Comment Disagree, this is the stupidest way possible! (Score 1) 8
While I despise AI initiatives in their current form, this is the way to do it.
You declare your AI intentions and lofty goals, then give the employees a decent (or, in this case substantial) voluntary resignation package.
No bad blood, and if you need to re-hire these people in the future, no burned bridges.
I hope more companies idd things like this.
It's good for the employees who leave and bad for customers, and coworkers who stay. The smart thing to do is layoff the shitty performers and boost the pay of the best employees. Instead, you're ensuring those with the best resumes will get a great pay package to get a better job. So you like your job at Krafton or can't leave?...well...now the best people quit and you're left with the very worst and least ambitious coworkers.
You're a customer? This is a repeat of the offshore outsourcing rage of the early 2000s...you make the environment hostile and terrible and the best leave for the jobs that aren't asking you to train your replacement....and those that remain have a fraction of the talent....deadlines get missed....product quality goes down....now there's an uptick in vulnerabilities....and of course costs go up...you need to pay these McKinsey consultants who recommended you move all R&D to India massive fortunes to justify their Ivy League brains cluelessly applying patterns that might have worked in manufacturing to software development where it DIDN'T work.
If AI actually worked as Jensen Huang and Altman/Zuckerberg/Beinhoff promised, this might be less of an issue, but AI can't code. At best, it can make your smartest programmers more productive...and even that is controversial. I use Claude 4.5 daily and it's a hindrance in anything I know how to do, like Java, where it can't reliably compile and pretty much fails nearly every prompt I give it. I will admit that it helps me with technology I don't know well...it helped me with some very simple JavaScript recently...so it slows me down on what you actually hired me for, but makes me less of a dumbass in every language you didn't hire me for...
This may move the needle, but not enough that you can cut headcount drastically. If AI can ACTUALLY replace these employees, they weren't contributing a lot to begin with. I am honestly baffled. The CEO must be really clueless. With Beinhoff, he was AI-washing his company's failures and portraying routine layoffs as AI innovation....this guy?...I honestly have no clue what he's doing or his motivations....maybe he's just a really nice guy who cares about the employees more than the future of the company?