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Comment by awfulneutral | Hacker News Reader

That thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.

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I think the bigger issue is that management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working. Output could be higher with less people but the situation that managers have crafted is the maximum number of people with minimum level of output. Not good.

The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.

Because that's the incentive that management faces. Their promotion is dependent upon having more headcount under them. The key metric in their resume that determines which jobs they are qualified for is how many people did they manage. They don't personally pay for that headcount. If they meet some baseline of output people don't really ask questions (or are able to judge) whether that headcount was necessary. So of course they seek more headcount.

I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.

> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working

they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest

This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.

Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.

This is the take nobody is ready for! Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.

It’s more nuanced than that. There are lines of business where there is plenty of growth and places where growth has stagnated or business is decelerating.

In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them.

So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.

These businesses didn't stop growing. They grew by how you say. Steady growth into adjacent markets and acquisitions. Not through innovative new products.

It's just a different mindset. It's no longer move fast and be first. It's well we'll get there eventually. Let's do it cost constrained and with minimal risk.

I agree that a lot of people aren’t working at 100% and a lot of the work was probably needless busywork.

I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.

Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.

The article isn't about people in software.

It's about professions like paralegals, translators, office type jobs.

And no, those people can't just be fired without some replacement -- they do actual work that is necessary for these companies to function.

But now they are being replaced, and it's not like they'll find some other job because the "other jobs" are also threatened by AI.

Not a good outcome.

That sounds like a statement from a pig that hopes they've been nice and useful enough to their farmer to avoid being tasty bacon.

This is a conspiracy theory, but I suspect that VC-backed tech industry overhiring circa 2020/2021 was partially done to give this impression.

I don't think so. During that time the potential of LLMs to eliminate work wasn't obvious. That was pre-hype explosion.

I think some attentive VCs couldve predicted this.

Paper from OAI 2020 about scaling laws: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361 The idea that you can make a system smarter by just putting in more money is very appealing. The earliest OAI coding model is here (Aug 2021): https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/

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