BarBQlarry

BBQ Junkie | Atlanta

[Ujjwal Chadha @ujjwalscript]

The AI layoff story just got its ending.

39% of business leaders laid people off citing AI.

55% of them now say it was a mistake.
~1 in 3 have quietly rehired for the exact same roles.

“AI can do this job” turned out to be the most expensive assumption in corporate history.

[middleclassparty @middle_class_us]

This July 4th a family will skip the fireworks.

Because gas is $4.24 a gallon and the drive is not worth it.

Another family will skip the cookout.

Because ground beef is $10 a pound and hot dogs went up again.

Another will spend the holiday applying for jobs.

Because the layoff came last month and rent is due.

America is worth fighting for.

But first we have to be honest about what we are fighting.

[Owen Gregorian @OwenGregorian]

Ford execs say they made a mistake when they replaced human engineers with AI | David Uzondu, Neowin

Ford recently announced that over the last three years, it's had to rehire about 350 "gray beard" engineers to mentor younger staff and reprogram diagnostic systems and AI tools that were failing to meet up to quality expectations.

The company's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, Charles Poon said that leaders overlooked the deep experience of veterans who survived many product cycles. Poon admitted that simply replacing them with AI was a huge mistake, and that while AI is "a fantastic tool," it remains "only as good as the information you use to train it."

The rehired engineers now run mandatory meetings to troubleshoot vehicles and reprogram automated engineering software and AI tools to prevent glitches before production. These technical specialists hunt for failure points before parts ever reach the plant floor, helping prevent the massive recalls and defects that previously cost the company billions as it aims to cut one billion dollars in expenses this year.

In last year's JD Power Quality Survey, an annual study that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership, Ford finished 10th among mainstream brands and scored below the industry average. But this year, JD Power ranked the automaker as the top mainstream brand, placing it above the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ford attributed this massive improvement directly to the expertise of these returned engineers.

Ford's realization that AI cannot magically design and test quality vehicles without senior human oversight is just the tip of the iceberg. When Careerminds looked at companies that conducted AI-driven layoffs, researchers found out that 35.6% of those companies had to rehire more than half of the employees they previously fired. Another 32.7% had to rehire between 25% and 50% of them.

In 2024, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, proudly announced that its new chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. As a result, the fintech company froze hiring and cut hundreds of positions. But by mid 2025, and into 2026, Klarna was scrambling to recruit human agents again because customer satisfaction had plummeted. It turns out, while AI is very good at answering basic questions like how to check an account balance, when faced with complex customer issues that require nuance, the thing usually resorts to the unhelpful, robotic corporate jargon we all know and love.

https://t.co/KIFHROzgt4

[LayoffHedge @LayoffAI]

REPORT: META EMPLOYEES PRAYING TO BE IN NEXT ROUND OF LAYOFFS

A new bombshell report says CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth admits morale is the worst it's ever been. He says the way they handled restructuring was "atrocious."

This is the same CTO who told unhappy staff to "just quit" last year. The same CTO Zuck granted stock options worth up to $921M in March.

Chief Product Officer Chris Cox calls working at Meta "insanity" and "what the fuck." Even Zuck admits recently they have "made some mistakes." You think?

Now, employees are saying they believe severance is the only way out.

Since November 2022 Meta has cut 32,600 jobs.

Fired 3,600 "low performers" who had good reviews.

Tracked 70,000 employees' keystrokes to train AI until 1,600 workers signed a petition.

Reassigned 7,000 more to AI training jobs, one of which an employee called a gulag.

Cut thousands more open positions.

And, reportedly, will have another round of at least 8,000 cut within months.

All of this was supposed to make Meta win the AI race.

As of now, they're losing it.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Very interesting layoff announcement from Robinhood

Basically, "Our business is great. We're firing people because we can"

And then..."Oh yeah...also AI" at the end. But they don't say AI. But still felt they kinda had to say it.

[Pubity @pubity]

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is reportedly planning a huge wave of layoffs, with her refocusing Xbox's budget on exclusive games that are good enough to compete with Sony and Nintendo.

via Bloomberg

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

They fired people to save money. Now they’re paying to hire them back. Across Canada, companies that cut staff and handed the work to AI are quietly hiring humans again, because the bots could do the easy stuff but fell apart on anything that needed human judgment.

