Tech Things: Everyone's Getting Fired - by theahura

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Tech Things: Everyone's Getting Fired<br>AI comes for tech jobs. Security issues seem to be skyrocketing. General Catalyst Ad, Elon v OpenAI, Gamestop and eBay, Claude v Codex.

theahura<br>May 14, 2026

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Everyone’s Getting Fired

It’s been over a year since I wrote this piece:

Back then, I wrote:<br>Assume that there are five senior engineers at a company. Each can produce 4k lines of code a month, or 20k total. And let’s say AI gets good enough that it can empower a single senior engineer to be 5x more productive.<br>There are two possible extremes here.<br>On one hand, the company could decide that it does not need the extra code. The primary company bottleneck is not feature dev or maintenance, so it just doesn’t need the extra coding power. In this world, the company holds the number of lines of code constant and gets rid of 4 of the 5 engineers.<br>On the other hand, the company may decide that it really needs all hands on deck. Maybe the company is a standard techco that needs to push out features as fast as possible. In this world, the company holds the number of engineers (that they can afford) constant, and increases the LoC output to 100k per month.<br>As with all things, the actual answer is likely in the middle somewhere. But notice that any setting of this knob that’s not the most extreme option — the one that sets the “lines of code” dial all the way to the max — results in someone being fired.

Well, AI has definitely gotten good enough that it can empower a single engineer to be 5x more productive. Naively, if you equate productivity multiples to the number of agents you have running at the same time, you may be able to get to 7-10x productivity (yes yes I know this is not a 1:1 measure of productivity improvement, it’s directionally correct). And companies have started setting the dial.<br>12 Grams of Carbon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Meta:<br>Meta said on Thursday it plans to lay off roughly 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, the latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled in part by artificial intelligence.<br>The company is also closing around 6,000 open roles, Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in a memo published by Bloomberg that Meta confirmed to CNN.

Oracle:<br>TD Cowen estimates the cuts hit between 20,000 and 30,000 positions, roughly 18% of Oracle’s global workforce of approximately 162,000 people. India was hit hardest, with approximately 12,000 employees terminated out of Oracle’s roughly 30,000 person Indian workforce. Affected workers included software engineers, account executives, program managers, and staff from Oracle Health, Sales, Cloud, Customer Success, and NetSuite.

Block:<br>today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.

Snap:<br>April 15 (Reuters) - Snap (SNAP.N), opens new tab will lay ‌off about 1,000 employees, including 16% of full-time staff, the company said on Wednesday, becoming the latest tech firm to shift toward leaner teams as it ramps up AI adoption to streamline operations.<br>The move, which also includes the closure of more than 300 open roles, comes weeks after Irenic Capital ​Management pushed the Snapchat parent to optimize its portfolio and improve performance. The activist investor has an economic interest of ​about 2.5% in the company.

Cloudflare:<br>Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday.

Microsoft:<br>Microsoft’s program announced on April 23, 2026 takes a different structural approach to the same underlying problem. Rather than involuntary terminations, Microsoft offered 8,750 U.S. employees — about 7% of its domestic workforce of approximately 125,000 — a voluntary separation package that includes 26 weeks of base pay, accelerated equity vesting and 12 months of healthcare. Acceptance window closes May 16, 2026. Internal estimates suggest Microsoft expects 60-70% of eligible employees to accept, implying actual departures of 5,250 to 6,125.

Coinbase:<br>On Tuesday, crypto exchange platform Coinbase Global Inc (Nasdaq: COIN) announced it was laying off about 14% of its staff, or roughly 700 employees. As Fast Company previously reported, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong cited two factors for the layoffs.<br>The first was the recent volatility in crypto markets in general, which Armstrong said necessitated cost-cutting measures.<br>And the second factor? AI.

Gitlab:<br>Four operational changes are part of the workforce...