Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 394 posts

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#91

Post by VictorPath »

tareqak wrote: post #42

https://twitter.com/IlariKaila/status/1600120645211201536 Ilari Kaila @IlariKaila · 1h Replying to @paulg Why did you delete this banger? | | | Paul Graham @paulg · 1h Replying to @IlariKaila I forgot that mentioning Marx attracts angry fools. Since I could make my point without mentioning him, I just reposted it without.

Actually Marx talked a lot about automation. Marx's prediction was this would lead to a lower rate of profit for invested capital which - mainstream establishment sources say is what has been happening.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#92

Post by baxtr »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #57
baxtr wrote: post #40

Hmm, so his example is Instagram. But Instagram was sold to FB, sorry Meta!, in 2012. Where are the new examples of that kind of startup? 13 employees selling for 1bn USD.

Musical.ly to Bytedance? And Qualcomm buying Nuvia?

Good examples. Didn't know that Qualcomm was so small

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#93

Post by vishnugupta »

> automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.

For sure, it's easier to launch a product with no employees. However, the challenge is to grow. That's when founders' run out of ability/patience to coax more out of automation tool. Edge cases appear more often; systems start breaking down; tools don't have meet their exact need anymore etc., That's when they start hiring these "tool experts". SAP consultants, AWS certified DevOps, Stripe Integration Engineers and so on. Also, at scale maintenance starts becoming a bigger challenge compared to new feature/product launch. So one needs to hire maintainers. As David Graeber astutely observed a glass cup needs to be produced just once but must be washed thousand times. Let's not forget one needs employees to maintain automation tools too.

I can cite plenty of real world examples but let's just look at Uber. For an outsider it seems like a tech company but internally it is run by a massive operations team. They are constantly in touch with drivers, address their problems, move drivers around to meet higher demand, map operations and so on.

What is happening however is these SAP consultants are paid significantly less compared to their Business Analyst (or equivalent domain expert) counterparts. So in some ways profit is being cornered.

All that said this is an extremely narrow view about IT sector. Look around; EV, solar energy, genetics, and so on. No automation happening there. If IT sector needs less employees, then it's only for good! Skilled labor is needed elsewhere too.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#94

Post by thatfrenchguy »

LeonM wrote: post #77
beardyw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the future, a 3 day week for all as computers/machines did the work.

Because of the competitive nature of business (and humans). If you can build a factory that can build products more efficiently, it means you can sell them cheaper then your competitors, meaning you can move more volume and thus make more profit. So you are definitely not going to run that new shiny factory for only 3 days a week. Eventually, competitors will notice your improved output and react with their own impro…

> So you are definitely not going to run that new shiny factory for only 3 days a week.

3/8 is a thing in factories, so you could have just hired more employees part/lower time. It’s a cultural artefact that we work 40 hours a week.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#95

Post by yetanotherforg »

theturtletalks wrote: post #73
yetanotherforg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Absolute suckers for giving out their work for free I guess.

You misunderstand their intentions. “I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman

This assumes that there is no financial intent in the work. My favorite example of this is that many thousands of Google's engineers used an app (Homebrew I think), but Google wouldn't hire him, thus letting him share in wealth partially created by his life's work.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#97

Post by lancesells »

PinguTS wrote: post #80

This is this thinking of "Automation reduces workforce". The next argument then is always "We need Basic Income" because of this. But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. It moved the focus of the workforce. At the end more automation even required more workforce. The thing is, you cannot engineer the process to be automated. You need to keep maintaining the automation. This inc…

How many people here have simpler jobs than 10-20 years ago due to automation? I work in marketing and I all I see is more apps and more complexity no matter how "automated" things get.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#99

Post by adamsmith143 »

japanuspus wrote: post #59
dandanua wrote: post #7

It's frightening that people "at the top" write those things without even realizing how it sounds for ordinary people. I think this delusion is on par with Marie Antoinette and her "eat cakes if you don't have bread".

This is the question I see way too few people asking: how do we want end-game capitalism to look. Should it be Banks' "The Culture", or should it be neo-feudal with the populace at large acting as serf to capital. Without discussing the vision, discussing the strategy becomes sort of meaningless. (Edit: typo)

As awesome as The Culture sounds I find it unsettling that Humans basically become the exceptionally pampered pets of the Minds and at least right now it's unlikely we will create AIs as benign and benevolent as they are.
Post reply on HN