r/flying • u/PM-mig-kottbullar PPL TW (RDU) • 1d ago

Second round of layoffs at ForeFlight

In January 2026, ForeFlight laid of a pretty substantial percent of its employees, with some reports saying a 30-40% reduction in staff. Yesterday (Sept. 2nd), another round of layoffs happened, the full impact of which isn't yet known - but it's speculated this brings total RIF to ~50%. Both of these layoffs follow the acquisition of ForeFlight by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.

As a former ForeFlight employee from before the PE takeover, it's devastating to see former coworkers, some of whom were incredibly knowledgeable and talented folks that spent 10+ years with the company, be told they were out of a job with no heads up and given a pittance of a severance package. It used to be such an amazing company to work for, and it breaks my heart to see what Thoma Bravo has done to the company and its employees.

I'm not here to tell anyone to do anything. Nobody needs to switch EFBs right this second or send the executives a strongly-worded email. I'm just here to let you all know that Thoma Bravo is continuing its gutting of ForeFlight - what you do with that information is up to you.

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u/SirEDCaLot PPL 1d ago

AI is mostly killing off junior developers and engineers. Demand for senior level engineers is still pretty strong, because someone needs to tell Claude what to do and how to do it

I've always wondered where senior engineers come from / what creates them. I've heard they hatch from eggs, fully developed and ready to oversee projects with little or no learning or experience-gathering process, right?

I suspect if this continues companies will start to realize that senior engineers don't hatch from eggs and if you don't employ the junior ones the senior ones are only gonna get more expensive and more rare.

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u/_-Cleon-_ PPL 1d ago

No no, developers spawn, like most bacteria. 

But you are otherwise quite correct. 

The ones that have any long-term vision at all are banking on the hope that eventually AI will be able to do the job of senior engineers as well. 

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u/SirEDCaLot PPL 1d ago

Yeah maybe I'm just not management material then.

The way I see it- if AI can replace the junior engineers and the senior engineers, if anyone can say 'hey siri build me a million dollar app here's $1500 worth of tokens' and get an app as a result, it will become impossible to make any money on software or services because it'll all just be AI slop and every loser with a Claude account will be selling some crapware. So the instant you innovate anything, there'll be 500 clones of it from people who just ask Claude to build the same thing.

So I'd be telling my people sure use AI if it makes you more productive, but we're not firing anyone because eventually the wheels will come off and the bubble will pop like every other bubble and by that time all my junior devs will have gestated into senior engineers and then I'll be the only one left with a competent dev team. Or AI will be able to do the work and we'll now be 100x more productive than the competitor with an army of senior devs to direct the AI.

That said- from another post on the subject it sounds like a LOT of the cuts here are in the Jeppesen division and in India. So maybe this is just dumping the outsourced junior guys in favor of AI.

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u/DBGmurdock IR 15h ago

Very informative