How can startups destroy more jobs? | Hacker News Reader

How can startups destroy more jobs?

danielharan.posterous.com

35 pointsjamesgolick26 comments

Innovations which reduce the amount of human effort needed to do things also reduce the amount of human effort that is directly or indirectly needed per unit of goods or services consumed, and so to fund the same total consumption, less work per individual is needed.

There are three sides of the triangle which can move - the percentage unemployment, the number of hours per employee, or the total amount of consumption. Historically, people have simply consumed more - luxury is addictive, and people measure each other relative to what others in their community have.

However, there is a major counterbalancing force to efficiency gains - that there are only finite natural resources, and many easily accessible reserves are becoming depleted. Reserves of fossil fuels and high grade ores are declining fast, so increasingly more labour is required per unit of energy or metal - and the cumulative effects of pollution rise with accumulation over time and a rising population, more labour is required to prevent pollution.

There are only finite natural resources if you're talking about a fixed number of atoms of each variety being available on the earth, but we don't have finite resources. We are creating new things all the time that lessen our need to consume natural resources. And if we stopped subsidizing consumption, we'd see even more such creativity.

Any natural resource that gets scarcer even as demand for it increases naturally gets more expensive. This gives people incentives to avoid its use, either by being more efficient or substituting alternatives.

This has even worked for land itself. As land gets more expensive as more people wish to live in an urban area, buildings add stories, using the same land over and over again.

As use of a resource becomes more efficient the rate of consupmtion actually increases not decreases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It is true that when a resource is difficult to use and produces little, its not in great demand. And when more efficient and productive ways to use it are found, the resource is more widely used.

But this doesn't mean that it will not become more expensive as it gets used up and more careful use of it will be made. Human nature will continue to function.

It's an unproven proposition, and usually only applied to industry. If my refrigerator is more efficient, I won't buy a second one. A more efficient car might give me an incentive to drive more, but that seems really marginal.

People who hadn't brought refrigerators before, might be a first one, though. And if there are extremely efficient, we might even switch to living inside refrigerators [1] in summer.

[1] Some people already do.

That triangle ignores worker productivity and resource efficiency.

To prevent pollution, we need workers producing LED lights instead of wasteful incandescents or mercury-laden (and ugly) compact fluorescents.

Have you actually used an LED light?

I have - and they are insanely expensive (okay thats to be expected) but what is worse is that they give very, very little light, not enough to light even a dinner table, let alone a small room.

Those compact fluorescent lights? Yeah not only do they flicker (which is bad for your eyes, even though it is not fast enough that you can see them just like the old CRT monitors) and there is some evidence that they may be linked to eye cancer, but even if they aren't they take about 30 seconds to turn on fully, which means I have to walk the corridor in the dark (what then is the purpose of lightning? fuck if I know). We don't need LED lighting, we don't need compact fluorescent lighting, we need actually useful lighting, which means incandescent light bulbs for at least the next 30 years.

Call me back in 2040 and we can try again.

You're right that LEDs aren't there yet in terms of price, but in new installations where you build LED lighting in rather than trying to retrofit existing incandescent fixtures with LED bulbs, you can get some amazing lighting with LED which isn't possible any other way.

On the environment, the low hanging fruit is to make electricity incredibly cheap -- I want PV solar and wind for grid resilience, but huge nuclear fission (U-233/Thorium, or reprocessing of U-235/Pu-239) using standardized designs in large quantities.

This is a problem with LED lights, but it's not a problem with the technology.

LED are expensive now, but the price/performance ratio and efficiency are improving rapidly. And as the other poster said, when designed in properly into new installations they can have excellent performance. But their lighting and heat dissipation characteristics are so different that they really don't do well when retrofitted into fixtures that were designed for incandescents or fluorescents.

The problem is that most of the "LED bulb replacements" and fixtures available to the consumer now are low-efficiency, expensive incandescent replacements that only exist to capture the buyer's money, not to offer better performance.

Yup, startups are creative destruction, that is, if the wise people allow big corporations to be destroyed. #toobigtofail

With regards to call centers, you might want to first ask those with a job there if they want their job destroyed. Without regard to their current job search plans, they are there for a reason...

I actually used to work in one. A couple years after I left, the center relocated to another province. It was a shit job.

As a society we're not doing a great job of helping workers move on. In any case, it really shouldn't be up to startups to protect jobs, any more than car companies had to compensate carriage manufacturers or nail factories helped blacksmiths.

As a society, we do a terrible job at helping workers move on.

You go to school for 12 years, then possibly uni for 3-7, then are unlikely to receive more than a couple of months of formal training throughout the rest of your life, even if you change careers.

Virtually nobody does a university course after graduating. I don't think that's because university is useless (though there is room for improvement), or that skills are easy to obtain elsewhere, but a society that tries to load a lifetime of study onto people who don't even know what they are going to be when they grow up.

I agree. I'd make more sense for many career paths if people did maybe 1 year university, then work for maybe 5 years, then 6 months uni, work for 5 years, etc.

Why do all undergraduate courses last the same length of time? Not because the amount of time it takes to master every subject is the same, but because of administrative convenience.

Also because it has just been so. In the old times, you used to do the same thing as your parents, and capabilities didn't usually go obsolete during the course of one's work life, even less if that was at a college level.

