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Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'
- orlp 2y agoI'd suggest him to lead by example and fire himself.
- bags43 2y agoAnd this is additional reason why I would never use their services.
- jansan 2y agoOf all the payment options Klarna always struck me as one of the less trustworthy ones. IIRC they are one of those services who basically want access to my bank account, from where they could read my account balance. I think this is something even regulated by the EU, but why on earth should someone agree to that?
- robador 2y agoSounds like a great company to work at and a great boss to work for (/s)
- lawn 2y agoIf we didn't have AI he would simply come up with other excuses to cut costs you know.
- Aurornis 2y agoTranslation: Klarna is not growing and they needed a good excuse.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yabatopia 2y agoIt's window dressing for their planned IPO. Klarna wants to go public during the first half of 2025, so it's all hands on deck to prop up the numbers. And saying the "right things" to investors, especially AI.
- yakorevivan 2y ago[dead]
- ks2048 2y agoLooks like it worked - make a controversial statement and now a lot of people have heard of your company.
- LtWorf 2y agoIt's a rather famous scummy company in sweden. Basically digital loan sharks.
- dev-jayson 2y agoAt least he's blunt about it.
- josfredo 2y agoThat’s what I say! Most companies think like this but say otherwise and receive praise or at least neutral stares. It’s almost like honesty is punished and deceiving is not.
- moe_sc 2y agoHonesty isn't punished here, a missinformed opinion is. "AI" can not do all jobs human do and it's unclear if and when it will.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoIsn't it because they're trying to IPO out, so trying to make a bullish case for themselves?
- feverzsj 2y agoBullshit business model combined with bullshit technology. It's a perfect match.
- bananadonkey 2y ago> Though Klarna's website is advertising open positions at the time of writing, a spokesperson told Business Insider the company wasn't "actively recruiting" to expand its workforce. Rather, the spokesperson said, Klarna is backfilling "some essential roles," primarily in engineering.
- Maxion 2y agoI am not applying for a job, I'm just trying to get backfilled!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mmmore 2y agoIf I were a CEO/PR team of large tech company that wanted to downsize, I would probably also say stuff like "AI efficiencies drive long term profitability". That said, I suspect in the short-medium term AI might increase salaries at the high end, but reduce opportunities at the low end. And of course, companies which seriously embrace AI advances, but in sensible ways, will do best. https://www.klarna.com/international/regulatory-news/klarna-h1-earnings-compounding-growth-generates-27-revenue-rise-sek-11-billion-profit-improvement-and-over-sek-1-trillion-annualized-gmv/ https://www.klarna.com/international/regulatory-news/klarna-...
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago> And of course, companies which seriously embrace AI advances, but in sensible ways, will do best. The use here of "sensible" exemplifies a good way to predict basically anything you want about the market so long as you don't reveal what "sensible" means in concrete terms.
- mmmore 2y agoWhat I mean concretely is embrace AI code assistants, generally allowing employees to use AI tools, use AI for some content production and customer services (preferably with human moderation and escape hatches). What would count as non-sensible would be company wide mandates that everyone must jam AI into their work. I've heard stories about stuff like this at certain big corps.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y agoIt should be noted that AI/LLM customer service bots/agents are generally very poorly received by customers. It’s not a good tactic if you like keeping your customers happy.
- mmmore 2y agoAre you referencing particular data?
- jamil7 2y agoWas it ever a good place to work? When they opened their Berlin office the word was the mobile team was a revolving door of contractors doing append-only development on a monolithic RN app. It already seemed dysfunctional then.
- ablation 2y agoFor a buy-now-pay-later business, it has aggressive narrative-shaping PR that seeks to paint it as something more. And most tech news outlets seems to regurgitate it willingly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jiggawatts 2y ago> append-only development I have not seen this term before. What do you mean by it?
- occz 2y agoProbably zero maintenance on old code, only adding new things. Not exactly a recipe for a long-term healthy code base, and helps explain the revolving door phenomenon previously mentioned.
- myaccountonhn 2y agoThe joke in the Swedish tech scene was that you work there until you graduate to Spotify.
- deanc 2y agoThey can’t even answer their support tickets using AI. We just had one waiting for over two months (customer is multi million revenue per month) and after escalating twice, we get a link to the docs (didn’t have the info) and find out they have changed the name of their product for online checkout to Kustom after selling it off.
- tejendrasingh90 2y ago[flagged]
- e6quisitory 2y agohttps://archive.ph/DG7Jf https://archive.ph/DG7Jf
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoThen when these guys get shot there will be posts complaining
- ablation 2y agoNearly every CEO I’ve talked to in the past three months (only a handful, admittedly) has said something along these lines, if not quite as extreme. They genuinely believed the current state of the art is polished and powerful enough to replace huge swathes of coders, designers, writers, etc. leaving only a middle-management supervisory layer and some lower-level grunts to herd the bots. Or it’s a good PR ruse to scale back growth ambitions as others have stated. But most of it appeared genuine belief in “AI”. Some of these companies will not survive the inevitable reality check that is coming. I’m only sad for the people the glassy-eyed CEOs are shitcanning.
