Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way I've put it before, is that a culture issue (in something of a soup of them) is that "people" aren't an "interesting technology" that will, for instance, make HN headlines or provide interesting things for technologists to work on or brag about, so SV companies don't really invest in "people" to solve problems. SV companies under-value important labor roles like customer service, and instead over-value automa…
I think apart from the scale, they view labor as a risk, rather than an asset. The ironic part to me is they're hiring "genius" level talent to create these dummy level algorithms.
That's certainly a part of the irony in how much they'd prefer to hire white collar SV labor than blue collar labor anywhere else. For the average salary of just one PhD in "data sciences" in SV cost of living you could often hire an entire floor of a call/support/service center in some Midwest state. (Though few of those consider labor an asset either, that's a more systemic problem in how the current zeitgeist of capitalism views the entire labor market, unfortunately.)