12 ms·

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

yujzgzc 9mo ago
"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever.
- taftster 9mo ago
  This says a lot as relating to the rise of AI and the fear of job loss. There's going to be displacement in areas we can't predict, but overall it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.
  - Nevermark 9mo ago
    > it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce. How could that possibly work? At some point I could see white collar work trending down fast, in a way that radically increased the value of blue color work. Software gets cheaper much faster than hardware. But then the innovation and investments go into smart hardware, and robotics effectiveness/cost goes up. If you can see a path where AI isn't a one-generational transition to most human (economic) obsolescence, I would certainly be interested in the principle or mechanism you see.
    - gnatolf 9mo ago
      Craftsmen will have a resurgence, that's probably a 'leveling up' in terms of resilience against AI takeover. There's just no way of automating quite a few of the physically effective crafts.
      - pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
        So the rich who can afford craftsmen will get richer, spend more on their multiple houses, perhaps. But that's literal crumbs, one or two jobs out of tens of thousands. There's no significant "leveling up" there at the societal levels of job destruction we're talking about.
- Spooky23 9mo ago
  Very true. We waste alot of valuable labor on “software engineering” that is grossly inefficient. Capital gets allocated to these so called startups that are incredibly inefficient.
- samiv 9mo ago
  This is putting the apple cart before the horse. Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".
Panzer04 9mo ago
And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.
- elmomle 9mo ago
  That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.
  - rictic 9mo ago
    Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.
    - powerapple 9mo ago
      because the developing world is producing a lot of things except the housing.
      - eru 9mo ago
        They also don't produce haircuts.
    - xboxnolifes 9mo ago
      How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?
      - 9mo ago
wholinator2 9mo ago
I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly. They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".
- shermantanktop 9mo ago
  > refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian" If they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”!
- nicbou 9mo ago
  How do you feel about the whole thing years later?
wafflemaker 9mo ago
In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!
  - yamakadi 9mo ago
    I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society.
    - virtue3 9mo ago
      It’s hard for some people to understand that situation until they are in it. Unfortunately. Totally agree with you.
    - strken 9mo ago
      I think the key part of that sentence was "...and just needs an advance", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit.
  - eloisant 9mo ago
    If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough.
anilakar 9mo ago
Back in the day one company had a dedicated copier operator who was very unhappy after a Xerox service tech did away with the job by enabling the network printing and scan to email functions. The customer had upgraded their old copier out of necessity but had never changed their workflow.
Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
This will not be unusual for any kind of software engineering work to be honest. A big chunk of work in B2C companies has to do with customer support, for example; building websites, apps, writing content, chatbots, etc with the objective being that people do not call customer support, because people on phones don't scale very well. And the other part is that when they do call, that the CS agent can address the issue quickly and has minimal administrative overhead. But it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that.
tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
I had that on my very first project. I couldn’t understand why the people on site were so hostile to me. Afterwards I was talking to the salesman about this and he told me they were all fired when the project went live.

yujzgzc 9mo ago

"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever.

taftster 9mo ago
This says a lot as relating to the rise of AI and the fear of job loss. There's going to be displacement in areas we can't predict, but overall it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.
- Nevermark 9mo ago
  > it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce. How could that possibly work? At some point I could see white collar work trending down fast, in a way that radically increased the value of blue color work. Software gets cheaper much faster than hardware. But then the innovation and investments go into smart hardware, and robotics effectiveness/cost goes up. If you can see a path where AI isn't a one-generational transition to most human (economic) obsolescence, I would certainly be interested in the principle or mechanism you see.
  - gnatolf 9mo ago
    Craftsmen will have a resurgence, that's probably a 'leveling up' in terms of resilience against AI takeover. There's just no way of automating quite a few of the physically effective crafts.
    - pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
      So the rich who can afford craftsmen will get richer, spend more on their multiple houses, perhaps. But that's literal crumbs, one or two jobs out of tens of thousands. There's no significant "leveling up" there at the societal levels of job destruction we're talking about.
Spooky23 9mo ago
Very true. We waste alot of valuable labor on “software engineering” that is grossly inefficient. Capital gets allocated to these so called startups that are incredibly inefficient.
samiv 9mo ago
This is putting the apple cart before the horse. Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".

Panzer04 9mo ago

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

elmomle 9mo ago
That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.
- rictic 9mo ago
  Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.
  - powerapple 9mo ago
    because the developing world is producing a lot of things except the housing.
    - eru 9mo ago
      They also don't produce haircuts.
  - xboxnolifes 9mo ago
    How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?
    - 9mo ago

wholinator2 9mo ago

I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly. They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".

shermantanktop 9mo ago
> refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian" If they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”!
nicbou 9mo ago
How do you feel about the whole thing years later?

wafflemaker 9mo ago

In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that.

fragmede 9mo ago
Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!
- yamakadi 9mo ago
  I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society.
  - virtue3 9mo ago
    It’s hard for some people to understand that situation until they are in it. Unfortunately. Totally agree with you.
  - strken 9mo ago
    I think the key part of that sentence was "...and just needs an advance", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit.
- eloisant 9mo ago
  If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough.

anilakar 9mo ago

Back in the day one company had a dedicated copier operator who was very unhappy after a Xerox service tech did away with the job by enabling the network printing and scan to email functions. The customer had upgraded their old copier out of necessity but had never changed their workflow.

Cthulhu_ 9mo ago

This will not be unusual for any kind of software engineering work to be honest. A big chunk of work in B2C companies has to do with customer support, for example; building websites, apps, writing content, chatbots, etc with the objective being that people do not call customer support, because people on phones don't scale very well. And the other part is that when they do call, that the CS agent can address the issue quickly and has minimal administrative overhead. But it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that.

tonyedgecombe 9mo ago

I had that on my very first project. I couldn’t understand why the people on site were so hostile to me. Afterwards I was talking to the salesman about this and he told me they were all fired when the project went live.