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I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mea

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock. Plus hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout. The market only valued company growth, not efficiency. But the market always capitulates to value (over time). When that happens all those overlay hires will get axed. Both companies have since laid off 10K+. AI was the scapegoat. But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.

bachmeier 1y ago
> I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Some managers read Dilbert and think it's intended as advice.
- trhway 1y ago
  AI has been also consuming Dilbert as part of its training...
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    Worse yet, AI has been consuming Scott Adams quotes as part of its training... "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams "Women define themselves by their relationships and men define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not trust you." -Scott Adams "Nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people. That’s a hate group." -Scott Adams "Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed." -Scott Adams "I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black Americas because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. ... The only outcome is that I get called a racist." -Scott Adams
    - dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
      >Worse yet Should have been 'better still'.
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        Thank you!!! It's so awesome when an unrepentant racist piece of shit chimes in to perfectly prove my point! I swear, folks: dennis_jeeves2 is not my sock puppet, the way Scott "plannedchaos" Adams is his own sock puppet and biggest fan. Scott Adams Poses as His Own Fan on Message Boards to Defend Himself: https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppet/ https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp... >Dilbert creator Scott Adams came to our attention last month for the first time since the mid to late '90s when a blog post surfaced where he said, among other things, that women are "treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone." >Now, he's managed to provoke yet another internet maelstorm of derision by popping up on message boards to harangue his critics and defend himself. That's not news in and of itself, but what really makes it special is how he's doing it: by leaving comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the pseudonym PlannedChaos where he speaks about himself in the third person and attacks his critics while pretending that he is not Scott Adams, but rather just a big, big fan of the cartoonist. >And what makes it really, really special is the level of spectacular ego and hilarious self-congratulation suddenly on display in the comments when you realize they were written by Scott Adams' number one fan... Scott Adams. [...]
phendrenad2 1y ago
To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals. And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100 employees? At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith we constructed. But we're not going to stop throwing bones in the air!
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  We really oughta work on setting up systems that don’t waste time on things like this. Might be hard, but probably would be worth the effort.
- idkwhattocallme 1y ago
  True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.
  - myko 1y ago
    Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video game concept
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      LGR - Afterlife - PC Game Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0 Afterlife (video game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game)
PeterStuer 1y ago
"Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout" Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.
- dlivingston 1y ago
  No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.
  - thfuran 1y ago
    The more cloud spend the better. Take 10% of it as a bonus?
  - monkeyelite 1y ago
    That metric is evaluated deep in the human psyche.
  - 0xpgm 1y ago
    It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  Automation is just one form of "face a sufficiently competitive marketplace such that the company can no longer tolerate the dead-weight loss of their egos".
icedchai 1y ago
I've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do. Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker" types. Most of them contributed nothing.
- xp84 1y ago
  My friend's company (he was VP of Software & IT at a non-tech company) had a habit of meetings with no particular agenda and no decisions that needed making. Just meeting because it was on the calendar, discussing any random thing someone wanted to blab about. Not how my friend ran his team but that was how the rest did. Then they had some disappointing results due to their bad decision-making elsewhere in the company, and they turned to my friend and said "Let's lay off some of your guys."
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    It is almost like once a company gets rolling, there is sufficient momentum to keep it going even if many layers aren't doing very much. The company becomes a kind of meta-economic zone where nothing really matters. Politics / fights emerge between departments / layers but has nothing to do with making a better product / service. This can go on for decades if the moat is large enough.
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  The first mistake is thinking that contribution must be in the form of output instead of ingestion. Of course meetings aren't often the most efficient form of doing so. More being forced to listen (at least officially) so there isn't an excuse.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    This is true, but generally speaking there should be more people "producing" than "ingesting." This is often not the case. Most meetings are useless, and this has become much worse in modern times. Example: agile "scrum" and its daily stand ups, which inevitably turn into status reports. At some point in the 2000's, every manager decided they needed weekly 1:1's, resulting in even more meetings. Many of these are entirely ineffective. As one boss told me, "I've been told I need to have 1:1's, so I'm having them!" I literally sat next to him and talked every day, but it was a good time to go for coffee...
disambiguation 1y ago
> But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway. I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for free.
- jsnider3 1y ago
  Netflix's value comes from being convenient and compatible with the copyright system in a way sharing videos P2P definitely isn't.
  - lazyasciiart 1y ago
    And their increasingly restrictive usage policies are basically testing how important the 'convenient' piece is.
  - disambiguation 1y ago
    I'm not advocating for p2p, but rather drawing attention to the word "value" and what it means to create it. For example, would netflix as a piece of software hold any value if the company were to suddenly lose all its copyrights and IP licenses? Whereas something like an operating system or excel has standalone utility, netflix is only as valuable as its IP. The software isn't designed to create value, but instead to fully utilize the value of a piece of property. It's an important distinction to keep in mind especially when designing such software. Now consider that in the streaming world there isn't just netflix, but prime, Hulu, HBO, etc. Etc. The parent comment was complaining about certain employees contributions to "real value" or lack thereof. My question is, how do you ascertain the value of work in this context where the software isn't what's valuable but the IP is, and further how do justify working on a product thats already a solved problem and still refer to it as "creating 'real' value"?
paulcole 1y ago
Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category either time?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- idkwhattocallme 1y ago
  Ultimately (and sadly) yes. While I never habitually or intentionally attended meetings to just look busy, I did work on something I knew had a long shot of creating value for the business. I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. I left both on my own accord seeing the writing on the wall.
  - dehrmann 1y ago
    > I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. You said you were at large companies, so this is a hard call to make. A lot of large companies work on lots of small products knowing they probably won't work, but one of them might, so it's still worth it to try. It's essentially the VC model.
mlsu 1y ago
I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise. Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.
- catigula 1y ago
  That really only happened in HCOL areas.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Sure, but there was a massive concentration of such people in those areas.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    HCOL wasn't the driver though. It is abundance of investment and desire to hire. If the titans could collude to pay engineer half as much, they would. They tried.
- spamizbad 1y ago
  Yeah, my spiciest take is that Jr. Dev salaries really started getting silly during the 2nd half of the 2010s. It was ultimately supply (too little) and demand (too much) pushing them upward, but it was a huge signal we were in a bubble.
  - LPisGood 1y ago
    As someone who entered the workforce just after this, I feel like I missed the peak. A ton if those people got boatloads of money, great stock options, and many years of experience that they can continue to leverage for excellent positions.
    - idkwhattocallme 1y ago
      Don't worry, there is always another bubble on the horizon
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hired now are in people who were in those "adjacent" roles - think agile coaches, TPMs, etc. (but I have a ton of sympathy for these folks - many of them worked hard for years and built their skills - but these roles were always somewhat "optional"). I'd also highlight that beyond over-hiring being responsible for the downturn in tech employment, I think offshoring is way more responsible for the reduction in tech than AI when it comes to US jobs. Video conferencing tech didn't get really good and ubiquitous (especially for folks working from home) until the late teens, and since then I've seen an explosion of offshore contractors. With so many folks working remotely anyway, what does it matter if your coworker is in the same city or a different continent, as long as there is at least some daily time overlap (which is also why I've seen a ton of offshoring to Latin America and Europe over places like India).
- catigula 1y ago
  Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor protection for their own different reasons so the US labor force got clobbered.
  - splitstud 1y ago
    [dead]
  - gedy 1y ago
    I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.
lukev 1y ago
Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking about David Graeber's [Bullshit Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs). And there's multiple confounding factors at play. Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible excuse to downside and gain efficiency. But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide meaningful automation or productivity improvemenet, it might well be the case that the ratio of bullshit jobs increases.
- alvah 1y ago
  Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it. Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them. I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one. What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?
    - trade2play 1y ago
      All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions. Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.
ozim 1y ago
Bad part is all those guys attending meetings start feeling important. They start feeling like they are doing the job. I’ve seen those guys it is painful to watch.
JSR_FDED 1y ago
I don’t doubt there’s a lot of knowledge workers who aren’t adding value. I’m worried about the shrinking number of opportunities for juniors.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  I agree with this, but I still think that offshoring is much more responsible for this than AI. I have definitely seen real world examples where adding junior hires at ~$100k+ is being completely forgone when you can get equivalent output from someone making $40k offshore.
matthest 1y ago
Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? Because they don't have to do that. They could just operate at max efficiency all the time. Instead, they spread the wealth a bit by having bullshit jobs, even if the existence of these jobs is dependent on the market cycle.
- nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
  > Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? I do. It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever. I'm a person that would be hypothetically supportive of something like DOGE cuts, but I'd rather have people earning a living even with Soviet-style make work jobs than unemployed. I don't desire to live in a cutthroat "competitive" society where only "talent" can live a dignified life. I don't know if that's "wealth distribution" or socialism or whatever; I don't really care, nor make claim it's some airtight political philosophy.
  - leflambeur 1y ago
    tech bros think not only that that system is good, but that they'd be the winners
    - tilne 1y ago
      I think the more optimistic interpretation would be that companies eliminating bullshit jobs would provide signal on which jobs aren’t bullshit, and then individuals and the job prep/education systems could align to this. That’s very optimistic! I don’t fully agree with it, but I certainly know some very intelligent people that I wish were contributing more to the world than they do as a pawn in a game of corporate chess.
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    > It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever. its just my intuition, but talking to many people around me, i get the feeling like this is why people on both "left" and "right" are in a lot of ways (for lack of a better word) irate at the system as a whole... if thats true, i doubt ai will improve the situation for either...
827a 1y ago
Half of everyone at most large companies could be retired with no significant impact to the company's ability to generate revenue. The problem has always been figuring out which half.
daxfohl 1y ago
Agree, but two questions: First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway). Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FUD inventing the correlation.
- ledauphin 1y ago
  the one does actually sound worse because... it's actually worse. it clarifies that the companies themselves were playing games with people's livelihoods because of the potential for profit. whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.
  - daxfohl 1y ago
    I'd read the first as adjusting to market demand, not playing with people's lives. If if were construed as playing with lives, that could apply to basically any investment.
    - tilne 1y ago
      Agreed. You could make the case that employment in general is playing with someone’s life.
- leflambeur 1y ago
  isn't the scapegoat he or she who gets sacrificed? I think engineers are that
__turbobrew__ 1y ago
Turns out 50% of white collar jobs are just daycare for adults.
ivape 1y ago
I've said this many times, that the abundance and wealth of the tech industry basically provided vast amounts of Universal Basic Income to a variety of roles (all of agile is one example). We're at a critical moment where we actually have to look at cost-cutting on this UBI.
federiconafria 1y ago
"my VP more headcount and therefore more clout" This had me thinking, how are they going to get "clout", by comparing AI spending?

