Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> this decision is not made by ‘robots,’ but management. It is a decision most often made with the intention of saving a company or institution money by reducing human labor costs

Right. And the same is true of immigrants and outsourcing. The idea that foreigners are "stealing" jobs is a narrative that intentionally deflects from the conscious decisions company managers make to reduce costs.

Ultimately, the cheaper solution will win, but why be angry at the rich people making these decisions when we can take it out on robots and poor people just trying to get by?

View on HN

Anti-immigration thinktanks like Numbers USA and The Center for Immigration Studies are well-aware the problems of.immigration are not about the immigrants themselves but rather about the corporate powers that import them.

I do find some perversion in the way the market tackles this issue: the market attacks the lowest paying people first, trying to automate the low-skill jobs, as opposed to attacking things like CEO compensation at 100 million, or software engineers making 200k in silicon valley.

I think the market is being inefficient here, and I don't know if its a market failure (lowest paying people have the lowest bargaining power, cultural power, etc) or a regulatory challenge (you cant automate away doctors, lawyers, VC capital, management, investment votes, etc).

Probably both.

It's targeting what is easiest to automate. This happens to be mostly low skilled workers.

Software engineers constantly cannibalize their own jobs, but there are so many positions for software engineers available (or potentially available) that we (software engineers) don't feel the affects.

Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team -- if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the spread sheets can show them self on the projectors -- automated and all.

The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

From that perspective, the big question is if their decisions statistically more profitable than cheaper alternatives.

There are some companies on a very predictable path. You could replace Eddie Lampert or Johnny Ive with a D20 mapped to management tactics and get pretty much the same outcomes at least on a short to mid term.

Plenty of competent companies have enough self-contained knowledge that you could make good decisions simply by surveying the on-the-ground employees, weighting them in some way, and generating policy that way. One would hope a widget factory with a combined 200,000 man-years of widget industry experience would know more about the widget business than a drop-in CEO that had to look up what a widget was on Wikipedia before he made his introduction speech.

I suspect the real justification for the wildly overpaid C-suite is that you need someone to be a scapegoat for Wall Street's whims.

A local and autonomous team that knows their market and is competent is not going to sack half of their own to finance a stock buyback, but a $30 million a year stuffed suit can impose it from above.

The vast majority of decisions that make or break companies are not done by the CEO. Or any of the C level people.

Most companies are like a train. The C level guys mostly report to the board where they think the train is going to be -- which is normally wag or ferry tail.

I know I am speaking in broad terms. There are companies out there where the CEO matters, but those are few and far .

It should target what is most valuable to automate. Thats normally how markets work.

It's people relying on the market to fix everything. It works quite well for some things but not so much as a social contract. CEOs in the past were not making the same kind of percentages but most of that was not based on the market, it was based on push back such as unions and not wanting to appear greedy.

The market is only good for optimizing cashflow. It doesn't care one bit about human needs or happiness. External factors are needed if you care about humans.

Having a bunch of factory jobs replaced by a machine is an excellent example of this. People are blaming the management, but really it's the market forcing it. If the management here doesn't do this and their competitors do, they'll become uncompetitive and eventually go out of business.

The worst part is that there isn't an easy solution to this. You can try to re-train those workers so they can get new jobs, but eventually those jobs will be automated away as well. You can try to make laws to protect the jobs, but this makes it inefficient and prone to corruption.

My argument is the opposite though..the market is NOT targeting the most profitable places to attack.

I would extend the "automate" to more the more generalized "innovate".

Unions are plenty greedy. In SF, police officers make 400k, bart officials make 300k+ and firemen make 200k+.

They are also part of the (general) problem. And all of those jobs should also be targets of automation.

> In SF, police officers make 400k

Where are you getting this data?

“San Francisco offers excellent benefits and the current starting salary is $87,230 per year. After seven years of service a Police Officer may earn up to $129,896 per year.”

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/careers/sworn-j...

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=police+...

So when I sort by pay, what I see is only one single record with a police officer making more than 400k, out of what it says is more than 200,000 people in 4,200 pages in that database. And there are only 9 people shown with base pay over 200k in all of California.

I have no idea what the story is with Paulo Morgado, but you simply cannot claim he's representative of all SF police officers.

That makes your comment seem pretty dramatically misleading... so how do you reconcile this with your comment above? Are you reconsidering your thoughts here? Doesn't the data you posted tend to not point at unions, or possibly point in the opposite direction, that unions aren't a factor?

Many companies are becoming increasingly data-driven so in some cases it's actually not the "rich people" making these decisions. We are increasingly seeing contracts that commit a company to whichever solution produces better KPIs after a trial period.

Companies generally act very logically and seek to maximize their future cash flows. If economic incentives change, such as labor becoming more expensive, automation becomes cheaper relatively, and we should expect a well-run company to invest more in automation.

It makes little sense to blame the managers. We live in a market economy and policy-makers should look to economic incentives as the main way to drive behavior.

> And the same is true of immigrants and outsourcing.

You are right but from certain perspective immigrants and outshoreing (as available economic resource not as human beings of course) are a sort of Dutch disease. Instead for innovation and increased productivity companies reach for imported labor and outsourcing which will hurt the economy in the long run.

Not defending this mindset, but I think people against immigration are angry with the rich people.

It would take a real idiot to be angry with someone that needs a job and is allowed to have one by the government they voted for. There are some of these idiots, but not too many...

I don't think most people have a problem with immigration. A term that gets used to cover many things these days.

If you listen closely, you will find that people don't like two things. 1) Mass immigration (we probably need to further define that). And illegal immigration. I think most people understand (at least in America) that we are founded on immigration, and we enjoy amazing food, and cultures because of it.

Mass immigration - large number of people immigrating and displacing the existing population within a short period of time (probably also needs defined). I think when places and areas change slowly it is much smoother. Its like boiling a frog. Regardless of where you are from it can be upsetting to see your culture displaced by another. And that is why we have limits on how many people can immigrate to America every year. Some say they are too high, some say they are too low. I am sure we will find just the right amount one day.

As for a short period of time - that is mostly defined in generations. For immigration to work I think it needs to happen slow. Both sides need to adjust. The existing culture needs time to meld with the arriving culture, and the arriving culture needs time to adjust to the new culture. Both sides will need to be willing to give and take to form a NEW culture. Neither side can force full respect of the entirety of all parts of either culture. Doing so will result in generational disputes and battles.

I think most things can generally be solved with culture clash by having a potluck and enjoying each others food. Fat bellies of tasty food can bring people from all walks of life together.

Conveniently the de facto immigration policy in the US for professions like physicists, lawyers, politicians, board members is such that the control is tighter for illegal immigration than Walmart clerks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com