- emseetech 2y agoI'm open to the idea they see something I don't. I'm not convinced, but I'm open to it.
- arcticbull 2y agoThey see dollar signs
- hyperadvanced 2y agoIn theory the market will sort this out. Overly stingy firms will reap the rewards of lower quality and be outcompeted in their industries, overly generous ones will run out of money, the “just right” ones will exceed expectations and be rewarded. Where those lines are drawn probably varies by firms. I frankly don’t know how the company that invented monthly payments for shoes with a high interest rate will stay in business long term, so maybe they really don’t need to hire anyone anyway
- arcticbull 2y agoYeah the whole BNPL space is very strange from my perspective -- it's basically just small dollar loans for borrowers you don't underwrite, without collateral (you can't repossess my socks) in exchange for super high merchant interchange. I was confident they'd all get ruined in the first real recession as that would be the first debt to go unpaid. 2021 wasn't a real recession I guess, since it lasted all of 5 minutes. It's just re-inventing credit cards, but with significant structural disadvantages leading to higher costs.
- acyou 2y agoNet income -2.5 billion kr (2023) Good thing they aren't growing, they appear to have scaled those negative margins, and it's time to dial it back. Will AI also be able to hyperscale a negative margin business?
- geysersam 2y agoIt's the only kind of business AI has scaled so far
- WWLink 2y ago[flagged]
- Mistletoe 2y agoAll the HN posters love AI and sing its praises to the heavens until these articles are launched and it becomes reality, and the real reason tech wants AI so badly is revealed haha. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hyperman1 2y agoFirst time I tried Klarna, their 'payment' workflow was actually a 'grant full access to all bank accounts' workflow in disguise. I was thinking this amount of misleading must be illegal. Further interactions with them always felt sleazy. Maybe they know the regulators will dismantle the company in the near future and are optimizing for extracting the maximum before their implosion?
- iforgotpassword 2y agoYeah, I don't see why anyone with a bit of technical knowledge would use that over PayPal. I mean I'm all for destroying those evil ultra capitalist US corps but unfortunately our European counterparts are just complete rubbish more often than not. If you don't offer wire transfer or PayPal, you lost me as a customer.
- lawn 2y agoEvery single time I've used Klarna I've paid with a credit or debit card. They abuse dark patterns for sure though.
- Moru 2y agoEhm, Paypal isn't exactly better than Klarna though. I have had only problems with both but Paypal beats Klarna in money saved for me as customer. Last time I used it I got the money back and the business got reported as a scammer (not by me, their algorithm). The business would have sent the goods already if it wasn't a bank holiday so I nearly got the whole order for free, around 1800 euro.
- Ekaros 2y agoOnly use case for me with Klarna is getting them give me invoice I pay with SEPA-transfer. 30 days after shipping. Actually a good system for me. Recently bought something and then found it cheaper, negotiated the seller to match price and now the invoice I got got the cheaper price. And I just now had payment go out.
- cluckindan 2y ago
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoLol Klarna is not even a real company. They were a classic zirp company. Sell 100 dollars for 80 dollars.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- TheChaplain 2y agoKlarna was recently fined for money laundering, and in Sweden they had long fights with the unions (and lost). But their services are pretty decent.
- 28304283409234 2y agoDecent? They create debt among teenagers. As if they don't have enough angst they now also have to worry about fines for having bought something marketing scum manipulated them into buying and Klarna allowed them to pay-now-regret-soon.
- mklepaczewski 2y agoTeenagers are allowed to take high interest loan? Where? I think in Poland it would be possible for every parent to refuse repay such a loan.
- c22 2y agoI think probably anyone could refuse to repay a $120 unsecured loan with pretty limited consequences.
- dagw 2y agoIn Sweden at least they will just send it to collections. Something which down the road could potentially negatively affect your possibility to, for example, rent an apartment, and in theory they could even garnish your wages if you keep refusing to pay.
- dagw 2y ago18 year olds aren't considered adults in Poland?
- halper 2y agoWell, the deal is that once one is 18 one may make one's own decisions and suffer the consequences. Klarna is scummy for sure, but the "SMS loans" in Sweden are even less appealing.
- buryat 2y agoI'm stopping using services that use AI for call centers, I much rather talk to a real person and know that they can handle any kind of situation. So I'm going to bring money to the businesses that employ real human beings
- spamizbad 2y agoThey stopped hiring because after raising over a billion dollars their value dropped 80%, they can't raise any more money, and after operating for 19 years they finally had a profitable quarter in Q2 2024. They are in "burn the furniture to heat the cabin" mode.
