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> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. Maybe in some imaginary world with spherical cows, infin

> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. Maybe in some imaginary world with spherical cows, infinite demand, and no friction (physical or transactional). In the real world, increasing productivity so that one person can do the job that ten used to do very often results in layoffs. 70 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard operators in the US. Productivity increased and they got laid off.

ddingus 5y ago
Reducing head count is literally the core sales pitch for a ton of software and or solutions out there today. They won't put that in the end user facing presentation, but you can count on it being part of the executive pitch.
afrodc_ 5y ago
This is so true. Anecdotally, my dad worked in FABs on chips and stuff in the 90s during the dot com boom before they stripped all those jobs away to outsourcing and it basically destroyed him as an older man. Funny how we're desperately trying to get the silicon manufacturing back after we sold out.
- spc476 5y ago
  "Hey, it improved the financials since it moved from capex to opex. Also, I got my bonus and jumped ship before the excrement hit the cooling unit." Yeah, several years ago, our corporate overlords sold off a database we created to a competitor and leased it back from them. Now, we're trying to recreate that database to avoid the financial overhead. I'm sure at the time it made sense to some bean counter but it was penny-wise, pound-foolish in the long term. I think now it's impossible to think long term financially. Thanks, Wall Street.
deltree7 5y ago
once again this is a clueless understanding of increasing productivity. If I build a tool and make a person irrelevent, then I didn't increase productivity of the laid-off worker. I merely increased my own productivity. What OP said was his tool specifically increased the productivity of all other users, which means his team can churn out features faster. Show me a management team that says no to it
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  That's easy: a management team that only needs ~X new features per month, not 4X. No organization has an infinite demand for features. If they currently have 50 devs working on the platform, maybe after quadrupling the productivity of each dev they'll keep 20. Speed of development increases by 60% and they save 30 developers worth of expenses, which means hefty end-of-year bonuses for every manager up the chain. More likely they keep about 13-15. It's naive and boneheaded to insist that productivity increases never result in layoffs.

ddingus 5y ago

Reducing head count is literally the core sales pitch for a ton of software and or solutions out there today. They won't put that in the end user facing presentation, but you can count on it being part of the executive pitch.

afrodc_ 5y ago

This is so true. Anecdotally, my dad worked in FABs on chips and stuff in the 90s during the dot com boom before they stripped all those jobs away to outsourcing and it basically destroyed him as an older man. Funny how we're desperately trying to get the silicon manufacturing back after we sold out.

spc476 5y ago
"Hey, it improved the financials since it moved from capex to opex. Also, I got my bonus and jumped ship before the excrement hit the cooling unit." Yeah, several years ago, our corporate overlords sold off a database we created to a competitor and leased it back from them. Now, we're trying to recreate that database to avoid the financial overhead. I'm sure at the time it made sense to some bean counter but it was penny-wise, pound-foolish in the long term. I think now it's impossible to think long term financially. Thanks, Wall Street.

deltree7 5y ago

once again this is a clueless understanding of increasing productivity. If I build a tool and make a person irrelevent, then I didn't increase productivity of the laid-off worker. I merely increased my own productivity. What OP said was his tool specifically increased the productivity of all other users, which means his team can churn out features faster. Show me a management team that says no to it

CrazyStat 5y ago
That's easy: a management team that only needs ~X new features per month, not 4X. No organization has an infinite demand for features. If they currently have 50 devs working on the platform, maybe after quadrupling the productivity of each dev they'll keep 20. Speed of development increases by 60% and they save 30 developers worth of expenses, which means hefty end-of-year bonuses for every manager up the chain. More likely they keep about 13-15. It's naive and boneheaded to insist that productivity increases never result in layoffs.