Major companies like Amazon, Block, Atlassian, and Meta are laying off tens of thousands of workers due to AI. On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X expressing gratitude to those who painstakingly wrote complex software character-by-character and acknowledging their efforts. "I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point." — Sam Altman (@sama) March 17, 2026 The problem with this statement is that the AI technology being used as justification for laying off programmers was created by Altman's own company. Moreover, the code written by the very programmers he is now thanking was used to train those AI systems. His post had the effect of implying that software engineering — a difficult and demanding field — is now outdated and no longer needed. As a result, his post attracted many angry comments, with people questioning whether the reward for their hard work was simply losing their jobs. While some were angry, internet users also created mocking memes out of the post. Some sarcastically called it a "funeral invitation" for software engineers, while others joked that someone should build an AI to stop billionaires from carelessly posting things they don't fully understand. Ref: Techcrunch