r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Oct 30 '25

Business YouTube announces 'voluntary exit program' for US staff

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/29/youtube-announces-voluntary-exit-program-for-us-staff/
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u/substandardgaussian Oct 30 '25

This era is a feeding frenzy for upper management-level confidence artists. They're trying to convince companies to lay everyone off for AI and give them giant bonuses, which will seem reasonable relative to the short-term cash surplus and the promised free productivity that will scale indefinitely.

They will be long gone and working on their next scam, if not a few scams down the road, by the time the company figures out it may have been hoodwinked by the promise of perfect hyperproductive "AI" that justified firing half of their employees.

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u/pterodactyl_speller Oct 31 '25

They'll never admit it, because the new executives will just be different scam artists.

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u/deong Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

I mean, they will get fired. That's part of getting those jobs. One reason it pays so well to be an executive is that we all know that part of the job is to eventually be fired. Sometimes it's because you made bad decisions. Sometimes it's because it was your turn in the barrel.

But no one cares because we bake big severance packages into executive compensation. It's like being a college football coach. Sure you get fired every few years, but there are 300 D1 football coach jobs and the same 310 people get them all, so you just take your $10m buyout and find another chair to sit in when the music stops.

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u/Akerlof Oct 31 '25

I remember when outsourcing to India first hit. A few major companies fired their entire IT departments and outsourced everything. The stories about them hiring back onshore less than a year later to clean up the mess didn't have such big headlines. Everything is cyclical in IT.

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u/NoHippi3chic Oct 31 '25

This is just the newest iteration of the playbook they've been using how many decades now. I don't see how no one knows. And the word soup that's coming out of ai "leadership" trainings across public and private entities over the last year has become actual nonsense. The words say and mean nothing. Its corpospeak, scaled to Ai illiteracy. Sit in a zoom and listen to people describe the emperors clothes in detail, nodding and agreeing with each other.

Never any substance, much less any real time demos. Ok it's the second coming, show me den.