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Comment by rakejake | Hacker News Reader

"decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - Very correct. Whether or not AI actually comes for your job, the fact that enough people at the top think so is enough to cause trouble.

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A non-technical friend was asking about the prospects of AI 'taking over' jobs. I told him that I'm less worried about 'Skynet' than I am about 'Slopnet', where bad takes on the applications of 'AI' just make life harder for all of us. That'll come more from decision-maker irrationality than from the tech itself.

This is the problem. Right now we're not in the, I need AI to work or get out stage. We're in the AI might completely upend reality stage.

It's just people telling stories to find bigger fools. Like the ads claiming they sell an AI employee that never needs sleep and never talks back.

Those ads are the same thing as those ads shoved in the lawn near the mcdonnalds drive through that look like they were drawn with sharpie, but are really mass printed. "Real estate investor looking for pupil, trade my money" kind of stuff.

They are purposefully looking for suckers that would overlook the sketchyness. They don't want normal people applying, that reduces the pitches effectiveness.

Only desperate people who will fall for anything.

Same is true for remote work. All the engineers know the return to work policies are dumb but all the decision makers have decided we’re all wrong.

then why don’t they co-locate teams when they get RTO’d? I keep hearing about people who have to go sit in a mandatory hot desk but are still stuck on Zoom all day. Seems like the worst of both worlds

It’s ordinary corporate dysfunction. The mandates come top-down. People in management don’t think too hard about exceptions. The people making decisions are far-removed from the consequences of their decisions.

It’s not really an exception though. These are the same people who spent the last 20 years singing the praises of offshoring and follow-the-sun. It’s just trend chasing.

Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”.

> Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”.

I am curious. Why do you think calling it telecommuting would have made any significant difference? And what difference would it have made? Where do you imagine we would be today if more people referred to it with that word?

My drive-by opinion: "telecommuting" has an advantage in optics/marketing and flexibility over "work from home" for both business leaders and employees. If I tell a board of directors or shareholders that "80% of our workforce performs some fraction of their weekly tasks ______", I imagine the following:

- "from home" elicits images of relaxation and lost productivity, while "via telecommuting" sounds like a commute still takes place and work is just as productive

- "from home" sounds like retreating to a comfort zone, while "via telecommuting" sounds like embracing a new technology or skill

- "from home" sounds like remote workers ought to be performing their tasks from their domicile only, while "via telecommuting" sounds like remote workers can do their work wherever they are

If businesses had adopted "telecommuting" terminology, I believe business leaders would not feel obligated to push back in order to regain productivity. I think it's easier to attack the trend of WFH given the points above. I actually agree with the proposal that WFH is a weak terminology, but had never sat down and thought about it before.

From the perspective of initial adoption, I think it would have happened just as fast. Workers were thrust into remote work arrangements during COVID, and everyone would have quickly gotten the gist of what "telecommuting" means, so it would have been the new buzzword to attract talent in job listings just as "remote" or "work from home" have been. Just without the downsides in CEO perception.

The only problem is that telecommuting is not a new buzzword, it was all the hype in 90s/00s, which is probably reason enough to pick a new word.

Yes and business leaders ate it up. They only pushed back when it was rebranded as “work from home”.

RTOs generally have nothing to do with any of the things they say. They are just layoffs.

You can't argue with them about the effectiveness of remote work. They aren't trying to optimize work. They are trying to fire people.

Working from home doesn't fire people, being more productive and happy doesn't fire people. Your mental well being doesn't have any bearing on how many people they need to fire.

Based on their own gut.

Exactly. It’s less about whether AI can replace certain jobs and more about the fact that companies are making decisions as if it will. That alone reshapes hiring, budgets, and job security

We are still doing scrum-like stuff after all. And they are dragging people back to the office. Decision makers have billions at their disposal to be inefficient with.

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