No one wants to admit the real reason corporations are laying off thousands | Hacker News Reader

No one wants to admit the real reason corporations are laying off thousands

thehill.com

14 pointsnradov9 comments

I'm of the opinion that over-hiring was a strategic move to make hiring more expensive for competitors. Look up those popular profit-per-employee lists that circulate now and then. Spending $1 to make hiring $1 more expensive for your competition makes business sense. And even if Bob and Sue and Jim and Alice have redundant roles in the company, that's three competitors who couldn't fill that role. Does Google _really_ need a South Lake Union office location? Probably not, the entire building is likely redundant. But it siphons talent from the neighbors.

1 - It ain't actually that simple.

2 - Bureaucratic bloat (and purges thereof) have been talked about since way back in the Old Testament. Though yes, few business leaders want to go on record saying "we've been stupidly squandering money on make-work and do-nothings".

Where do you see purges of bureaucratic bloat in the Old Testament?

It's not spelled out, but my first thought is Genesis 40-41. In a regime where displeasing Pharaoh gets his personal servants imprisoned and killed, things do not look good for all those magicians and wise men who failed to interpret Pharaoh's dream. And likely similar for many who previously held authority over harvested grain.

Daniel 2 is a fairly similar story. Nebuchadnezzar explicitly orders all of Babylon's wise men to be destroyed. Which is averted by Daniel - who ends up appointed as chief prefect over the wise men. Kinda hard to imagine that the new broom isn't gonna do some housecleaning there.

(There are also passages where the OT is solidly pro-bureaucracy. Exodus 18, for example.)

I'd bet there's plenty more, but I'm no biblical scholar.

Fair enough.

A few good observations, but a few missteps.

"AI" (can we just say LLMs?) isn't replacing jobs and more than the steam engine removed our needs for boats. It just made existing boats better, raising individual worker output. The same happened when diesel arrived. Jobs didn't disappear, they shifted from shoveling coal to diesel mechanics.

The jobs in danger are those shown by the article: those doing transactional process, not adding value.

My theory on big layoffs is a few fold: "AI" is a great scapegoat, uneducated CEOs are drinking the koolaide, and the events in the boom economy leading up 2020 resulted in mass over-hirings. Post 2021, when inflation began to become unhinged, corporations began to feel the pinch. Human capital is expensive and it's also hard to shed off of large corporations.

This is painful for everyone, but hopefully we end up in a better place soon.

> The real reason corporations have been laying off people comes down to one word: bloat.

Naw, it's over-regulated markets leading to a scarcity of jobs at lower pay; not enough freedom to start up and build

> AI agents will soon be processing payroll, placing orders, paying suppliers, creating policies, sending out contracts, creating marketing materials, answering customer questions, analyzing profitability, filling out compliance forms, reconciling accounts and posting on social media.

Dystopian fantasy.

tl;dr we are lazy and need to work harder for our corporate overlords

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