That's because of overhiring and other non-ai related reasons (i.e. Higher interest rates means less VC funding available).
In reality, getting AI to do actual human work, as of the moment, takes much more effort and cost than you get back in cost savings. These companies will claim they are using AI, even if its just a few engineers using Windsurf.
The companies claim AI is the reason they laid off engineers to make it look like they're innovating, not downsizing, which makes them look better in the eyes of investors and shareholders.
in my own experience, using Claude gives me about 5-10% productivity increase because it's really good at writing boiler code or surgically modifying some code I didn't write.
But not because of AI, they only use that as pretext for normal layoffs. Sometimes they also use it to hire cheaper workers fresh from school or a cheaper country, so just replacing expensive seniors.
From what I'm seeing, it's become more and more difficult for fresh grads to get hired over the last year. If anything, I see that the preference for experienced devs is now even stronger. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd appreciate it.
The Shopify and Cloudflare intern thing is interesting: both companies have committed to hiring way more interns, on the basis that an intern armed with AI-assistance can get productive way faster (plus they are more likely to be "AI-native" than older engineers.)
are you insane??? big tech literally make one of the most biggest layoff for the past few months