bachmeier 1y ago

> I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Some managers read Dilbert and think it's intended as advice.

trhway 1y ago
AI has been also consuming Dilbert as part of its training...
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Worse yet, AI has been consuming Scott Adams quotes as part of its training... "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams "Women define themselves by their relationships and men define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not trust you." -Scott Adams "Nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people. That’s a hate group." -Scott Adams "Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed." -Scott Adams "I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black Americas because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. ... The only outcome is that I get called a racist." -Scott Adams
  - dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
    >Worse yet Should have been 'better still'.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      Thank you!!! It's so awesome when an unrepentant racist piece of shit chimes in to perfectly prove my point! I swear, folks: dennis_jeeves2 is not my sock puppet, the way Scott "plannedchaos" Adams is his own sock puppet and biggest fan. Scott Adams Poses as His Own Fan on Message Boards to Defend Himself: https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppet/ https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp... >Dilbert creator Scott Adams came to our attention last month for the first time since the mid to late '90s when a blog post surfaced where he said, among other things, that women are "treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone." >Now, he's managed to provoke yet another internet maelstorm of derision by popping up on message boards to harangue his critics and defend himself. That's not news in and of itself, but what really makes it special is how he's doing it: by leaving comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the pseudonym PlannedChaos where he speaks about himself in the third person and attacks his critics while pretending that he is not Scott Adams, but rather just a big, big fan of the cartoonist. >And what makes it really, really special is the level of spectacular ego and hilarious self-congratulation suddenly on display in the comments when you realize they were written by Scott Adams' number one fan... Scott Adams. [...]

phendrenad2 1y ago

To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals. And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100 employees? At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith we constructed. But we're not going to stop throwing bones in the air!

