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Comment by DeadMouseFive | Hacker News Reader

Really solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry.

WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve from the old "filing cabinets and typewriters" methods that some companies are still using to this day.

Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.

The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore.

I watch my partner's experience in accounting and the difference are stark.

There are many many bs steps in accounting with paper that disappear when digital tools are used.

Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required.

"We've always done it this way" is an excuse for firms that will fall behind other digitally empowered firms.

What does this mean for investors? Don't invest in companies that insist on using filing cabinets.

View on HN

> Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.

I know some people who do this kind of work in various organizations.

As far as I (and they) can tell it all should have been automated down to 1/10 or less the staff it takes now decades ago with computers, but their orgs keep getting basically scammed by vendors promising the moon and delivering a mimeograph of a smeared Xerox of a bad photo of the moon, so it never happens—there's constant tool churn, but nothing ever gets faster or better. Anyone internal smart enough to automate any of it themselves either quietly does it some for them and their buddies so they can slack more, or does none at all and tells no-one what they're capable of because it'll just mean more work and management'll probably fuck it up anyway, if not be angry about it.

It's a leadership failure and it seems to be more common than not. Maybe we'll reach a tipping point where such orgs simply die from that kind of thing, but it really seems like we ought to have by now considering how much "low hanging fruit" that couldn't been tackled in the 80s is still around.

Hilarious example: our org decided to "optimise" travel expenses by mandating all our bookings through a centralised travel service. The service offers a corporate portal that allows orgs to specify their policy and ensure compliance while letting employees "self-serve" to book travel.

Unfortunately the software is so bad and so complex that upon deployment, they realised they couldn't just roll this out for direct access to staff. It is full of travel-industry terminology nobody understands combined with corporate org policy terminology few understand.

So they designated specific staff as "travel managers" who would be the ones to book travel for their group. These people then get special training etc. In practices however none of the managers have time for this so we are all delegating it to admin staff that already do other admin type work for our teams.

And so the whole exercise has brought us full circle to where dedicated staff are effectively manually booking travel for us. And of course then COVID hit so nobody traveled for 2 years after that and we all prefer remote / zoom as much as possible anyway.

We have that and it is still cheaper to book outside of it sometimes by many hundreds of $$$

Was the software Concur by any chance?

I recently used concur, and by 'used' I mean I clicked to a page that said "our servers are down" and then I called the travel agent directly who then booked my travel over the phone.

Of dear God, I had to use Concur at a previous job. What a nightmare.

I think concur depends on the implementation - at one job I had to fax in receipts and was painful, at another they had an email gateway configured where you just took a photo of the receipt and emailed it, and it did OCR and imported all the receipts automatically.

concur isn't that terrible, at least I had no trouble using it

I've worked on an automation tool that has a dedicated team to work with it and all the other self service tools.

It's really not a worthwhile effort getting everyone to learn the domain specifics, and a few domain experts to translate works pretty well, despite looking silly.

Ahh I see you too use Egencia. .. fucking useless piece of shit.

10,000 person tier 1 tech company, 80% of the staff are software engineers, so let’s be conservative and say the average cost of an hour of each employee’s time is $100.

I’ve got a great idea, lets implement a tool that means it takes a minimum of 4 hours to complete the process of booking flights, so that we can better enforce budget policies and make sure people don’t spend an extra $50 on flights.

Let’s also ignore the fact that the “cheaper” flight the tool makes you book is several hours different timing to the one you wanted, meaning you’re now losing nearly 8 fucking hours of productivity…

Yeah… but you saved $50 on the flight…

"Let’s also ignore the fact that the “cheaper” flight the tool makes you book is several hours different timing to the one you wanted, meaning you’re now losing nearly 8 fucking hours of productivity…

Yeah… but you saved $50 on the flight…"

How does a cheaper flight lose productivity, I have never been flying or in a plane before.

Long layovers, or flights that leave/arrive at sleep-disrupting times.

Most likely it has several stops and no layover, direct flights can be expensive but ones with layovers can be cheaper. Longer, risk of cancellation and higher risk overall.

