No one's switching to AI cold turkey. Think of it as training your own, cheaper replacement. SWEs & their line managers develop & test AI workflows, while giving the bosses time to evaluate AI capabilities, then hopefully shrink the headcount as close to 0 as possible without shrinking profits. Right now, it's juniors who're getting squeezed.

I don't think bosses are smart enough to pull this off.

Increasing profits by reducing the cost of doing business isn't a complicated scheme. It's been done thousands of times, over many decades; first with cheaper contractors replacing full-time staff, then offshore labor, and now they are attempting to use AI.

It's not complicated because "bosses" accomplish this by saying "let's reduce the cost of doing business" to someone who actually does whatever is needed.

The value of a boss/manager when there's no employees to do the work is negative. AI won't change this.

> "bosses" accomplish this by saying "let's reduce the cost of doing business" to someone who actually does whatever is needed

I don't know where you work, but in my experience, headcount reductions are strictly a top-down exercise. At best, the bosses may ask line managers who the essential people on their teams are. At worst, they get handed a list of people to fire, and they themselves may get the boot right after.

Yeah, that's the whole point. "Some boss says reduce head count" and that's the amount of "work" done from that "boss".

Even the execution of "reducing head count" is done by everyone else.