Rehiring Laid Off Developers ??

Most big-tech companies, such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and Tesla, are hiring developers again, offering thousands of jobs and exorbitant salaries. Some of these companies notoriously laid off hundreds and thousands of developers over the past couple of years.

Why the layoff? To focus on automation and spurred by the belief that AI would actually be able to do a lot of their junior developers’ jobs.?

Why hiring back? Well, it didn’t work out as planned.

Tedeily founder Santiago Valdarrama shared that the founder of a company that let go of most of its developers a year ago, told him: “I think we were too early… things didn’t work out as we had hoped for.”

The recent resurgence of companies hiring developers started in June this year when there were around 117k valid and unique job openings in tech at JobsCopilot.ai.?

The number has now increased multiple times. Even the companies that laid off developers last year riding on the back of AI, have learned from and accepted their rushed decisions. They are now hiring for the same team.

Indian Developers Taking Charge

Sounds like great news for Indian developers, since over 85,000 fresh graduates would be looking for tech jobs in the next quarter. For example, Google laying off its Python programmers’ team to outsource to cheaper options might be a good chance for Indian developers to finally hop on board.

After the year-long predictions of its collapse and the sad state of hiring in Indian IT, things are finally looking up. Following a weak FY24, hiring is expected to increase by 8.5% in FY25, which will continue until March 2025.?

This means around 150,000 fresher jobs will be open next quarter, perfectly timed for the wave of new graduates flooding the job market.

We will finally see a reduction in the bench size of Indian IT, which has been growing since last year. TCS announced hiring 35,000 freshers last year, while others, such as Infosys, Wipro, and Accenture, froze hiring of more than 25,000 developers combined. Now, they are looking to hire around 80,000 freshers combined.        

Even Indian startups have started rehiring after laying off around 30,000 employees in 2022 and freezing hiring for around 12-18 months.

What is the GenAI Lesson for Companies?

The goal of focussing on automation and the belief that upskilling the existing workforce with generative AI would be enough clearly wasn’t for most companies.

There are exceptions to the trend, though. Just a few weeks ago, Klarna cut 50% of its workforce, ending partnerships with Salesforce and Workday for what it claims is a generative AI overhaul. It seems like companies haven’t yet realised that laying off people in the name of generative AI isn’t going to work in the long run.?

Cost-cutting was one of the biggest reasons cited by companies that fired people last year. Some of them had overhired developers during COVID only to realise their inability to sustain those jobs later.?        

The blame on AI for these layoffs turned out to be not true. “The story that ‘we’re so productive now we don't need employees anymore’ sounds a lot more palatable for investors than ‘we over-hired and we’re struggling’,” quipped Francois Chollet.

But apparently, Klarna’s case is different. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said that AI will play a crucial role in cutting operational costs, contributing to a 50% planned reduction in the company’s workforce.

Regardless, some companies still search for a “generative AI solution” or make it a scapegoat to cut costs. With the market pulling itself back up, companies might learn a lesson or two and we might see more cases of companies rehiring developers, as AI is definitely not replacing developers anytime soon.

Read the full story here.

What About Low-Code/No-Code Platforms?

Tools like Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT canvas allowing users to build software using natural language is reminiscent of the times when low-code/no-code platforms had lowered the barrier to entry for app development and made it easier for companies to teach their developers the existing solutions within the companies.

However, the community is now questioning the relevance of low-code/no-code platforms in the AI era. So, how do these platforms stay relevant in a landscape dominated by AI??

Read to find out.

Docusign Reinvents Contracts with AI for Smarter Business Deals

“Every company engages with vendors, suppliers, customers, partners, and contractors, handling crucial agreements. Despite the valuable information involved, we often treat it as unstructured data. The lifecycle of creating, managing, and renewing these agreements costs trillions of dollars in business,” Sagnik Nandy, chief technology officer at Docusign, told AIM.

Click here to learn how Docusign is reinventing contracts with AI.

AI Bytes

• Baidu has introduced Baige 4.0, a new version of its AI Heterogeneous Computing Platform, which focuses on enhancing cluster stability and efficiency with its ability to monitor GPU clusters, automatically detecting failures and migrating workloads to prevent disruptions.
• NVIDIA has unveiled EdgeRunner, which can generate highly detailed 3D meshes with up to 4,000 faces at a spatial resolution of 512, derived from both images and point clouds—resulting in sequences that are twice as long and four times higher in resolution compared to previous methods.
• Andrew Ng’s AI Fund has announced its first investment in India, backing Gurugram-based AI healthcare startup Jivi. The AI-focused venture capital fund, known for its investments in tech-driven startups, has chosen Jivi as its entry point into India’s rapidly growing AI market.