Then also red-eyes, it's hard to sleep on a plane, so you may get to somewhere in the morning but if you didn't have a full nights rest, what's the point? You're exhausted.

That's very interesting. Would it be okay for me to ask how it is possible that you have never been on a plane? Is it due to you being very young, or afraid of flying, or living in a part of the world where flying is uncommon?

Something like 15-20% of US adults have never flown on an airplane.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-much-w...

Afraid and maybe living in part of the world where flying is uncommon not sure about that.

8 hours is a work day. He means that you have to take the flight one day earlier (e.g. because the flight arrives three hours too late) which means that you lost an entire work day on poor scheduling.

It was announced that we were switching to Egencia, but then it was cancelled after feedback from user testing. Since all the other business apps we use are frustratingly shitty and broken in obvious ways yet nobody bats an eye, we all inferred that Egencia must be a truly special kind of dumpster fire.

are you reading my mind?

The idea "this could all be easily automated so those who don't automate it will go out of business" presumes efficient market theory is true. Markets are not actually efficient. Markets are based on relationships between human beings. And a lot of human beings have a vested interest in things staying exactly the way they are.

that is why i automate some things but in general "keep my head down and my mouth shut". the people who get all angsty and revolutionary about this stuff tend to get fired / laid off / asked to leave / burned out. i know because i used to be one of them.

the people who survive are quiet and don't complain about "leadership failure" as you put it. we do not get paid to point out failures of our leadership. or to do things which would by their very existence imply a failure of leadership. we get paid to do what leadership tells us. our continued supply of health care, shelter, and food depend on it.

if i want to develop my talent / skill, well that is in my free time. i can build robots in my basement and play around with new algorithms and nobody will get mad at me or tell me to stop. now you'll have to excuse me, there is an STM32 board calling my name.

Haha you know I used to move from company to company looking for the one that would make my 60 hours a week pay off. Ultimately I cared about things that these companies did not.

My employers and I were much happier when I switched to 30 hour work weeks and went to grad school part time :P

YES so much this. It's really not hard to see why so many people are doing resume driven development, everyone is overworked and understimulated. Nothing matters, the business doesn't care about good engineering, there are so few interesting problems, ugh.

It's often cheaper for big companies to operate a human meat grinder that churns and burns cheap labor than to employ engineers to automate and monitor manual processes.

I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs.

Imagine an economy where there were no ATMs. Any time you wanted cash, you would have to walk to the bank and wait in line to talk to a bank teller and cash a check. And every week you'd be paid by a check. Paper records were collected for everything and an army of employees had to reconcile the records. No spreadsheet software was available.

In fact, the number of bank tellers (not even bank employees) actually doubled since the advent of ATMS:

> The number of human bank tellers in the United States increased from approximately 300,000 in 1970 to approximately 600,000 in 2010. Counter-intuitively, a contributing factor may be the introduction of automated teller machines. ATMs let a branch operate with fewer tellers, making it cheaper for banks to open more branches. This likely resulted in more tellers being hired to handle non-automated tasks, but further automation and online banking may reverse this increase.

But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine

All these people theorizing the end of work have never actually worked in a large company, and don’t understand the motivations of people making hiring decisions.

The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts. For careerists, “number of people managed” is a key performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging right).

The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their own careers by being the manager that manages more people - is completely misaligned with these future efficiency hypotheses

As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat and companies hiring way more people than they need.

Right, so more efficiencies could free up resources to hire even more middle managers or administrative staff. It's only natural that well funded startups will have roles for "experience coordinator" or something. You think FAANG would have such a large headcount if they didn't have crazy margins?

There are some other tides working in the favor of bloated salaries and payrolls. One is the focus of "stakeholder capitalism". Most of the large companies are held by ETFs. The large banks that run the ETFs are less concerned about individual efficiencies of any one company (they own them all anyway), but are more interested in other things (green initiatives, social causes, etc). So the decisions being made at these companies are less about profit and more about servicing "stakeholders", be it their employees, the community, the environment. That's all fine, but it's difficult to track and hold executives responsible. A bloated staff is fine because you don't want to lay off employees. Or various money losing departments are okay because they're servicing the community.