- evbogue 2y agoIf they bring their AI inhouse that can also generate heat.
- jsbisviewtiful 2y agoCame here to leave a snarky "guess I won't use Klarna then", but happy to see your comment. This info fills me with great joy.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoYou shouldn’t find joy in the failure of others that you don’t have a relationship with. Why does this news fill you with joy?
- the_real_cher 2y agoIt fills me with joy to see that the tech industry isn't vanishing as quick as the company makes it out to be. they're actually just covering for a funding problem.
- jsbisviewtiful 2y agoOh please, spare us the harmonious bravado. Klarna is a vulture capitalist company that’s now refusing to hire people because it wants to automate away paying jobs so it can make more money for its vulture capitalist leaders. Klarna struggling should make anyone below the millionaire line joyful.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoThey’re refusing to hire people because they’re not making as much money as they planned to. Covering it up with claims of AI is lame, but I don’t think it’s a terminal offense.
- ein0p 2y agoWhy do they need 3500 people (!) to issue simple installment loans?
- knifie_spoonie 2y agoMy guess is that it's to try and drive up the perceived value of the company before their IPO
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 2y agoAs usual with startups, building a profitable, sustainable business is never the objective. Building complexity in order to grift endless VC rounds is the objective. And it's a lot easier to justify a big one with 3.5k employees than with 3.
- duskwuff 2y agoThe implied message of "once we figure out how to automate your job, we'll fire you and replace you with AI as well" has got to be great for employee morale.
- caseyy 2y ago“Think of all the money we could save if we just fired all staff!” was a joke in my business school. I suppose Klarna will finally deliver a punchline in a few years.
- gorbachev 2y agoSell short.
- 28304283409234 2y agoTheir AI forgot to update their jobs page then. https://klarnagroup.teamtailor.com/jobs https://klarnagroup.teamtailor.com/jobs
- apelapan 2y agoThey pay surprisingly low salaries in their Stockholm location. Stated salary band for senior software engineer is 62-69 kSEK/month. That means a post-tax take home of about 45kSEK and a small one bedroom apartment in the general neighbourhood of their office is on the order of 4-5MSEK.
- ortusdux 2y agoSee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403232
- Sloppy 2y agoNow maybe AI will buy their products?
- gruez 2y agoIt never makes sense to employ people as a jobs program, just so you can get more customers.
- blibble 2y agohenry ford essentially created the middle class with the approach that you are saying "never makes sense"
- gruez 2y agoIs there any evidence for that claim aside from it being an oft-repeated tale on the internet? Mathematically it can't possibly work, because you're spending $80k (or whatever) on an employee that might spend $30k on a car every 5 years, so paying $80k/year to get $6k/year in revenue. It's actually worse than that, because Ford only makes around 15% gross margin, so at best that's $900 of money you get back for spending $80k on an employee. That's so low that Even if you account for money multiplier effects, it's unlikely you'll get anywhere near break even.
- karmajunkie 2y agois there a list of public companies like this that are good candidates for shorting?
- krapp 2y agoBut but but AI will never take anyone's jobs. AI will only create new opportunities for innovation. The Luddites are wrong, I tell you, wrong!
- aitchnyu 2y agoIs there any serious document/person on how many jobs were lost to AI? So far the headlines have been from CEOs playing with Other Peoples Money (fellow comment stating 1 of 76 quarters were profitable), giant consulting orgs etc.
- bni 2y agoGreat that Apple Pay is growing a lot right now. Every other e-commerce website has it. Better UX than Klarna and no scummy dark patterns to add "late fees".
- iamleppert 2y agoEveryone knows by now Klarna operates like a payday lender in a strip mall. It isn't a flex to say you can automate your customer service experience away with AI when your customer service borders on non-existent / terrible.
- ahartmetz 2y agoIt's one of these banks that is like "Choose us because we have an app and emojis". Yeah no thanks, I want a bank that knows how to bank first and foremost.
- dzonga 2y agoAI = jobs move to eastern europe or Asia. you see it with a lot of tech companies acquired by PE or massively funded by VCs that on their careers page - most positions are either India or Eastern Europe.
- coastermug 2y agoKlarna use a huge dark pattern on their payment processing (irrelevant of bnpl), whereby they store your details for future use by default, even without an account. Last time I checked you only needed a couple of pieces of easily identifiable information to be granted access to “your” autofill. - I know all the H&M group shops use it as their payment processor in the UK.
- hofo 2y agoAnd who’s going to use your payment service when they can’t buy anything because AI took their job?
- wisdomalfred 2y ago[dead]
- violettegabarae 2y ago[dead]