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AH Anthony Ha Anthony Ha Weekend editor at TechCrunch, writing about technology, startups and AI policy.

“There was this period where it was this almost triumphant thing of, hey, we cut 30% or 25% of our workforce. Isn't that great? As opposed to saying, well, that actually reflects some sort of failure on your part … that's not something that's a win. That means you probably messed up in some ways.”

The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · November 2026

“There was this period where it was this almost triumphant thing of, hey, we cut 30% or 25% of our workforce. Isn't that great? As opposed to saying, well, that actually reflects some sort of failure on your part … that's not something that's a win. That means you probably messed up in some ways.” — Anthony Ha, The Aboard Podcast

Context

The hosts had been talking about companies that cut engineers because of AI and then rehired many of them. Ha says layoffs were framed as a win when they more likely signal a mistake, a pointed take in a week of large AI-era staff cuts.

Transcript

The Aboard Podcast Around 29:59 into the episode
Paul Ford

It didn't happen and it didn't work. Like, I'm not saying, I'm not doing this from a high-minded point of view. It's just like whatever people thought they would get out of laying off thousands of engineers, it doesn't seem like they got it. And so nobody's talking about it anymore. Well,

Rich Ziade

…it was a bit of a magic pill mindset, I think. And the truth is, companies are going to have to transform and adapt to this new, just the new way things are going to work. And I think a lot of people are going to have to reskill and change what they do. But the idea of like, everybody go home.

Anthony Ha

I think that also ties into what I said at the beginning about being normal, is that there was this period where it was this almost triumphant thing of, hey, we, you know, we cut 30% or 25% of our workforce. Isn't that great? As opposed to saying, well, that actually reflects some sort of failure on your part that you did that. And, you know, maybe that's going to be necessary because certainly it's going to be a very interesting couple years in the global economy. But, you know, that's not something that's like a win. That's something that means you probably messed up in some ways. And there's certainly ways this technology can be used where maybe also it'll make some jobs redundant. But again, that's not a triumphant story. Like no one likes the story

Speaker 4

of machines win.

Rich Ziade

I'm going to be one of the AI CEOs, ready? I'm in Wyoming right now with an Italian accent. Should I do it?

Paul Ford

Yeah, you got permission.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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