I see that in places I've worked. I've always resisted growing my team's headcount as I've seen it break efficiency first hand. However I'm well aware it makes our team less noticed, and less attractive when other companies ask what's my current reporting count as a metric of how senior you are.

You must be me. I have a very strong technical team, and our work is foundational for the product. But it is harder to convey that impact in interviews, compared to saying you have a larger team and manage a large budget. I feel companies don’t value efficiency.

To go from Sr. Manager to Director requires having experiencing managing managers who report to you. How do you get more middle managers? You hire more people.

How do you go from Sr. Manager to Manager, you manage a large team, and create a need to have your org have multiple managers.

So yes, lots of perverse incentives to grow your org so-as to grow your career.

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code written.

Exactly, except that managers do not seem to get judged for striving for that metric.

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of monitors they have.

If there's anything folks like more than reports, its money. Like the savings and goosed stock price from offshoring, especially "offshoring to local robots," which are even more reliable.

Which folks? A lot of careerists and middle-managers on a salary in big corporations don't get profit sharing or options.

Leadership usually doesn't care too much about those folks either.

Counterpoint: if the company actually had good upper management, they will only let the mid level managers grow their team if it brings value to the company.

No org is perfect, but I keep seeing this take again and again and again, yet rarely any form of acknowledgment that it could be good for the company to incentivize proactively growing a team

Banks in the US are not a good example because they are several decades behind the rest of the world. I haven't stepped purposely into a bank except to open an account, in about twenty years.

Fednow should alleviate some of this.

Fednow will be great for most domestic transfers but I still expect any international ones to require either a third party service (Wise, Xoom, etc) or a call/visit to the bank.

Will Fednow not interoperate with SWIFT?

It does (at least when I last looked at FedNow ISO 20022) but that still only handles things until the first out of States routing institution, which means I don’t expect personally (from my experience in the field) for wire transfers and domestic sends to exist on the entirely same rail and payment forms.

> But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?

Population growth doesn't account for regulatory changes and it takes a while to automate anything that interfaces with the law because of the inherent risk in getting it wrong. Banks are acutely exposed to this because they're often the ones who are ultimately responsible - they're the default insurance policy against counterparty risk.

Sure, that makes sense when talking about employee count in aggregate. But specifically the number of bank tellers has doubled. Surely bank tellers should have more tools at their disposal to be more efficient, and surely fewer people would use bank tellers with things like ATMs and online banking. But somehow we have more bank tellers.

Tellers could have gotten twice as efficient and still double in size if the number of transactions requiring human intervention increased four-fold, especially if the move to online banking has driven an increase in fraud and user error. It's a number that scales with regulatory demands, transaction count, total volume, and so on - not number of active users.

Edit: Tellers also tend to be general purpose account managers at smaller banks, so if you called up the bank you'd eventually get forwarded to someone on the floor at your local branch instead of a call center.

Maybe the percentage of people who are unbanked has decreased significantly since ATMs were introduced.

Additionally, people are much more reliant on financial services and payment rails. Credit cards weren't as common (and required for almost everything) 20 years ago. People used cash for probably 10X as many transactions as they do now, so you probably had more 'cash economies'

The invention of things like saddles and carriages only made horses more and more valuable over the years, until automobiles became a more practical replacement.

I think it is hubris to say that anything a human can do cannot eventually be replaced by a machine. When we will actually reach that point is the real question.

The only reason I have interacted with a bank teller for the past 2 decades is to get quarters.

If I could get quarters form an ATM, there would be no reason ever for me to.

What are people using tellers for?

Large counter deposits, cashier's checks. And my parents go in the bank to socialize with the tellers

How do you do a wire transfer from an atm? Even with a private banker I still have to call someone to move money above X amount - I can’t do everything through a web portal. Maybe my bank just sucks, though.

