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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

I have worked with deps around the world of JPM, GS and others and others and there are not many places I have seen where there are so many replaceable and basically not really employable people. They could’ve been replaced with some code 10 years ago; now it’s only easier. Not necessarily AI but AI won’t make it better for them. These are very large numbers who are only there to pump the number of employees under their managers or some other lame metric.

Of course it does not mean they will do anything about it.

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I'm assuming by "deps" you really meant "devs", and if so, I'd have to agree. I worked in the investment banking world for some years in a back office IT role and there were mini armies of devs there doing the most mundane, basic CRUD style work for years on end getting paid cushy 6-fig salaries. Not FAANG level, but solid nonetheless.

I would not at all be surprised if these large firms hired consultants from places like McKinsey to come by and analyze the work their IT staff is involved in to see how tools like GPT-4 could be leveraged to "streamline" (aka reduce the headcount of) these orgs, and then dramatically restructured them based on their findings. The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads.

> The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads.

People love saying that, but why wouldn't an exec take a multi-$million bonus to cut that dead weight? Or Private equity buy it out to gut it and resell it?

That happens as well, but a little while later the ‘organigram’ under these managers will be the same size or larger as, for some reason, more people under you means more money. And every manager has the same thing, so this happens at every level; I know managers only in title who have 2 persons under them and that entire ‘team’ does exactly nothing outside looking busy and taking pay. That way that ‘manager’ who was supposed to be a leaf in the tree and not a manager, makes more than the people under them, so win for them and the managers above them can boast both more people and more teams, so they get a nicer title and make more. At banks.

I’m convinced most people in investment banking and economic forecasting could be replaced by a monkey pressing buttons

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