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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee

One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk.

I assumed I’d be welcomed and appreciated for helping make their work more efficient, but the reality was not that simple. The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.

Mind you, the original process was extremely slow and non-parallel so they had a lot of time to wait. The job was still very easy. I spent weeks doing it myself to test and optimize and to this day it’s the easiest manual labor job I’ve ever worked. Yet I as the anti-hero for ruining the good thing they had going.

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  The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up.

Imagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs...

What a great comparison; I've never thought of it this way. It's obviously not perfect since the automation is so temperamental shall we say, but this does give me more empathy for the countless workers whose jobs have been re-natured by technology.

From their prospective, the efficiency increases and more gets done, but the hours and wage stay the same and the number of co-workers may decrease.

I don’t even have to imagine it, you just described my job now that we have LLMs.

I believe that was the point

Reading it back now it does seem pretty obvious. That’s what I get for commenting right after waking up!

All good, it's a Monday morning

efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?

The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model.

There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.

There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.

At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.

Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.

Nursing massively expanded but they didn't want to take it.

You can't expect factory workers to magically turn into nurses. Sure, people can learn new things, but human skillsets are not entirely fungible.

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that.

A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.

Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.

agreed. the "lump of labour" fallacy is a thing -- the idea that there are always more bodies and that it's trivially easy to hire, train / get up to speed, and work them.

in practice hiring and firing is expensive and often very risky. Bjorn the office worker may now be redundant and have a room temperature IQ but he's shown he'll show up on time, sober, and is liked by his coworkers enough, so throwing $5k to retrain him may be a far, far smarter investment then blowing $7k to hire a rando for another position...

Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!

If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough.

then the pendulum swings the other way and now I have ruthless mercenaries chasing $$$ who will jump at the first opportunity

and not every job needs to be top-shelf.

Betty in Accounts-Payable just sorta needs to be there and not screw up too often. I don't need a super-star, and if we have to move her to another part of Accounting that's fine; I'll save my money for a solid CPA or two, etc.

I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society.

I think the key part of that sentence was "...and just needs an advance", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit.

It’s hard for some people to understand that situation until they are in it. Unfortunately.

Totally agree with you.

Why do the laws exist if its better for (almost) everyone involved? Without the laws why would people not do it that way if its the better approach?

Many laws solve the problem of high initial cost dissuading globally good actions. Laws forcing everyone to buy insurance, for example. It's very easy to see that where such laws don't exist, almost no one buys insurance, making everyone worse off.

This is also an example of the same kind of law.

Insurance is an interesting example, I would have expected one that causes more direct harm to others like drunk driving.

How are we all worse off when fewer people have insurance?

Healthy young people are less likely to buy insurance than sick older people. But if only sick older people buy insurance the payouts per insured are going to be higher. That in turn causes high premiums. Insurance works if everyone buys in, pays while they are young and relatively healthy, and gets paid healthcare when they are older and sicker.

If you “game” it, it breaks the whole system.

Now some of you might be thinking “why should a young and healthy guy like myself subsidize the old sick people?” The answer is that you will also get old.

What you are describing isn't really private insurance though, its a privately run socialized healthcare system. There's nothing wrong with that, it simply isn't insurance.

You're right. However, all insurance needs to get more in premiums than it pays out in claims in order to be viable. The details will differ about whether there is some kind of bias for certain people to pay more and claim less. With socialized healthcare, the coverage is just much broader and there is less room for "gaming" the system.

Think of something like home owner insurance. Your insurance rates depend on exactly how your home is built, what type of heating system it has, where it is, etc. The rates, carefully calculated by actuaries, act as a signal to you as to how dangerous your house is to yourself, but also to others. If you set your house on fire due to negligence and cause the next house to burn, you might be liable for damages there as well.

Forcing everyone to buy such insurance forces everyone to fully pay for the expected cost of the danger inherent in their house. Over time, this causes houses to be constructed in a safer manner. If people are not forced to buy insurance, they don't buy it, and so this evolution over time does not happen. Also see [1].

Some financial tools are amazingly clever - whether they are morally good or bad. Bits about Money is a great blog to build insight into some of these constructions [2].

Another example for your initial question is car seats for kids. If you don't force em, nobody buys em. Then their kids die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

[2] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/

For the insurance example, you're describing insurance as a forcing function for better made, safer buildings. That's what building codes are for though, we shouldn't need to have both and building codes are a more efficient and direct way of ensuring safe buildings.

For car seats, I'm not sure how we could know that people wouldn't buy them. I don't expect anyone would propose dropping the requirement to see how the market responds, and probably rightfully so. If car seats are much safer though (and I'm obviously not disputing that), people that can afford one would buy it anyway.

> ... building codes...

