parts of the stack and where compensation becomes non-competitive it should be okay to at least give an employee an option of a lower salary to stay.
I think it goes a little deeper than that. In ways that seem to echo in your description of GitHub vs GitLab too.
Big Tech doesn't seem to attempt to generate value. The most positive attribute you can ascribe to a silicon valley startup is "disruptive" which in effect means eating somebody elses lunch. I think this is pretty natural for an industry that has pretty much achieved perfect penetration, but we're still dimensioning the industry for massive growth.
In that framework, silicon valley startups have to identify some sort of frontier they can expand into, and with pretty much all productive enterprise already interfaced with technology. They have to expand into simply replacing labor.
No, actually all evidence points exactly to a ~20% slowdown> https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
The "evidence" that you think about is probably that dopamine hit you felt when the shit-generator spat out a complete half-finished react app. But that's not evidence of increased productivity, unless we now measure productivity by the size of the codebase bloat.
Granted, I agree models have improved since then, but still.
> Importantly, survey results are not necessarily grounded in reality. There are reasons to be skeptical of people’s responses to counterfactual questions such as about AI’s effect on productivity — for instance, our study in early 2025 found that people overestimated AI’s effect on their time spent on tasks by 40 percentage points on average.
- your linked study
It contradicts this
1. Developers _self_ report a 1.5-2x increase in productivity 2. Empirical measurements show 20% slowdown
Now, that study is from 2025, so it may be outdated.
The study you linked and claim contradicts the 20% slowdown is only _self reported_ data, which the original study proves is unreliable and overestimates productivity.
In fact, the study _you linked_ says this:
> In 2 of these 7 cases we were able to view public outputs from the work completed using AI. We are confident that in both cases the participants are overstating their change in value produced as we understand it; at least, the enormously more valuable work is not externally visible.
> In 2 other cases, we are somewhat suspicious of large changes in the value of work produced because qualitative claims do not match our intuitive sense of agent capabilities.
> There is 1 instance where our best sense is that the respondent does indeed have agents doing an impressive quantity of productive work, although we suspect that this work is better captured by improved speed or quantity of output, not improved value of output.
> In the remaining 2 cases we lack sufficient qualitative information to meaningfully interpret.
(edits for formatting)
I have seen data going both ways.
From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.