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IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
- RobLach 4y agoIf jobs are being replaced by AI I would think a company in IBM's position would be hiring to help offer those transitions as a product.
- voxadam 4y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35780706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35780706
- rkagerer 4y agoHah! Good luck with that.
- wunderland 4y agoThe original story from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pause-hiring-for-back-office-jobs-that-ai-could-kill https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pa...
- rob74 4y ago> More mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said. ...and if some employees quit out of frustration about being managed by AI (being "moved between departments" at the whim of an AI sounds pretty spooky to me at least), even better!
- daniel_iversen 4y agoIt says "moving" employees which maybe implies voluntary, so "internal mobility" in other words which can create a lot of admin (business need, cost centres, levels, specs, visas etc etc). It'll perhaps be a while before the AI overlord runs the entire company and just moves us at it's whim and treats us all as Amazon Mechanical Turks[1] :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
- AlecSchueler 4y agoI took it more to mean that the paperwork involved in the move would be automated, rather than the decision to move.
- lynx23 4y agoI doubt there is much of a difference between typical brainless human management, and AI management. Maybe AI is even better, that is at least likely.
- jzb 4y agoIt won’t be. AI will be trained on human input, after all. And it will be even harder to appeal or reason against.
- XorNot 4y agoI actually can't wait till I'm managed by AI. At least with an AI there's the high probability it will get better. In fact most likely it'll just be the same gradually improving system which I can converse with for the rest of my career. Whereas with human managers who knows? Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad, it's a reset every time.
- nullsense 4y agoIf it's trained on data human managers then it'll just burn you out and emotionally manipulate you into staying with the company longer to maximize corporate profits. ...or your life could become utopia. Who knows?
- 0zemp2c 4y agoIts easy to make a headline by claiming AI will eventually replace people you never intended to hire anyway
- sammalloy 4y agoAnd strangely, they never replace CEOs, who earn more than 200 times what workers earn. One would think, that would be a priority.
- prepend 4y agoMy experience is that there are lots of BS consulting jobs where I would wonder “what do these 10 people do?” This included lots of offshoring companies, like IBM, that seemed more about filling out whatever the budget sheet given to them than actually making software or even any evidence of software (commits, issues, etc). I expect that there are firms out there right now using ChatGPT to produce the facade of work so instead of messing around and billing 8 hours times 30 people every day, they just have a few people fiddling with prompts and checking in the generated text. I actually think this might have the same impact but would hope that the value just goes back to the client in having employees do the AI work directly. The joke was that behind every successful offshore project was one or two really busy onshore engineers manically covering and integrating work from the away team.
- soco 4y agoThe question is, can IBM place those consultants at customers and get paid for them? Then they're definitely not "BS jobs" for IBM. They might be BS for the person interacting directly with them, yes, but I see no reason for IBM to reduce them.
- isoos 4y agoI know a company that already reaches test coverage metric goals by feeding chatgpt with code that they need test for. These are tests based on mocks, running trivial things, providing little to no value to the overall codebase. But if the requirements are garbage, the delivered items will be garbage too.
- moffkalast 4y agoConsulting jobs are largely bullshit because their main role is to be a corporate mercenary that makes up solid data supporting the direction that management wants to go. Their job is weaponizing confirmation bias. Relevant: https://twitter.com/ConsultingHumor https://twitter.com/ConsultingHumor
- jiggawatts 4y agoThat's unfair and inaccurate. We also serve as convenient scape goats in case risky projects go bad.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And having been exposed to some of that stuff, they aren't very good at it even but they can still get some things done. They still have lots of ancient tech from last century that they support of course. But mostly a new company starting their business today would have very little reason to engage with IBM on anything. There's very little that they do that you can't get cheaper and better elsewhere. So, IBM using this opportunity to cut down their own org tree a bit more and "replace it with AI" (or simply drop some people) is not unexpected. Because consulting related to doing exactly that is probably what they'll be selling a lot for the next few years. Basically, as world + dog is trying to figure out how to fit AI into their businesses, consulting related to that is going to be booming. And IBM is a consulting company. A lot of their previous efforts are actually powering the backoffice of course. So now that AI is going to replace all of that, that basically means there is going to be a lot of consulting happening as to how that would work. So that's a good business opportunity.