I agree that in an ideal world that would be sufficient. But in practice, governments rarely deploy trained actuarial to make decisions, rather relying on politics and shoddy studies. Government codes also change very slowly. Insurance companies (whether private or public), under the financial incentive, are constantly changing their policies and rates in response to new data and calculations. I would be open to looking at studies that resolve this question one way or another.

> ... car seats...

I grew up in a poor global south country. Rich people, who clearly can afford them, don't buy car seats. Many people who live in countries where they are forced to buy car seats, when they come back on vacation don't use car seats for their kids. People can be very irrational.

I'd love to see this argument used to get rid of legal authority to create building codes. You make a great point, and you're effectively pointing to the fact that, at least for that specific problem, the market is much more efficient and solving the problem than government regulations.

The car seats one is tough. If you've seen first hand examples of people actively choosing to forgo car seats, I'm not sure if that's a problem governments should solve. Unless the state directly claims "ownership" as it were in the child, the parent is their legal guardian and if the parent makes a terrible choice they have to live with the repercussions. We don't regulate all decisions that can harm a child, that's a tough line to draw.

Norway has very strict pro-workers laws in general, it's just one facet of them. One Norwegian explained it to me like that: in the late '60 when Norwegian oil industry started developing, workers realized that they can incur great losses on the companies if they organize/unionize and strike together. They used that as a leverage to both change their contracts (to include paid sick leave and such) and also get better working conditions (Norwegian platforms have both better safety and on platform to on land ratio).

And later other trades did the same. Some of the things in contracts trickled down to the law. But still some laws apply only to companies where at least a certain % (is it 50%?) are unionized.

The general picture is more or less like that, but please verify the details.

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human)

Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.

Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.

Incomes are up, but the expenses are up as well, especially with the upcoming changes in healthcare for people on the ACA.

Also any comparison of wage growth vs corporate profit growth over the last 30 years shows that wages have not kept pace with the increase in productivity.

So incomes are only just barely keeping up, when they should be booming.

How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?

Housing is not part of the inflation calculation. There IS a housing inflation crisis.

Household income is more than just wages. Household income can go up while wages remain stagnant or shrinking because other pieces of the pie are increasing (e.g. work benefits, investments, money from the government). https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/09/sources-of-household...

The price of housing can rise even faster than incomes.

Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.

Accommodation costs are the first part of any sensible measure of inflation. If you're not factoring in housing then you're fudging the figures.

Many people don’t see housing inflation - if you bought a house in 2020 and house prices were up 80% since then it doesn’t affect your housing costs, especially in the US where mortgage rates are fixed for length of term even if interest rates sky rocket.

Yes? Who says otherwise?

As long as accommodation isn't 100% of your basket of goods and services you use to measure inflation, accommodation can rise in price faster (or slower) than the basket. This ain't exactly rocket science.

If the mandatory basket item expense raises, it should also become a larger portion of basket, as the basket is supposed to measure the cost of living. So either CPI is not properly measuring the cost of living, or there isn't an affordability crisis.

You cannot have rising inflation adjusted wages and worse spending power, unless the inflation is not being measured meaningfully.

Housing, schooling, healthcare, daycare, food.

Samsung TV purchasing power has skyrocketed, though, so there's that.

Inflation also corrodes your savings and investments.

Yet more and more people are struggling to afford even basic necessities and one can only dream of the luxury of the 50's when a single working class person was able to pay and cover for housing, car, family and even have enough for leisure. Where has all the economic surplus gone? Right...to the bourgeois, the capital owning class that exceedingly extract more and more of the wealth generated by the society.

because the developing world is producing a lot of things except the housing.

They also don't produce haircuts.

On average, most large cap stocks (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, etc) are owned by millions of retail investors through 401Ks, mutual funds, ETFs, and direct ownership.

Median net worth at 40 years old in the US is less than 150k. Most Americans benefit very little from share prices rising, at least directly.

Of the US stock market half is owned by 1%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01122

Actually I believe this graph is half of US-owned equities and mutual funds is owned by the top 1% of Americans right? This doesn't include other extremely large holders such as sovreign wealth funds like norway/singapore or very large pension funds like the ontario teachers fund etc....

The USA is rather unique in its low pensions compared to countries in the EU or Australia (notable for its high contribution rates).

Tech founders (part of the 1%) own about 2% of the stock market.

About 18% is owned by foreign entities.

> If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits

It's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here.

Lower costs only translate into lower prices if sufficient competition is there. That is not true for many markets

That’s the big difference in China. When there is competition for everything —> prices are low. Not a lot of profits for investors, though…

Which markets do you have in mind?

I'm all in favour of lowering barriers to entry, too. We need more competition.

Be that from startups, from foreign companies (like from China), or from companies in other sectors branching out (eg Walmart letting you open bank accounts).

Untrue, most of the time. Even with a monopoly, there's still a demand curve.

