If you need some catharsis from the news that Amazon is laying off 16,000 employees, Block is cutting nearly half its workforce, Atlassian is cutting 10% of its workforce, and Meta is reportedly considering even more massive layoffs, all in the name of AI, you might want to read the response to Sam Altman’s recent post on X.
OpenAI CEO Altman said on Tuesday:
“I’m so grateful to the people who wrote such complex software, letter by letter. It’s already hard to remember how much work it really took. Thank you for getting us this far.”
The problem with this naive sentiment is that Altman’s company introduced AI and is now using it as an excuse to lay off developers and reduce employment of junior developers. And he did it by training large amounts of code written the old-fashioned way, by the very people he now thanks.
His post suggests that technology that is difficult for developers to truly master is now like a rotary phone, obsolete and unnecessary.
Unsurprisingly, Altman’s comments attracted memes and richer reactions than his posts. While some people were straight up angry (“You’re welcome. I’m glad to know that our reward is to lose our jobs”), much of the internet was doing what it always does: making dirty jokes.
There are thousands of comments. Some of our favorites:
tech crunch event
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October 13-15, 2026
“Sam’s eulogy for software engineers”
“I really miss Sam Altman’s parody account at times like this.”
“Dear Developer, you’ll be out of a job forever and forced to work in a coal mine. But take comfort in knowing that Sam Altman appreciates it. ❤️ 🙏”
“Billion dollar app idea: an AI that reads billionaires’ tweets before they’re posted and says, ‘This sounds incredibly out-of-touch, are you sure?'”
“Thank you to OpenAI for doing all the AI work for us to make Chinese open source AI models available for free 🙏.”
“This seems to be something the Mayans say just before the ceremony begins.”
And finally, another reason to promote this meme:
