AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay
This was always about destroying tech worker's leverage to demand a decent quality of life in exchange for their work, never about "intelligence" of any kind, and the only thing that could have stopped it was unionization.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/forrester_ai_rehiring/?td=rt-3aOpen linkView original on sopuli.xyz270
Comments20
Backfire? Looks like it worked perfectly.
Yeah, it is worded weird, I agree with you.
You'd have to be in a tight spot to be fired and replaced to accept being rehired even at the same salary, never mind a smaller salary. I feel bad for these people. Hopefully they work a bit slower in proportion to the reduced pay.
Welcome to the current economy.
This is just coming out of a prediction from a Forrester Research report of predictions for next year. It’s not actually showing they’re hiring people back at lower pay.
I would imagine they are producing garbage that works today but will gum up the works in the future when they try to change it. At least for the engineers. For everyone, i would assume the accuracy of their work will be shaky at best.
Rehiring your workforce at lower pay is probably a success for those jackasses
Why at lower pay? I'd ask for more. The original employees already know the job, hiring and training someone new would cost way more.
They are not rehiring the same people. The jobs either go offshore, or to new people for less $
Thats also going to be more expensive than just keeping the same people. Its a sign of poor managment if they think otherwise.
Yes, but you see, number go up. You can tell shareholders number go up.
If the management thought a fancy text generator was going to magically replace human creativity and decision making, do you think we're talking about good management?
Quality of workers doesn't really matter for big corporations. They are too big to fail. Same with quality of product.
Windows is shitty. So is SAP. So is almost any product from big corpo.
Lower? The fuck! Stop caving yall.
It’s crazy what people are willing to do when they’re at risk of losing their home, or their kids are at risk of going hungry.
I would absolutely accept less money, but I would also keep my job search going and be out of there the first chance I got.
Having a system where you will go homeless and your family dies of starvation because you didn't accept lower pay is fucked up.
Agreed, yet here we are.
You meant to say "Get Unionized yall!" FTFY
I’ve long said the AI thing is a media distraction. The trend of performing mass layoffs while still actively recruiting started at least a decade before ChatGPT, and ramped up during the pandemic.