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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

>Being adaptable now is more important than ever.

I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.

>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.

I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.

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> At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.

When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.

The key is to never let them know you're not working. Deliver the output they want. Whether you personally created that output or a machine is irrelevant.

Labor, just like any market relies on information asymmetry. Your company is in business because it manages to sell something at a higher price than the cost it incurs producing it. Your company will absolutely not give away its "secret sauce" to their customers so they can go off and do it themselves and stop paying.

You should act the same; if you have "secret sauce" that allows you to deliver the expected output quicker, enjoy the free time or put it to use elsewhere.

it's called being the employer. if you own the capital and you automate the labor then it's your call what to do with the extra time

> When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.

This was most employers during COVID :-)

I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.

I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour.

As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again?

"Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion.

All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.

The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day.

We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic.

There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic.

Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy

On the cheat topic: don't forget things like 'r/overemployed'. People truly taking advantage of, and ruining, what could be a nice situation. Sure, some of it's made up, but the response is certainly genuine.

CEOs and middle-management are loud and clear: get back to the office/work yourselves to the bone. I've never had to attend so many pointless Teams calls just to prove presence... until this started making the rounds. I've been WFH for nearly ten years. I didn't stop caring until they started. Funny, isn't it?

Anyway, we're rambling a bit. Why such a soft apologist? They care. And? These still mean the same thing as fifty years ago: 'salary', 'exempt', and 'at will'. If you mean the peers: well, comparison remains the thief of joy. Management probably also wouldn't want us discussing comp, eh?

I hope my point is clear, it's not our place to worry. This is a business transaction, the terms were well-defined. A coworker being upset that you Did Good and Was Rewarded is insanity. Go after the employer, not your peer.

  > Why such a soft apologist?

To be clear, I'm not defending them. I'm doing the opposite...

  > I didn't stop caring until they started

I've never been a "loud laborer" but boy is it crazy how far those people go now. What little work they can get done as long as they do it loudly... (and I'm not criticizing the employee for this, I'm criticizing the one rewarding them. Same reason about comp. I've never been upset at a coworker who is making significantly more than me. I don't feel cheated by them. I feel cheated by the person who duped me into thinking my rate was the wage.)

> To be clear, I'm not defending them. I'm doing the opposite...

My mistake. Much of this read like an appeal, their finances, challenges, and so on are utterly irrelevant. We're employees. Beyond the ability to maintain their contracts, we should not care.

The employers can want with one hand and shit in the other, see which fills first.

Ah, I see. Yeah, I was saying what they want and claim but contrasting. Like how they scream that times are hard as their stock goes up. That tells me times are not so hard. I'm not sure why we continue to buy it.

Adversity and triumph make for a great story! Nevermind that is what's really manufactured. A worse form of construction.

I saw a very different perspective. Some of the people who got to WFH for the first time thought they were getting away with working less because they could bang out Slack replies on their phone when the notification bell came in, but it was really rather obvious that many weren’t working as much.

I’m still salty about it because the people who played this game poisoned the WFH situation for the rest of us who didn’t use COVID as an excuse to work less and try to pretend we were working more.

> At work, you must be at work doing something else

Speak for yourself, salary means I'm done when the work is. I encourage you to enjoy the hike, book, whatever. That said, I truly hate the induced demand LLMs offer.

That works short-term. Long-term, expectations of productivity catch up, and you either deliver more or get laid off. It's a treadmill not a mountain.

Eh, it's worked well for a couple decades. Pointed effort beats toil, every time. Layoffs are like the tide, do you like the beach?

I thought the same... Then I got laid off. It can happen, not certain it will happen to you, and delivering quality certainly matters more than loc or stupid metrics. Glad you're in a good situation

You say this as if I've never been laid off before. I have, because of acquisitions and even poor performance after the loss of a family member.

My point is this: it's going to happen anyway. I refuse to over-extend [any more] to stave the inevitable. I'm in a good spot because I have a solid network (contacts/skills) and reasonable savings.

I'm sure the employer would be mad to know I'm posting right now, I don't care. Their fault for allowing me to automate!

