Hacker News Reader

Comment by realce | Hacker News Reader

> Cisco spokesperson Robyn Blum said in an email to SFGATE that the layoff is meant to allow the company to invest in “key growth opportunities and drive more efficiency in our business.”

Human Labor is no longer a "key growth opportunity" it's looking like?

View on HN

It's actually quite likely something else (unless it's just an excuse to reap short term savings): in a company large enough, deciding to shift staffing from one area to another is hard. As an executive with thousands of staff, you can tell your management team to each cough up a certain number or (somewhat) suitably qualified people. But again, if large enough, incentives diverge, so you don't necessarily end up with the top talent you thought you needed for your big new thing.

An "easy" solution is to do a layoff, then open roles elsewhere, allowing for selection.

It's commonly practiced across the large companies in the industry.

(Not speaking for my employer)

Human labor is a cost to society. The less of it we use per unit of output, the better off we all are. If Cisco can generate their value to society with fewer people that's a good thing. Society gains the additional output those workers will generate in other places.

Sucks to be one of those laid off though.

UBI first, then the AI workforce apocalypse, please.

I think this assumes a lot of efficiency and rapid equilibration in the reallocation of labor. There are real costs and inefficiencies in the job search process and constraints limiting which new jobs these now-displaced workers can actually end up at, and I don't think you can just treat a worker as a value-making widget that pumps out as much value in one job as another.

I'd also add it's not clear to me that labor reduction must lead to better productivity - can't you have a situation where labor reduction (and or wage suppression) actually reduce downstream demand / productivity?

Labor reduction - given constant output - is the definition of better productivity.

But in the limit, where most output could be automated, then there would be no society worth having. Without some fundamental redistribution of how wealth is allocated, anyway.

Really? - that sounds like utopia to me. We don't have to work at things that we don't want to. We can go rock climbing or play music or whatever. And the machines to all the work. We could still make a table or write a program if we want to - for it's own sake.

Yes, of course we have to handle the distribution of the stuff, but that's really a separate problem.

Could go either way; extreme dystopia, or utopia. The issue is how all that wonderful productivity is distributed.

> Human labor is a cost to society.

Human labor is the primary pillar of society and has been for all of human history. Services cannot be utilized without capital, capital cannot be acquired without labor. Remove labor and all of it falls apart, which is somehow acceptable to classes whose resources provide escape and comfort when "society" collapses.

Society isn't just a bunch of people going to a football game, it's the totality of human interaction centered around their commercial interactions.

Elysium is not a society anyone with less than billions of dollars should be advocating for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com