The famous example is Klarna, a payments company. It got rid of about 700 customer service workers and let an AI chatbot do their jobs. The chatbot was cheaper and faster, but the service got worse and customers kept asking to talk to a human, so within two years Klarna was hiring staff back.

Now it’s turning up in the hard numbers. The staffing giant Robert Half asked more than 1,300 Canadian hiring managers about it, and among the ones who had already cut jobs after adding AI, over a third have since rehired for those roles. Sometimes the exact same people. In legal work it was nearly half.

The reason barely changes from one company to the next. AI is good at the boring, repetitive parts of a job, but it needs babysitting. In a separate survey, Canadian workers who use AI said they spend about a third of their time on a task just checking it didn’t get something wrong or make something up. The jobs that came back fastest were the ones built on judgment and on dealing with people directly, the stuff a chatbot still can’t fake.

The same thing is happening well beyond Canada. A worldwide survey of more than 1,100 senior managers found that 55 percent of the ones who replaced people with AI now wish they hadn’t. And firing people then hiring them back is not cheap. You pay them to leave, then pay to recruit and train someone new, and eventually pay to bring back a person who already knew the job.

AI is still changing work in big ways. A firm that tracks layoffs in the US says it’s now the most common reason companies give for cutting jobs, around 88,000 so far this year. But that same firm adds a footnote: a lot of it is really about money. Companies are pouring cash into the pricey computers that run AI and trimming payroll to pay for it, even when the work still needs a person.

The jobs coming back have changed. Companies now want someone who can actually use these tools, catch them when they slip, and own the final call. The cheapest hire, it seems, is the person who can babysit the machine.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This is Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million dollar Feadship-built megayacht

It docked in South Lake Union, Seattle near Meta’s offices

Meta just announced 1,400 layoffs in the Seattle and surrounding area, about 20% of its local workforce

The irony…..

the largest and most expensive private superyachts in the world

- Length: 387–390 feet (118–119 meters)
- Builder: Feadship, completed around 2022–2023
- Gross Tonnage: Approximately 5,000–5,528 GT
- Top Speed: Up to 20–24 knots
- Cruising Range: Around 6,000 nautical miles
- Guests: 24 in 13 cabins
- Crew: 48–55
- Estimated Value: $300 million, often cited around $400+ million with supporting vessel
Annual Operating Cost: $30 million

But he’s laying off American employees…..

[Harshit Jain @jain_harshit]

🚨This is really serious!

Without an “emergency fund” of 1-2 years, you are sitting on a disaster waiting to happen.

How much runway do you have if you are affected by layoffs today?

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

Tech companies really normalized announcing 10,000 layoffs like it’s a casual weather update every other Friday.

Whole lives getting flipped upside down so CEOs can say “we’re becoming more efficient” on an earnings call.

[Swapna Kumar Panda @swapnakpanda]

Meta is going to fire 8,000 employees tomorrow at 4AM.

> They have asked all their employees to WFH tomorrow.

> 8,000 unlucky employees will receive the Good Bye email at 4AM in the morning.

> Workers laid off in the US will get 16 weeks of base pay as severance, plus 2 extra weeks for every year spent at Meta.

> Apart from them, 7,000 more employees who keep their jobs will be shifted into 4 new AI-focused organisations.

> After this, Meta have a plan to fire more employees in August and another round towards the end of 2026.

All total Meta may reduce its head count by 10,000 to 15,000 in this year only.

What do you think? Where is Meta doing wrong?

[Champagne Joshi @JoshWalkos]

The American healthcare system may be the only industry in the country where you can consume a service without ever being told the price beforehand, then receive a bill weeks later that looks like a ransom note assembled by a cartel of accountants and insurance executives. Imagine taking your car to a mechanic, ordering dinner at a restaurant, or hiring a contractor to renovate your kitchen only to be told: “We can’t give you the price until after the work is done because we need to negotiate it with a third party behind closed doors.” People would laugh you out of business. Yet in medicine, this absurdity has been normalized to the point that citizens barely question it anymore.

What makes it even more insane is that the actual customer, the patient, is often completely removed from the transaction itself. Instead of transparent pricing between provider and consumer, healthcare routes everything through an opaque middleman system involving insurers, hospital networks, pharmaceutical benefit managers, and government reimbursement formulas that almost nobody understands, including many doctors. The result is a market where prices are effectively fictional.