Ok, we're 100% aligning. I was taking care of myself, because I was on the way to bad burnout, and wasn't delivering what I had during the "honeymoon" with that company. Despite feeling like a lynchpin in the organization, I was blindsided by a layoff. Now I'm a professional woodworker and don't give a shit about any of that anymore. Cheers!

The wood turns on you, but never like that. Cheers indeed! Enjoy and stay safe out there.

@bravetraveler You edited after I replied. Chill, we're not disagreeing

Totally fair, my emphasis remains though: protect yourself, not your role/position. edit: enjoy the woodworking, you're there already :)

Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that.

I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.

> But you wouldn't get paid for that.f

Maybe you wouldn't, but you definitely should. Knowledge workers aren't paid for their labor (in the form of me trading my time and effort for wages), knowledge workers are paid for impact. I'm trading my ability to reason, decide, and create value for the company.

I'm valuable not because I sit at a desk and type for 8 hours. I'm valuable because the outputs of my thinking help move the company forward. My employer isn't buying 8 hours of my time , they're buying the outputs that come from expertise and judgement.

So if I automate something, the company still receives the same value the pay me for whether I perform the task manually or build something that automates it. I work in ops, so if I use ansible and a script to automate patching 100 servers instead of doing it by hand, my employers gets the same result: patched systems. The automation didn't diminish my contribution, it proved it. I get paid the same either way.

In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else. It's not payment for activity or time.

These are contradictory claims:

>In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else.

>It's not payment for activity or time.

If the latter statement is true, then you must not have any mandatory hours to be present.

If you do have mandatory hours to be present, then the latter statement is not true.

>> My employer isn't buying 8 hours of my time , they're buying the outputs that come from expertise and judgement

I'm pretty sure your typical managers don't think so.

There are a few managers who think the same way, but not that many.

I think the problem is if/when AGI enables "someone else" to not need human employees for ~anything. The people that own physical capital (land, farms, mines, etc.) would have robots and GPT-N to extract value from it. The people who survive based on their labor are SOL. I think it is reasonable that many people won't be excited about that kind of automation.

The problem is capitalism, not automation.

I don't disagree.

Social/economic stratification (to a certain degree) makes sense as long as there is a reasonable amount of social mobility. AGI paired with advanced robotics seems as though it would all but eliminate social mobility. What would your options be? Politics, celebrity, or a small number of jobs where the human element is essential? I think the economic system needs to dramatically change if/when we reach that point (and ideally before, so people don't suffer in the transition).

Of course, but then why would I be excited about automation? I can imagine that the executives and shareholders could be excited for automation, but I'm not sure that it benefits me whatsoever.

Automation reduces cost of goods sold, so in a market with multiple sellers, it leads to lower prices.

Also, almost everyone is a shareholder, directly or indirectly by being a taxpayer and shouldering the cost of pensions, which are invested in businesses.

The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.

When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.

I get that they're connected, but it isn't hard to see why people bemoan classifying humans as a cost and eliminating their ability to receive food and shelter.

The person shopping at Costco or choosing a cheaper roof installer who can work more efficiently with fewer humans is doing the same thing - “classifying humans as a cost”.

Choosing to clean your own house instead of hiring a house cleaner, cooking your own food, doing your own landscaping, driving your own car, all of these are “classifying humans as a cost”.

I probably could afford a maid and landscaper, but I don’t because I would rather keep the money. When an employer does that, it is somehow different.

people complain all the time that Walmart and dollar tree drive local groceries out of business though

Distilling everything to pure numbers in a spreadsheet is one of the problems of this type of economy.

The executives and shareholders will only be excited about the first order effects of widespread automation like this.

They will be less excited about the second order - a steady loss of revenue as whole professions are automated and people can't find a well paying job.

The third order will be even worse when no one has a job or money to buy anything.

People always point to the industrial revolution. But that created millions of jobs before it obsoleted millions of jobs - you needed workers to create tractors. This wave seems to be shaping up much more like what happened to the rust belt in the late 20th century, regions which still haven't recovered. However this time it'll hit pretty much everyone, everywhere.

Good luck with that capitalism.

I concur capitalism has it's problems but if this means we move back to feudalism I think we can safely say that will be worse.

>> you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing

Right, like drinking coffee at the kitchen in the office.

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