Cashiers Checks!

> What are people using tellers for?

They need to look you in the eyes to see if you are pure of heart and deserve a mortage.

For everything other than $100, $20, & $5 I use a teller. Translates to I use a teller every week or 2. Why? because in many parts of this world cash is still king. Get out of the city for a change. Bring Cash.

My credit union is located near the route I take home from work on not very busy. So I use tellers for everything other than withdrawing cash.

to open accounts, thats it.

Crappy Wells Fargo app can't handle mobile deposits of Western Union and other Money Orders. So, I have to go to a branch, only 2.5 hours away.

Why am I stuck with WF? A longer, boring-er story.

Automation does not remove jobs. It simplifies them, and makes them lower skill and thus lower wage jobs. A bank teller today is a terrible job making terrible wages. It has basically no career trajectory. There may be more of them, but they’re not the same job at all.

The number of tellers is expected to drop by 12% over the next decade while general jobs are expected to grow by 5% according to government forecasts btw.

Being a cashier used to be a tougher job because you needed to know all the inventory. Now it’s ok for a grocery store cashier to not know what parsley is.

If automation makes it practical to do an embarrassingly small task in order to provide a value to someone richer, yeah, you can be hired into it. Maybe a lot of people will. But that’s not prosperity that’s capitalism holding you by the balls.

This reads to me that only being capable of doing an embarrassingly small task is the problem. If that’s your ability, you’d prefer a world where that’s possible to one where the minimum floor for ability is higher than your own.

You’d prefer a job where you can develop some sort of skill and grow at the company; rather than hit a terminal position of sedentary button pusher.

Yes, on average, people would prefer to be more capable rather than less.

Not everyone is equally capable, which implies that some people are on the left side of the distribution. Some jobs that simplify the essential actions bring the job to meet the capabilities of the worker.

It’s a misleading argument. People can be trained on the job for many things and that’s how it’s historically worked.

Lowering the bar is not needed or helpful. People who are so incapable that these jobs are their peak potential should probably just be on social programs.

Why should X% of people be on social programs if 75% of them can type a number from the parsley tag into the computer (or scan the tag on the parsley)? Isn't it a more dignified life to have a purpose of helping your fellow humans select and pay for their groceries than to sit around being paid by a social program because we didn't want to make cashiers' jobs more automated? I think for those people lowering the bar is helpful to their psyche.

(I had a family member, since passed, who was significantly mentally handicapped by a difficult birth sequence. She loved nothing more than to feel like she was included and being helpful to the limits of her ability.)

Being supported by social programs does not mean you can’t work. It just means you’re not going to starve to death if you don’t.

This reminds me of this video:

Jordan Peterson - What Kind Of Job Fits Your IQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mxdrTP-os

That’s because the banks took their 2008 bailouts and built a million branches.

All those branches closed during covid. I have 6 within walking distance and there isn’t a human anywhere.

And yet they're still building new branches left and right!

I count half a dozen Chase branches that have gone up near me in the past few months. I don't get it.

Probably because they've ascertained that one of the key things customers look for in selecting a bank is whether there is a branch near them. Never mind if there is literally anything in there other than an ATM ...

Branches exist for the most part as places for people to open accounts. Everything else is understaffed and exists as a side effect to get more accounts opened at the bank.

Around where I live, they opened branches with 5 atms and maybe 2 people "assisting" account holders with the atms.

> I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs.

It hasn't in 250 years of automation.

For how many thousands of years did innovation only increase the employment of horses? Until suddenly their employment suddenly dropped, and hasn't increased in a century.

Your analogy only works if people are horses. If you could employ a horse as an office manager, you might have something.

Compared to future AI we may be horses. Or even just comparing those who can automate to those who cannot.

Regardless time will tell

The number of people working in agriculture has shrunk significantly.

> But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth.