- aflag 4y agoThat's a very cynical view. It might be true, but I hardly think they were just waiting for the perfect opportunity. If it made business sense before, they would've already been halting their hiring.
- wesapien 4y agoA lot of corporations are replacing humans jobs instead of enhancing them with new tech like what the tech gurus say during their TED talks about the benefits of X tech. Another reason to flip cars.
- qualudeheart 4y agoSmart Money flips houses. The Smartest Money flips GPUs.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agonice way to try and pump your stock price. similar to that google guy who left because Google's AI is about to become a sentient, nice little boost to the retirement fund.
- hgsgm 4y agoHe said he left because it's dangerous, not sentient.
- Dr_Birdbrain 4y agoI think parent comment was talking about Lemoine, who never claimed the AI was dangerous, but rather that it was sentient and not being given the rights it deserved.
- gumballindie 4y agoNah, they are letting 7800 people go because of poor business practices. The AI thingie is to save face.
- willis936 4y agoStrangely I think they would have saved face better if they said "we are letting 7800 people go due to poor business practices" rather than some BS line about LLMs being ready to replace humans.
- gumballindie 4y agoIBM hasn't been making logical decissions recently (past decade or so) and this fits the pattern. It's actually rather embarassing they even mention the term AI considering they've been playing with it for a while and nothing came out of it. They should stick to low quality consulting and call it a day.
- jonas21 4y agoNah, you have to look at this from the perspective of IBM's target customers. A bunch of Fortune 500 execs who can barely use a computer are going to see this and say "That's brilliant! Can you do the same thing for us?"
- caporaltito 4y agoAlso, their competitors are better at AI, they basically use it to say they fire people because of their competitors.
- sumoboy 4y agoPoor middle management, those should be the majority of the people to let go.
- oofta-boofta 4y agoThat's literally every tech company. Middle managers, product owners, project managers, etc can all go.
- kypro 4y agoI won't comment on whether this is good or even workable idea, but I will acknowledge this announcement is kinda genius. Playing into fears about AI replacing large segments of the labour force in the coming years invites calls for regulators to slow down their competition. While at the same time this announcement makes investors happy because IBM is signalling that they're looking to both cut costs and embrace AI.
- jzb 4y agoThis assumes that IBM is not serious about trying to replace jobs, but is trying to make a strategic 3D chess move. I'm very skeptical that this is the case. But, let's say it is. It might play well with investors, but the idea that it's going to spur regulation or legislation to slow down AI development seems optimistic at best. That assumes a government and elected officials who are looking out for workers and not the investors who are going to be giddy about this. In the U.S., at least, government has been actively trying to suppress wages and maintain higher levels of unemployment. Why would this spur any action to slow down AI?
- agloe_dreams 4y agoI would note that IBM is like 80% middle management. At this scale, one could easily make an AI tool that generates powerpoint presentations from an email, present it to a different AI that can create an email with the bullet points that can then be read by another AI...
- SilverBirch 4y agoThis is like how Kodak pivoted to crypto. It's chasing a short term stock market bump at the cost of being absolutely bollocks. Or maybe I'm being unfair and they're smarter and actually this is just a ruse to avoid more lawsuits for age discrimination in their firing practices. Either way, it's more of a sign that IBM is in trouble than AI is really breaking through.
- rvz 4y agoOh well. Typical good ol' IBM shapeshifting again. They also know it is time to learn to c̶o̶d̶e̶ adapt.
- afrcnc 4y ago[dead]
- seu 4y agoAI will not replace humans. IBM's CEOs and managers will replace humans with AI. Shareholders will force IBM to replace humans with AI. Let us stop blaming the only thing that is _not_ making any decision. Capitalism is a powerful idea that will kill the same people that vouch for it.
- jzb 4y agoThis makes as much sense as “guns don’t kill people, people do.” AI tech is being driven by capitalism. The reason companies are so eager to embrace it is to replace people. If you’re in the AI business or advocating for it, you’re (at least in part) an arms supplier for cutting jobs.
- sitkack 4y agoThe end goal is for The Board (maybe) and the shareholders to be human. Everyone else can get replaced with automation.
- qualudeheart 4y agoManagers will do every job.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ResearchCode 4y agoAI will do management.
