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Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Weird, middle managers are among the few things more worthless and wasteful than AI in the job space.
Are we talking like product managers? Because I've worked at a company where the CEO or CTO can just saunter over and talk to you, and I prefer having someone in between us to deflect pointless toil.
Product managers tend to be useless in large groups, but a good product manager is worth their weight in Iridium.
It's basically the upper end of the Peter Principle.
CEO after a project has been worked on for 18 months: "had a chance to check it out over the weekend, my wife doesn't really like green, can we change that?"
Literallyy
I am drawing from personal experience.
This is a real thing that happened to me, after a CEO ignored a product that we had worked on for years - yeah why would he have any knowledge it was just the entire reason for the company to exist.
There were 700 interconnected parts, many partnerships, many other businesses, many layers of approval, dozens and dozens and dozens of specs approval rounds that were signed off by dozens and dozens of people.
1500 hours of meetings which you can extrapolate into 10,000 person-hours of meetings and post-meeting analysis.
"My wife doesn't like green"
I think a lot of these companies let go of team leads and just decided they could do without. They had the biggest salaries and likely no respect from the higher ups. In my experience with big projects this position is extremely important because it keeps the team on task and they are able to coordinate with other team leads. If you just have a handful of junior employees, they may be doing work, but it's not actually moving the project forward. Often time these leads are still doing code review or even writing code (or the equivalent work product in their division), so it's not like they're just in meetings all day. They actually know and do the work, but they're able to keep the group organized. I'm guessing those are the positions they're rehiring.
The hyperlinked article in that section goes into a little more detail, but I'm guessing based off what I've been hearing from the industry.
Why are we writing articles on what the biggest megacorps are doing with the technology? Meta is one of the most braindead corporations I've ever seen, wasting billions and billions of dollars on failed tech after failed tech. Microsoft can't stop pushing their shitty Copilot, which isn't even on anybody's LLM radar. Anything Elon Musk leads consistently makes dumbass decisions that scare us all.
If anything, it just shows how stupid these megacorps are.
Copilot isn't an LLM, it's a tool to use LLMs and Generative AI. It's very useful when people with no understanding of a topic speak vehemently about it because they can be tagged and easily ignored on other topics too.
You know what they meant
Actually, the model itself is called Prometheus, but Microsoft has slapped their Copilot label on so many things that it's hard to know what they are talking about.