Perhaps that's not quite the right comparison - even though the population hasnt doubled since 1970, the number of people employed has (80M->160M, approx [0]). Adjusting for that, Bank Teller employment level is basically unchanged.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CE16OV

> I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs

I’m not sure I buy into the bank analogy (probably due more to technology making bank products cheaper/more accessible and thus more customers and thus more bankers) but I definitely buy this.

If you believe fundamentally in basic market dynamics and that humans are generally productive creatures, then any automation that comes about will simply shift where the human labor is most useful, and we will generally always have enough human powered work to go around. The tech and automation is just making it more efficient for everyone.

I don't really find this convincing. Companies have been transitioning from paper for 20 years, and most have superseded it. WFH is hardly a step change.

> WFH is hardly a step change

Psycologically for some it is a massive change - having had numerous colleagues in the past who had core values like "if you are not physically sat at your desk you are not working".

On every metric, excluding commuter congestion and possibly office rental rates - no change.

I used to work in process automation. So you're aware, the reason human CRUD apps exist is to handle edge cases & changing context. Often, it takes more time/money to adequately describe the human process than it does to just do it.

You can see this principle with ERP implementations - they can literally bankrupt an entire company if you get too ambitious with what can be automated.

Edge cases & changing business context aren't going away.

Bingo! The business I work for specializes in and caters to edge cases. It is why we are profitable and we let the big boys do all of the big easy jobs that aren't as profitable.

Does your speciality portfolio of edge cases change over time, e.g. are some eventually handled by bigger companies because they become more common?

Rarely but it has happened. When properly diversified this is only an inconvenience.

> WFH will reduce middle management

In my experience, it's the exact opposite. WFH creates more of a fog of war, so companies end up hiring more managers to stay on top of it.

Some employees are great at self-directed WFH, but many others struggle without the physical, social context of the office to get them focused. Again, companies rely on more managers to compensate for those employees who struggle more with WFH.

I know people will say "Just hire people who are good at WFH", but if we transition large amounts of the workforce to WFH then you can no longer pick-and-choose just the good WFH people. You have to deal with the realities of managing WFH at scale.

You know WFH is bad for non-technical EMs because of how hard they are fighting it.

Senior ICs are split on WFH. Managers who can code are split.

Managers who can’t code are unanimous.

To be fair, if they’re all in the office it’s much easier to see that all the butts are in their seats.

If you try doing that remotely you need permanent surveilance with a webcam, and people get all uppity about it when that happens in their own home.

Oh I agree, but if attendance is a performance metric then the work going on doesn't need an expensive white collar management infrastructure, which I think is part of Dr Burry's point (even though the article is referencing cooked studies about WFH productivity loss and couching the reference in weasel language).

What kind of job has no other measurement for output than time spent in a chair?

Jim is a hard worker, always first in the door and last out at night. - if only you were as committed as Jim, instead of being 2x plan, you would be 4x plan.

Jim sits and watches cat videos on youtube all day - is 0x plan, and will be promoted to being your boss next year.

You seem fairly resolute that knowing if someone has their butt on their seat is useful, but I would invite you to try finding some other metrics that actually measure output, and try rewarding people for performing highly on those metrics. I can tell you, I've seen countless unproductive hours wasted with butts firmly on seats. It's not a good measure of productivity.

What about Junior ICs who need a lot of mentorship and coaching? They are a lot more in number (twice that of Senior ICs in my observation) and almost everyone uniformly asks for more in-person events and more mentors.

In fairness Junior ICs also miss the collegiate atmosphere of going out with all their work friends after the day wraps ;) I was a Junior IC with smart attractive colleagues once…

It is a real issue though and the answer isn’t obvious. I tend to think that something like A16Z’s model will wind up as the end state: modest amounts of flex office space, geographically distributed, with frequent, family-friendly off sites.

Pair-programming software infrastructure will have to improve, and maintaining a hub of urban office space where Senior ICs get a COL bump to be near the young folks will probably be part of it.

It’s a new world, and there will be an adjustment, but there’s enough critical people who simply aren’t going back that it’ll be management’s job to figure it out. I imagine figuring it out well will pay commensurately well.