- patwolf 4y agoPerhaps they're trying to create FUD around AI destroying jobs with the hopes that governments will restrict AI development.
- rchaud 4y agoRemember when IBM was claiming all kinds of imminent breakthroughs in healthcare via their Watson AI project? Sad that they have to now resort to digital outsourcing to pump the stock price.
- pulse7 4y agoI think that AI is just an excuse here... They wanted to cut jobs anyway but they say AI is the cause (which is not), just to be "in trend"...
- ep103 4y agoIBM lays off 10% of workforce is literally a yearly headline As are IBM sued for age discrimination, and IBM closes product line
- roncesvalles 4y ago>Krishna said in an interview he believes around 30% of about 26,000 non-customer-facing positions, like human resources jobs, could be replaced by AI over a five-year period—amounting to about 7,800 lost jobs. HR duties like documenting employee moves to different departments and writing employment verification letters will likely be among the first rolled over to AI, Krishna told Bloomberg. Jobs focused on interacting with customers and developing software at the 260,000-worker strong company should not be impacted in coming years, according to Krishna. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-will-stop-hiring-humans-for-jobs-ai-can-do-report-says/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-...
- hgsgm 4y agoThe names tasks are already automated without AI. Who need a generative LLM text to print a receipt?
- roncesvalles 4y agoStarkly reminiscent of blockchain. Many "blockchain problems" were really just software problems. Coincidentally, IBM also went all-in on blockchain before quietly abandoning it sometime last year. IBM seems to be run by very gullible people.
- admax88qqq 4y agoMore likely they are just saying this to get in the headlines as a "Look IBM is AI too" story.
- retrocryptid 4y agoIBM is still alive? Hunh. You learn something new every day.
- shahbaby 4y agoIt makes sense. IBM is primarily a consulting company pretending to be a tech company, run by business majors.
- fdye 4y agoThis is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..." Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.
- d--b 4y agoThey don’t even have to spend anything on ChatGPT, they can say they’re using Watson!
- gitfan86 4y agoYes, they have done things like this before. IBM is good at PR.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoYep if you read what the CEO said the quote was that they "could" replace workers with AI over five years and as the tech improves. That's just pure speculation and bullshitting, like when Elon said Tesla cars will be fully self driving vehicles in five years. It's market pumping talk from a company with a vested interest in selling "AI" to enterprises.
- RoyGBivCap 4y ago[flagged]
- t43562 4y agoIBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part. I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence board members. So to get your project past a lot of people who basically don't respect or believe in nerds you had to hire a company with non-nerdy salesmen to back you up. i.e. the entire thing is social. And just because the nerds (us) have trounced them for the last N years, it doesn't mean that the world has converted into 100% nerd. Shiny shoed salesmen are probably still quite necessary. I joined as part of an acquisition. I am probably biased but they spent a year making the product multilingual and not fixing anything. Everyone knows the name of the Open Source knock-off of that product but not the name of the product anymore. It's probably still there taking almost no investment of effort. So I got the impression that IBM is a company where software goes to live out its old age and die. I think of Redhat (perhaps unfairly) with their super complicated Linux distribution which must be a nightmare to maintain because it does so many things and needs to keep long compatibility guarantees. I'm not expecting any innovation whatsoever from them. Perhaps this is very unfair and ignorant of me. I'm happy to be corrected.
- Gooblebrai 4y agoHow do you think selling is being handled nowadays that the nerd percentage has increased within the companies?
- t43562 4y agoThe salesmen have adapted to a new style with smart casual clothes. They have a new vocabulary and perhaps ride mountain bikes instead of playing golf. They still mock technical knowledge by wading around in a new sea of acronyms which they don't truly understand or care about. Think of the CEO of a company that makes a build system - every 10th word at one point in time might have been "CD" which means Continuous Delivery which is something his own company never did. But it's the most important thing in the world for that year or two and lots of sententious things are said about it without any connection to the possibility of "walking the walk" to use one of their favorite and least honest terms. As a technical person one listens to them and wonders what planet they came from and how they could possibly have any connection with the reality of the business they're supposed to be running. But... they're salesmen and have sold themselves as the first product. They know what impresses non-technical people and it isn't the plain honest truth. I think it boils down to some facts: we have it better than it has been for a long time but there are real situations where one must be a master of bullshit and have the ability to appear supremely confident and all-knowing whilst actually knowing very little. This confidence founded on nothing transmits itself to other people. If you are lucky and appear to be a winner or if you can hide your mistakes and advertise your success then people will take your lead or offer you opportunities.