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
We really oughta work on setting up systems that don’t waste time on things like this. Might be hard, but probably would be worth the effort.
idkwhattocallme 1y ago
True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.
- myko 1y ago
  Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video game concept
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    LGR - Afterlife - PC Game Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0 Afterlife (video game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game)

PeterStuer 1y ago

"Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout" Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.

dlivingston 1y ago
No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.
- thfuran 1y ago
  The more cloud spend the better. Take 10% of it as a bonus?
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  That metric is evaluated deep in the human psyche.
- 0xpgm 1y ago
  It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend
Nasrudith 1y ago
Automation is just one form of "face a sufficiently competitive marketplace such that the company can no longer tolerate the dead-weight loss of their egos".

icedchai 1y ago

I've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do. Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker" types. Most of them contributed nothing.

xp84 1y ago
My friend's company (he was VP of Software & IT at a non-tech company) had a habit of meetings with no particular agenda and no decisions that needed making. Just meeting because it was on the calendar, discussing any random thing someone wanted to blab about. Not how my friend ran his team but that was how the rest did. Then they had some disappointing results due to their bad decision-making elsewhere in the company, and they turned to my friend and said "Let's lay off some of your guys."
- osigurdson 1y ago
  It is almost like once a company gets rolling, there is sufficient momentum to keep it going even if many layers aren't doing very much. The company becomes a kind of meta-economic zone where nothing really matters. Politics / fights emerge between departments / layers but has nothing to do with making a better product / service. This can go on for decades if the moat is large enough.
Nasrudith 1y ago
The first mistake is thinking that contribution must be in the form of output instead of ingestion. Of course meetings aren't often the most efficient form of doing so. More being forced to listen (at least officially) so there isn't an excuse.
- icedchai 1y ago
  This is true, but generally speaking there should be more people "producing" than "ingesting." This is often not the case. Most meetings are useless, and this has become much worse in modern times. Example: agile "scrum" and its daily stand ups, which inevitably turn into status reports. At some point in the 2000's, every manager decided they needed weekly 1:1's, resulting in even more meetings. Many of these are entirely ineffective. As one boss told me, "I've been told I need to have 1:1's, so I'm having them!" I literally sat next to him and talked every day, but it was a good time to go for coffee...

disambiguation 1y ago

> But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway. I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for free.

jsnider3 1y ago
Netflix's value comes from being convenient and compatible with the copyright system in a way sharing videos P2P definitely isn't.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  And their increasingly restrictive usage policies are basically testing how important the 'convenient' piece is.
- disambiguation 1y ago
  I'm not advocating for p2p, but rather drawing attention to the word "value" and what it means to create it. For example, would netflix as a piece of software hold any value if the company were to suddenly lose all its copyrights and IP licenses? Whereas something like an operating system or excel has standalone utility, netflix is only as valuable as its IP. The software isn't designed to create value, but instead to fully utilize the value of a piece of property. It's an important distinction to keep in mind especially when designing such software. Now consider that in the streaming world there isn't just netflix, but prime, Hulu, HBO, etc. Etc. The parent comment was complaining about certain employees contributions to "real value" or lack thereof. My question is, how do you ascertain the value of work in this context where the software isn't what's valuable but the IP is, and further how do justify working on a product thats already a solved problem and still refer to it as "creating 'real' value"?

paulcole 1y ago

Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category either time?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
idkwhattocallme 1y ago
Ultimately (and sadly) yes. While I never habitually or intentionally attended meetings to just look busy, I did work on something I knew had a long shot of creating value for the business. I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. I left both on my own accord seeing the writing on the wall.
- dehrmann 1y ago
  > I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. You said you were at large companies, so this is a hard call to make. A lot of large companies work on lots of small products knowing they probably won't work, but one of them might, so it's still worth it to try. It's essentially the VC model.

mlsu 1y ago

I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise. Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.

catigula 1y ago
That really only happened in HCOL areas.
- xp84 1y ago
  Sure, but there was a massive concentration of such people in those areas.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  HCOL wasn't the driver though. It is abundance of investment and desire to hire. If the titans could collude to pay engineer half as much, they would. They tried.
spamizbad 1y ago
Yeah, my spiciest take is that Jr. Dev salaries really started getting silly during the 2nd half of the 2010s. It was ultimately supply (too little) and demand (too much) pushing them upward, but it was a huge signal we were in a bubble.
- LPisGood 1y ago
  As someone who entered the workforce just after this, I feel like I missed the peak. A ton if those people got boatloads of money, great stock options, and many years of experience that they can continue to leverage for excellent positions.
  - idkwhattocallme 1y ago
    Don't worry, there is always another bubble on the horizon

