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Comment by deltree7 | Hacker News Reader

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management.

Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and generalization, which is incredibly hard. Some people may even hate it, because they have their own best way to do things.

Devs should stop being delusional about their self-importance in these things. There are 100 other factors going on in an org and your one little tool ain't gonna make a penny difference in the profitability or productivity of the company (unless you have data to prove it, including impact on profitability)

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> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive.

Maybe in some imaginary world with spherical cows, infinite demand, and no friction (physical or transactional).

In the real world, increasing productivity so that one person can do the job that ten used to do very often results in layoffs. 70 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard operators in the US. Productivity increased and they got laid off.

Reducing head count is literally the core sales pitch for a ton of software and or solutions out there today.

They won't put that in the end user facing presentation, but you can count on it being part of the executive pitch.

This is so true. Anecdotally, my dad worked in FABs on chips and stuff in the 90s during the dot com boom before they stripped all those jobs away to outsourcing and it basically destroyed him as an older man. Funny how we're desperately trying to get the silicon manufacturing back after we sold out.

"Hey, it improved the financials since it moved from capex to opex. Also, I got my bonus and jumped ship before the excrement hit the cooling unit."

Yeah, several years ago, our corporate overlords sold off a database we created to a competitor and leased it back from them. Now, we're trying to recreate that database to avoid the financial overhead. I'm sure at the time it made sense to some bean counter but it was penny-wise, pound-foolish in the long term.

I think now it's impossible to think long term financially. Thanks, Wall Street.

once again this is a clueless understanding of increasing productivity.

If I build a tool and make a person irrelevent, then I didn't increase productivity of the laid-off worker. I merely increased my own productivity.

What OP said was his tool specifically increased the productivity of all other users, which means his team can churn out features faster.

Show me a management team that says no to it

That's easy: a management team that only needs ~X new features per month, not 4X. No organization has an infinite demand for features. If they currently have 50 devs working on the platform, maybe after quadrupling the productivity of each dev they'll keep 20. Speed of development increases by 60% and they save 30 developers worth of expenses, which means hefty end-of-year bonuses for every manager up the chain. More likely they keep about 13-15.

It's naive and boneheaded to insist that productivity increases never result in layoffs.

>Increasing productivity never lays people off

Once, I worked for a medical claims company. We had a dozen people who just worked on processing claims. I wrote some software that cut the claim processing time in half. Instead of finding new work for the claims processors, they literally laid off half of them. I have never felt worse, as a software developer than I did that day. Management was so short sighted at that company.

Management commonly has a dumb understanding of economics and management. Particularly when they view engineering as a cost center.

To the untrained eye, it definitely is a huge cost center. Devs and smart people get premium dollar for their work, as they should, but for the bean counters, execs and bad managers, it's extremely difficult to simply quantify the work in such a way to see it as a value add. Especially in an executive excel sheet/powerpoint

Nevermind how work and production is the bare minimum price of being a business

>> it's extremely difficult to simply quantify the work in such a way to see it as a value add.

Which is often the case even in product development. They know the existing product is only going to be useful for the next few years. They know they need something new to build on the line. But somehow the development of that new thing is seen as pure cost rather than an investment in the future.

> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive.

This is either trivial or underdetermined. It depends on how you define "unproductive":

- If you define "unproductive" as "produces at a lesser rate than the new, increased productivity level" then it's just a tautology.

- If your definition of "unproductive" is not relative to the new rate, then you have to stipulate a reasonable definition of "productivity" and show that it was not being met prior to the automation. You haven't done this.

It might turn out that the second bullet is easy enough to do in the domain you're talking about. But it's worth using language precisely if you're going to tell people that they have a "dumb understanding" of whatever you're discussing.

This comment is absurd. I cannot for a second fathom how you came to believe so naively that’s productivity increases do not result in lay offs. Seriously how did you come to that conclusion? I’m just curious because it’s so disconnected from reality I can’t figure it out.

Also, your assumption about tooling is 100% incorrect as I myself have written tooling that was saving an org 35k a day, in a single market.

Most people have a poor understanding of 'increasing productivity' especially what OP is talking about.

If I build a tool, that makes someone else irrelevant, that increased my productivity, but not the person who is now irrelevant. Yes, that person gets laid off. So, your tool leading to firing a legal assistant is not what we are talking here.

If I build a tool, that makes every other developer more productive, then the team can build more features or fix more bugs.

Show me one software team that doesn't have a backlog of bugs and features that would not benefit from increased productivity and leading to laying of people in the team.

>Devs should stop being delusional about their self-importance in these things. There are 100 other factors going on in an org and your one little tool ain't gonna make a penny difference in the profitability or productivity of the company (unless you have data to prove it, including impact on profitability)

This is false. My org has seen millions of dollars of savings many times on the backs of tools. Improving developer productivity, and it sounds like ops tool would be huge for productivity, is extremely valuable.

You may be correct but still, this made me literally laugh out loud.

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