- JCM9 4y agoIBM is known for its marketing BS over “AI” (see the previous fiasco surrounding the trail of unfulfilled hype with Watson) but this one really takes the cake. IBM has long been struggling. They could release a press release saying they’re pausing hiring because businesses are underperforming. Or they could play the news cycle and say it’s because of how awesome their “AI” is. Interpret that as you wish.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI see this as a sales pitch for consulting, they want people to hire them to transform their companies from overseas outsourcing to AI outsourcing. Doing it to themselves first serves as a case study.
- retrocryptid 4y agoI am sad J. G. Ballard is no longer with us to comment on IBM's plan. IBM is replacing humans, who can identify an exceptional events which weren't anticipated by planners, with AI, which only regurgitates past training data. I'm sort of imagining IBM human resources department now as some hellish mashup of Ionesco, Nietzsche and Ballard (with a piquant dollop of THX 1138 to provide that absurdist, institutionalized aroma IBM seemed to love.) At least the TVA was smart enough to recruit biological entities to run it's bureaucracy.
- blacksmith_tb 4y agoHmm, all my experiences with the old, more-human IBM (randomly powering off VMs, randomly breaking the UI for cloud admin, etc.) have been pretty much Kafka all the way, so maybe this will be an improvement (though not for the 8K employees who will be replaced).
- retrocryptid 4y agoI can only talk to my experience at IBM on-and-off from '89 through '94. There were many things wrong with IBM, but at least through '94, internal processes were fairly solid. Compare that to my current firm, where we wasted three days of employee time trying to figure out how to get Workday to properly render the text area I was supposed to use to provide employee evaluations. (This doesn't include the days it took to find someone in HR who understood what Workday was and had an idea who in the company managed it. It turns out that employees are given access roles in Workday (not really a bad idea) but our humans didn't understand that only people with specific roles could create surveys with form elements regular users could fill in. We apparently fired the people who knew that during the last round of layoffs.)
- jmount 4y agoGonna be funny watching IBM apply their consulting methodology to themselves.
- hinkley 4y agoNow IBM will be able to create solutions so complex that even their own people don’t understand them.
- anttiharju 4y agoIdk how fair that is but reminded me of the email fiasco some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706128
- dboreham 4y agoCould definitely replace the press release writing dept. with AI.
- Ologn 4y agoAs has been posted in a few submissions today (including one of my own) - Chegg stock lost half its value today after announcing how ChatGPT is affecting its business. Pearson stock tanked today too. Meanwhile Nvidia stock hit its 365 day high yesterday.
- justinzollars 4y agoI wonder how long our jobs last?
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- flenserboy 4y agoThis is why companies should consider just doing things, and then, if they work, point backwards to how great an idea that was.
- drumhead 4y agoAs its IBM we might see a first here, firing AI's.
- Imnimo 4y agoEven if it's true that 7,800 jobs at IBM could in principle be replaced with AI, there's no way IBM has the AI chops to accomplish that.
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- susanasj 4y agoobviously AI is moving quickly, but every mainstream news article about AI is incredibly gullible. Good time to be the Simpsons monorail salesman but for AI.
- linksnapzz 4y agoWow. Finally, Watson can replace the ppl. you get in the first five levels of phone support for hardware. Then again, they could be outsourcing it to Amazon. "Alexa...why won't my mainframe IPL?"
- MR4D 4y agoFrom what I've read/heard from others, if they try and replace those people with Watson-based AI, they'll need to hire another 10,000 consultants to try and implement it.
- jppope 4y agoBetter Title: IBM announces scheduled bankruptcy in roughly ~3-5 years
- anticensor 4y agoAlternatively: IBM automates itself away
- bunbun69 4y agoWe all know this won’t happen. Fun attempt at humor though
- vcryan 4y agoLol with the quality of work coming out of IBM these days, they should just replace every one
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- lee101 4y ago[dead]
- gregvab 4y agoGood
- Haga 4y ago[dead]