It all balances out. The industrial revolution removed the need for lots of manual laborers and replaced unskilled jobs with machines.

But then TV came along and created even more jobs for the unskilled than the patent crop rotator over destroyed.

I worked in not one but two call-centers during a very dark time of my life. I say freaking bomb all call-centers out of existence. They create crap jobs, with crap pay, and crap benefits that steal work from better qualified people.

In the first call-center I worked in, I was doing financial support for customers. I was great at my job because I was studying finance at that time in my life. Everyone else on the 200+ team (excluding this very smart girl that came from a crappy neighborhood with crappy parents) were complete and utter retards. The place was a petri dish of fraud, bad advice, and foul phone manners.

In the second call-center I worked in two departments. The first one was sales, basically 300 kids just out of school tricking customers into promotions they did not want and hanging up on clients when they couldn't get a credit card number. I was also great at sales because I developed a system, without bullshitting the customers. I always hit the bonuses... but the rest of the department also hit them, with 500% my performance. Imagine I sold 10 units per day to hit 60 units a week (the bonus being after 50 units sold), they sold 300. Fraud to the extreme (and I know this because a close friend of mine did this... his whole team did). Lastly I did tech support. I was probably one of the few (less than 10) people that actually understood the technology. The rest of the 120 strong department where tech illiterate.

Aside, I strongly remember one agent being fired because he brought two machetes into the office building and cut (superficially, no horror story here) some dude's arm, and a 45 year old lady agent that reported 13 cases of sexual assault (the lady was hideous looking and was just looking for an easy payday) which got the 13 men fired and which ended with her resignation which included a severance pay of several thousand dollars.

They funniest side, is that at least 60% of all the agents I met, could not speak or even comprehend decent english. I thought that might be a prerequisite to do customer support/sales for english speaking customers. In comparison, I was once reprimanded for speaking french to the french speaking husband of a customer about their tech equipment.

So yeah, I say bomb all these call-centers. I don't live in the US, but I think that those sales agent jobs dealing with people in the US should be filled with US sales agents. Those tech support jobs for US customers should be filled with US college kids or recent graduates. Instead companies pay 300~400 dollars a month to a bunch of retards (I can count myself in this group, though give me a break I had been kicked out of my house so I took the first job I was offered), cheats, and thieves, so they can go ahead and make your experience on the phone a living hell.

As a counterpoint: I had a lot of book smarts and street stupid during my later years in high school. There was an $N,000 gap between my scholarships and my family's ability to pay and the cost of the expensive private university that changed my life.

I made a few hundred dollars in off-the-books employment for a borderline psychopath who nearly killed me with a pipe to the head. Following poorly planned unemployment brought on by the pipe incident, I got a job at a call center for an office supply company (the kind that sells things like, I don't know, staples). I remember those years pretty fondly: they paid me what I was owed in a timely fashion, no pipes were thrown at my head, I touched no toxic chemicals in a hot warehouse, and it was a value-creating job which I was good at for a wee bit of time prior to going to bigger and better things.

By any chance was this call-center servicing the same country (or a country with similarities in culture and language) and where you properly trained by the company? I should have added to my comment that I meant most outsourced call-centers in which employees are nothing more than people to fill seats that either commit mischievous actions or make stupid mistakes. I have no quarrel with a call-center servicing people in the same language or high end call-centers in which people are either highly trained or only hired if they have the skill set required for a specific job.

There is also a call-center in my country that is dedicated to translation services. They are of course exempt of my contempt as they only hire translators with the capacity to translate from x language to english in a timely and concise manner. They offer pay that is considerably a lot higher than regular call-centers and they vet and test their employees before hiring. Once again I was targeting call-centers in India, Central America, and Africa that are full of thieves and morons. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they are surely the minority. By a long shot.

Destroy jobs, increase supply of labor commodity, ???, profit

Poster has confused the difference between lowering unemployment rates and the shifting role of labor, like that brought about by the industrial revolution.

Hopefully he isn't secretly dreaming of firing the person who answers the phones as a triumph of the information age.

The kinds of work we've done have changed, as has the social structures in which we perform it. I'd rather see far more people being self-employed, as it was before the industrial revolution - although in more interesting jobs and with a higher standard of living.

I am struggling to understand how this whole thing doesn't boil down to "we should eliminate jobs that I used to do and hated, and get more people doing jobs like the ones I enjoy and have now"

Lots of career paths (not necessarily jobs!) add value to society, and I'm not about to do them. Daycare worker? They should be paid WAY more given the value they provide. Even if the salary was higher than mine, there's no way I would consider that as an option.

Conversely, there are lots of dirty, dangerous and demeaning jobs I've never held which don't seem worth it. How many people die in coal mines every year? Would you want to do that?

By all means we should give those workers a decent shot at retraining, like Germany did with their coal miners. If anyone figures out how to use robots to entirely automate their job or engineers manage to make wind and solar scale up cheaply, I would say that's a net positive for humanity.

"If anyone figures out how to use robots to entirely automate their job or engineers manage to make wind and solar scale up cheaply, I would say that's a net positive for humanity."

The unions have prevented many jobs from being automated.

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