Another "AI-washed" layoff, now stuck with 4x more work

Posted by therealslimshady1234@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 132 comments

So our company — a pretty famous Human Resources Management SaaS which went all in on "AI" a while ago — did a 2nd round of layoffs recently. The first round was arguably necessary because many people just didn't perform well, but last week we got another surprise invite with hidden invitee list and I immediately knew another round was about to happen. I was not disappointed, 30% of the engineers gone. I was sure I would be included as well as I am one of the more expensive engineers they have, but I was not.

Instead, they opted to just flood me with more work. Currently I am working on 1 frontend project with 1 other full stack engineer, a mobile dev, and a manager. The amount of work is pretty doable.

They fired the fullstack guy, no idea why as he was pretty good at his job and never caused issues. They also fired the mobile guy, and now expect the Web to replace the app entirely, adding even more stress on the Web app.

Then they fired most of 3 other projects and then bundled them all together under a new team. Guess who is the only frontender on that new team? Me.

So effectively I am getting 4x more work (at least, as there is a lot of tech debt in those other projects) and the only one who could help me was fired. It will just be 1 frontend engineer, 1 backend engineer, a manager and a PM.

They spammed a lot of AI buzzwords in the announcement saying that it will "fill the gap", but I work with Opus 4.7 every day and it is very lackluster. It does the easier things quite well but the harder things it just completely fumbles and becomes near useless. It will not help with the massive amounts of problems and tech debt in the other projects. Unleashing an agent on them will just make things worse. Besides, our per user limit on Claude Enterprise is like 20$ a day, so even if it could do the work I would need about 10-100x more tokens. They dont want to up this limit as they suddenly want to make a profit even though we have a ton of runway left.

Basically, it's almost as if they want our team or these products to fail, because this is completely unrealistic. AI may help a little bit but it's not anywhere near enough, especially not under these circumstances. I asked them if this is realistic and they said that of course we might have to cut some corners, but I find it hard to believe they will cut this many corners. I suspect they are trying to get me to resign to avoid paying a severance or something. Anyone else had experiences surviving a layoff like this?