Would you rather sell one widget for $1000 or 1000 widgets for $10? Does the answer depend on costs?

The ROI for a large corporation tends to be around 10%.

Everybody can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. It's pretty easy.

If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.

(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.

The labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)

Everyone with excess disposable income can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company.

The oligarchy of the CxOs and boards and cross-pollination has led to concentration of the rewards of companies into the their hands, compared to 40 years ago.

All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.

The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.

> All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity [...]

What your evidence for that? See https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... for a good account.

> [...] and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.

You seem very confused about how capital markets work. Are you also suggesting buy backs are morally different from dividends?

In any case, the whole point of investing (at least to the investor) is to eventually get more money back than you put in. Returning money to investor is not a bug, it's the point.

> The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.

Blame voters.

There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades.

And someone don't need to look further than this quite interesting report by the Rand Corp: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.

Income is the wrong measurement. Total employee compensation is the more accurate one, and averages around 145% of salaries.

Total employee compensation includes things like the value of employer provided health insurance.

What's your evidence for that?

It's narrow vs wide views. Wide views, automation and the like has improved the economies massively. But narrow views, people have lost their jobs, had to retrain and basically restart their career, and some never found another job.

This isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee.

I've not seen a correlation between automation and wealth, though there is an extremely string correlation between energy use and wealth.

I don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example).

> It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards

yeah but it's clear that we're not doing that, and are arguably going the other direction as hard as possible

> removing human labor from production

Karl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

You might notice that Karl Marx isn't exactly the pinnacle of economics.

Quoting Marx is a bit like quoting Aristotle or Ptolemy.

"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever.

This is putting the apple cart before the horse.

Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".

Very true. We waste alot of valuable labor on “software engineering” that is grossly inefficient. Capital gets allocated to these so called startups that are incredibly inefficient.

This says a lot as relating to the rise of AI and the fear of job loss. There's going to be displacement in areas we can't predict, but overall it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.

> it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.

How could that possibly work?

At some point I could see white collar work trending down fast, in a way that radically increased the value of blue color work. Software gets cheaper much faster than hardware.

But then the innovation and investments go into smart hardware, and robotics effectiveness/cost goes up.

If you can see a path where AI isn't a one-generational transition to most human (economic) obsolescence, I would certainly be interested in the principle or mechanism you see.

Craftsmen will have a resurgence, that's probably a 'leveling up' in terms of resilience against AI takeover. There's just no way of automating quite a few of the physically effective crafts.

So the rich who can afford craftsmen will get richer, spend more on their multiple houses, perhaps. But that's literal crumbs, one or two jobs out of tens of thousands. There's no significant "leveling up" there at the societal levels of job destruction we're talking about.

I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly.

They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".

> refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian"

If they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”!

How do you feel about the whole thing years later?

Back in the day one company had a dedicated copier operator who was very unhappy after a Xerox service tech did away with the job by enabling the network printing and scan to email functions. The customer had upgraded their old copier out of necessity but had never changed their workflow.

This will not be unusual for any kind of software engineering work to be honest. A big chunk of work in B2C companies has to do with customer support, for example; building websites, apps, writing content, chatbots, etc with the objective being that people do not call customer support, because people on phones don't scale very well. And the other part is that when they do call, that the CS agent can address the issue quickly and has minimal administrative overhead.

But it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that.

I had that on my very first project. I couldn’t understand why the people on site were so hostile to me. Afterwards I was talking to the salesman about this and he told me they were all fired when the project went live.

> So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.

Couldn't help but imagining Darryl getting mad at you.

Thanks for the story!

Yup same story here, also warehouse optimization. I was the reason the employees got new scanners and oh my... the scanners didn't have a physical keyboard. Now all the 50yo+ would have to aim on a touch display which is apparently impossible.

Also we had to introduce some fixed locations and storage placement recommendations. Our storage workers almost revolted. After a few months it settled though.

Yous story is not about optimization: it is about change imposed to people who did not request it, nor felt the need of it.

It 100% was about optimization. Introducing new devices, with more capabilities (storage place recommendations for example), that weren't 10 years old and broke every 2 weeks is optimizing.

> The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.

The faster the LLM spits out garbage code, the more time I get to spend reviewing slop and dealing with it gaslighting me, and the less time I get to spend on doing the parts of the job I actually enjoy.

Mandatory reference: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer

insane mindset. This kind of thing is why there is no industry left in anglosphere outside US

Insane mindset that people should work modestly, get paid modestly and live in the fruits of a wealthy society? As opposed to breaking their backs to make a boss even wealthier?

The efficiencies are always to the benefit of the wealthy, the wage gap grows. You work hard, you still get fired.

Cap top wages to 5x the lowest, companies can't own housing except socially beneficial housing, individuals get 2 house maximum.

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