Big Tech Plans to Lay Off Half Their Engineers, Upgrade to AI Overlords

KEY POINTS

•Steve Yegge, former Amazon and Google engineer, predicts 50% layoffs in Big Tech due to AI adoption.
•Yegge explained that companies are trading engineer headcount to afford costly AI infrastructure and licenses.
•Despite layoffs, innovative engineers are forming startups, signaling hope beyond the large corporation cutoff.

Steve Yegge, a self-declared software veteran who rubbed elbows with Jeff Bezos during Amazon's early wildfire years and then chillaxed over 12 years at Google earning the majestic title of 'senior staff software engineer,' has declared AI the Grim Reaper for half of Big Tech's coding wizards. In a 2026 Pragmatic Engineer pow-wow, Yegge foretold that companies will toss out 50% of their engineers faster than you can say 'AI fatigue,' trading high wages for blingy GPUs, millions in AI licenses, and cloud tokens. Meta's Zuckerberg even bragged one engineer now outcodes entire squads thanks to AI 'productivity.' Meanwhile, software engineer Siddhant Khare confessed his job is now more 'reviewer' than 'creator,' a bittersweet badge of honor in AI’s rising kingdom. Fear not, creative rebels—Yegge spots a startup oasis rising like a phoenix, where the chosen code sorcerers innovate from the ashes of big business layoffs.