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hired now are in people who were in those "adjacent" roles - think agile coaches, TPMs, etc. (but I have a ton of sympathy for these folks - many of them worked hard for years and built their skills - but these roles were always somewhat "optional"). I'd also highlight that beyond over-hiring being responsible for the downturn in tech employment, I think offshoring is way more responsible for the reduction in tech than AI when it comes to US jobs. Video conferencing tech didn't get really good and ubiquitous (especially for folks working from home) until the late teens, and since then I've seen an explosion of offshore contractors. With so many folks working remotely anyway, what does it matter if your coworker is in the same city or a different continent, as long as there is at least some daily time overlap (which is also why I've seen a ton of offshoring to Latin America and Europe over places like India).

catigula 1y ago
Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor protection for their own different reasons so the US labor force got clobbered.
- splitstud 1y ago
  [dead]
- gedy 1y ago
  I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.

lukev 1y ago

Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking about David Graeber's [Bullshit Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs). And there's multiple confounding factors at play. Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible excuse to downside and gain efficiency. But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide meaningful automation or productivity improvemenet, it might well be the case that the ratio of bullshit jobs increases.

alvah 1y ago
Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?
- ryandrake 1y ago
  People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it. Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them. I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one. What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?
  - trade2play 1y ago
    All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions. Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

ozim 1y ago

Bad part is all those guys attending meetings start feeling important. They start feeling like they are doing the job. I’ve seen those guys it is painful to watch.

JSR_FDED 1y ago

I don’t doubt there’s a lot of knowledge workers who aren’t adding value. I’m worried about the shrinking number of opportunities for juniors.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
I agree with this, but I still think that offshoring is much more responsible for this than AI. I have definitely seen real world examples where adding junior hires at ~$100k+ is being completely forgone when you can get equivalent output from someone making $40k offshore.

matthest 1y ago

Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? Because they don't have to do that. They could just operate at max efficiency all the time. Instead, they spread the wealth a bit by having bullshit jobs, even if the existence of these jobs is dependent on the market cycle.

nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
> Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? I do. It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever. I'm a person that would be hypothetically supportive of something like DOGE cuts, but I'd rather have people earning a living even with Soviet-style make work jobs than unemployed. I don't desire to live in a cutthroat "competitive" society where only "talent" can live a dignified life. I don't know if that's "wealth distribution" or socialism or whatever; I don't really care, nor make claim it's some airtight political philosophy.
- leflambeur 1y ago
  tech bros think not only that that system is good, but that they'd be the winners
  - tilne 1y ago
    I think the more optimistic interpretation would be that companies eliminating bullshit jobs would provide signal on which jobs aren’t bullshit, and then individuals and the job prep/education systems could align to this. That’s very optimistic! I don’t fully agree with it, but I certainly know some very intelligent people that I wish were contributing more to the world than they do as a pawn in a game of corporate chess.
- andrekandre 1y ago
  > It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever. its just my intuition, but talking to many people around me, i get the feeling like this is why people on both "left" and "right" are in a lot of ways (for lack of a better word) irate at the system as a whole... if thats true, i doubt ai will improve the situation for either...

827a 1y ago

Half of everyone at most large companies could be retired with no significant impact to the company's ability to generate revenue. The problem has always been figuring out which half.

daxfohl 1y ago

Agree, but two questions: First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway). Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FUD inventing the correlation.

ledauphin 1y ago
the one does actually sound worse because... it's actually worse. it clarifies that the companies themselves were playing games with people's livelihoods because of the potential for profit. whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.
- daxfohl 1y ago
  I'd read the first as adjusting to market demand, not playing with people's lives. If if were construed as playing with lives, that could apply to basically any investment.
  - tilne 1y ago
    Agreed. You could make the case that employment in general is playing with someone’s life.
leflambeur 1y ago
isn't the scapegoat he or she who gets sacrificed? I think engineers are that

__turbobrew__ 1y ago

Turns out 50% of white collar jobs are just daycare for adults.

ivape 1y ago

I've said this many times, that the abundance and wealth of the tech industry basically provided vast amounts of Universal Basic Income to a variety of roles (all of agile is one example). We're at a critical moment where we actually have to look at cost-cutting on this UBI.

federiconafria 1y ago

"my VP more headcount and therefore more clout" This had me thinking, how are they going to get "clout", by comparing AI spending?