A simple first-order approximation of your first 3 paragraphs - hybrid model. Companies are discovering that offsites are in fact costlier for the value they provide. Hybrid would require an office and hence a higher cost, but it also has a much bigger bang for the buck.

> but there’s enough critical people who simply aren’t going back that it’ll be management’s job to figure it out

Pendulum is swinging, my friend. With a big recession looming, companies will have all the leverage. Elon has already paved the way and other big companies will soon follow. On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of startups will be bootstrapped in this recession and a majority of startup founders want to have the initial bootstrapping team to be together[0].

[0] Based on my first hand observation working as an advisor for a VC firm.

Your point is taken about the macroeconomic situation (I'm not quite convicted enough to go short but it's a near thing, Q3 earnings are looking to be a shit show).

With that said, we've been through this before: companies always have leverage with many/most of their employees, and that is going even further up for awhile, but Google Search doesn't stay up without a meaningful number of people who have made enough money to not be pushed around.

This is the flip side of being one of the "CEO/VC class" and having a boom decade or two: most of the real pros made some serious money on stock and can't be herded like cattle the way new grads can be.

The American economy has become an experiment in how close you can get to indentured servitude for your working people without calling it that by twisting the macroeconomic knobs until the kid doesn't get medicine unless you hump that bullshit job. I'm sure the money guy who figures out how to do that to hardass infrastructure hackers or founder-caliber kids will be hailed as a hero (in private), but it hasn't happened yet alhamdulillah.

> Again, companies rely on more managers to compensate for those employees who struggle more with WFH.

The tactic never seems to be to hire more people to do the actual work though, curious!

I work for an organization where all the accounting is digital, has been for decades. Yet every miscellaneous expense reimbursement requires a receipt. That physical receipt has to be submitted with an expense report. The physical receipt is then scanned when the expense report is processed, but it is also filed and has to be kept for 7 years, subject to audit.

It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, so it must either be a legal requirement or maybe the organization had a really bad experience with expense fraud and is now paranoid.

They probably find that they save money by making the process so onerous that more people don’t bother to file expense reports.

I see that you have also identified the central value proposition of Concur.

It’s true though. I recently bought a $100 thing for work, and my manager found out I paid for it myself, so told me to expense it through concur.

“You pay me enough that I can afford not to deal with Concur or our expensing process.”

I've wasted more time (and thus salary cost) using Concur than any amount of money the company is 'saving' by making me USE Concur. An asinine, idiotic, cumbersome, SLOW inefficient and often _wrong_ process to book any travel with.

Not sure about US law, but in my country it's fairly similar. The physical copy of the receipt must be kept for 7 years, but "only" for 3 years if you make a digital copy of it. It's quite a hassle if you WFH and expense things, since now you need to bring the physical receipts to the office.

> The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore.

This is all baloney. There is noone organising the information and documents in "modern" companies. There is just a rolling reset of knowledge with an average lifetime of about three years.

> Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times,

They are not behind their times. They are using a system that actually works.

I wish we could just return to the basics for knowledge management. Have bibliographic databases and enforce proper referencing. Have a numbering system to locate things and a standardised classification system. And employ actual people to manage it.

This is going to cut into profits, for sure.

> white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps

Nah, I’ve seen legacy code and how much maintenance it requires. Regular devs are safe.

Let’s take ‘a really big bank’ (you know who); I know tons of people there, with very high paying jobs, who do absolutely nothing that cannot be replaced by a few lines of Python. For many years. You don’t need wfh to automate all these people, and their managers away. Yet this has been true for at least a couple of decades and these people are in demand and get hired for serious amounts of money all the time. Same at other (big) banks. You think this is going to end soon? I see 0 moves towards that; at one team I know they just hired yet another manager (who manages over people who fill spreadsheets from emails and mail them out later) because the current managers felt they were overworked, so now they have 1 managers per 3 people. They can cut out the entire department since at least 2012 but probably since 2002.