One patient gets billed $400 for a procedure, another gets billed $40,000 for the exact same thing, depending on what labyrinthine insurance contracts exist behind the scenes. Hospitals post absurd sticker prices knowing insurers will “negotiate them down,” while uninsured people are left holding the inflated bag. It’s less a functioning market than a Byzantine shell game designed to obscure accountability at every level.

In short, it is corrupt to the core and plays games with the most important thing people possess: their lives.

[Mike Lee @SenMikeLee]

H-1B should only be used to fill extraordinary gaps in our workforce.

It was not meant for the wholesale displacement of Americans in their own industries.

Time for a long, long H-1B pause.

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

I absolutely hate the script companies are using to lay people off in 2026

It’s bullshit and hurts America

I’m not picking on Cloudflare here. Every company that has announced layoffs the last 6 months has used this script:

“Business is great! We’ve never been more rich! We have so much money we have no idea what to do with it! But AI man, that shit is crazy! Sorry 14% of the company has to go!”

They take 0 accountability for poor decisions made. They take 0 accountability for not being prepared for competitors or market conditions.

They just blame it all on AI

80% of Americans hate AI and this is the reason.

They see CEOs of AI companies saying the world is ending. They see CEOs of regular companies laying everyone off and purely blaming AI

If you weren’t as familiar with AI, you’d think it was the worst invention ever

This is why every state has people standing outside of data centers protesting, and they don’t even know what a data center is!

We have a MAJOR marketing problem in America when it comes to AI, and if this script all of these companies are using continues we’ll have no shot of beating China

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Starbucks CEO defends a cup of coffee costing $9

He says the customers needs to just not think about it as a $9 cup of coffee, you’re paying for the “experience” of getting a Starbucks coffee

“In some cases a $9 experience does feel like you're splurging, and then what that means is we have to make it worthwhile.”

He says Starbucks customers “want to have a special experience and regardless of what your income level is, in some cases, a $9 experience does feel like you're splurging — well, this is a really affordable premium experience”

How out of touch could a person possibly be…

[Joseph Carlson @joecarlsonshow]

The reason every company blames AI for job loss is that it sounds way better than "yeah, we overhired in 2022, my bad."

Any time Microsoft, for example, has taken on a large number of employees in a short amount of time, it has led to subsequent layoffs, like now.

But management exists to spin the most flattering narrative possible. Today, that story is that AI is so transformative that layoffs are a sign of "innovation" and "efficiency," rather than a direct consequence of their own mistaken overhiring.

[Edison @CodeEdison]

Biggest Tech Layoffs in the Last 12 Months

1. Oracle
Layoffs: 30,000
Reason: Took on $58B debt for AI data centers; cut jobs to free up cash flow.

2. Intel
Layoffs: 25,000
Reason: Lost AI chip market to NVIDIA; new CEO restructured the company to become leaner.

3. Amazon
Layoffs: 16,000
Reason: Removed corporate management layers and redirected resources toward AI.

4. Microsoft
Layoffs: 9,000
Reason: Cut gaming and Xbox teams; realigned budget toward AI and cloud.

5. Block, Inc.
Layoffs: 4,000
Reason: CEO Jack Dorsey said AI enables smaller teams; workforce reduced by nearly half.

6. ASML
Layoffs: 1,700
Reason: Eliminated manager roles to reduce bureaucracy; engineers remained untouched.

7. Ericsson
Layoffs: 1,600
Reason: Falling telecom demand after the 5G boom; ongoing cost reduction.

8. Atlassian
Layoffs: 1,600
Reason: CEO cited AI reducing the number of roles needed; capital moved toward AI development.

9. Meta
Layoffs: 1,500
Reason: Reduced focus on metaverse; redirected budgets toward AI after lagging behind OpenAI.

10. Salesforce
Layoffs: 1,000
Reason: AI agents replaced about half of the support team; shift from human to AI support.

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

Disney’s CEO Josh D’Amaro receives a $38 million annual salary while announcing 1,000 layoffs. Why is his salary not cut to save about half of these people’s livelihoods?

[The Random Recruiter @randomrecruiter]

You know the job market is cooked when prediction markets are pricing an 83% chance there will be more tech layoffs in 2026 than in 2025.

For context, 2025 had almost 250,000 tech layoffs.

We're barely into April and already closing in on 100k this year.

Meanwhile the S&P 500 is up 24% year over year and within 3% of another all time high.

[BarBQlarry @BarBQlarry]

@diamweb @nypost 👆