> Automation is coming

This has been said over and over. In the 1980's people worried automation would leave lots of people unemployed. And long before in 1931 Keynes [1] predicted we should now be living in a world of abundance. He said our the biggest concern would be how to spend all this free time.

Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries.

Every step you automate opens up new possibilities and more employees are needed. I work as a software engineer now for around 15 years. Never have my software reduced costs, because as soon as my software automates something people want more.

Although I'm skeptical, we could really facing a turning point, Keynes made his predictions for 2030, so we'll see :)

[1] Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931)

> Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries.

I do have a pet-theory that humans aren't well equipped for long-term 9-5 computer thought work. Anecdotally, I see people burning out in < 5 years with thought work careers. People under 30 packing up their careers to go live in a van or whatever it may be.

I really disagree. The past 20 years have shown us that automation is the main driver of white collar job growth.

There are very few industries that haven't already digitized, the ones you mentioned that have human CRUD apps are relatively rare. Accounting, law, healthcare...who else? Basically nobody.

How many new companies exist now because of automation?

Sure, there are some prestige managers out there, but I think their prevalence is overstated. Most managers I know in tech companies are overworked and have no time on their schedule.

"WFH will reduce middle management..." I find that an interesting idea, because at my company the introduction of work from home has increased middle management to herd remote cats. Because you can't just talk anymore, you have to document every last effing thing, and then have interminably long meetings to go over it. I'm skeptical. WFH seems to be a middle manager's dream.

Yeah there is a sense that more pdf certified scrum masters are creeping in everywhere but it soon be visible its all bollox. Any senior dev should be able to manage their time with a nah constantly asking about progress and companies will see little value over time in having these glorified secretaries pollute work processes.

His point 2 of 3

Increasing automation...the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed by office professionals is now being performed by software.

This is not even wrong, in the W. Pauli sense. Just one of the many reasons is enterprise software works less and less for the enterprise that 'rents' it and more and more for the enterprise that controls it.

Everyone hates enterprise software who is on the receiving end of it.

As for the accounting example DM5 uses, ask his partner about when three people have to co-ordinate a fixing a single ppv in a single po. It can take days to fix a single mistake. Meahwhile dozens or hundreds more po's have piled up.

po = purchase order, ppv = purchase price variance 3 people = seperation of duties, because people try to steal.

But then they counterbalance this with the introduction of efficiency sapping regulations and compliance which adds little benefit but lots of overhead/headcount. Let's look at University Administration... instead of automation REDUCING administrative headcount, it has gone UP!!

That just sounds like the company is (badly) lagging frankly - almost all the companies I worked with phased out paper around a decade back with stragglers being ~2015

At this stage I'd welcome any automation in the accounting space but efforts I've seen thus far have not been promising. Domain specific software is tricky - either you get SWE in then they don't know the domain, or the opposite then the code is garbage. That gap means endless meetings and committees about requirements and end user testing in practice even for the most trivial of automations.

Outsourcing is way more likely to kill accounting jobs.

> WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve

It also removes geographic limiters that drive up the cost of certain pools of labour.

timezone and holiday differences are a huge cost at my job. Communication windows easily delay projects 1-14 days.

There is a lot of room for further development in accounting that is not presently happening because so many people are required to file all the lunch receipts. Shortsighted business might fire their staff when they find out how to buy an OCR system but it would be wiser to explore what you can do with people who can collect and collate complex business data with great reliability.

>Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required.

Until some genius writes delete from invoices ...

I don't think that we are nearly close enough to have digital recordkeeping done right.

Ha ha nothing will go away as long as there are “agents” and “licenses” and lawyers for all activities. They could all be disrupted , the technology is definitely there but the elephant will not move a inch to make way for robust technology to make it smaller.

This is almost certainly the line of reasoning that lead to COBOL, and yet here we are with guilds and corporations that still need management to relate to the present and future of their trade's procedures and environment to the real world.

Those paper trails are established by laws. Entire job sectors exist solely because of regulation. What is the probability that politicians and lawyers will agree to remove that legislation

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