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Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

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Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#111

Post by LunaSea »

bilvar wrote: post #104
Tade0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often have to uproot their lives to get into a new role. It's only ultimately worth it if it's a long-term commitment on both sides. Also later in life having to suddenly switch jobs is neither easy nor desirable.

Cry me a river, the same people who demand a long-term commitment from their employer will jump ship in an instant for 10k more after 6 months of employment. Companies are full of them.

Cry me a river. Will the company have to uproot its family to find a new worker?

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#112

Post by dukeyukey »

stkdump wrote: post #56
brigadier132 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow your logic. Just because companies could grow their businesses without increasing their workforce it doesn't mean that they couldn't achieve a higher rate of growth by increasing their workforce.

My point is if it were possible we should see at least some examples of it happening. So far it is an often recited conjecture without any practical proof, so I remain sceptical.

> My point is if it were possible we should see at least some examples of it happening.

We see it all the time? Google's revenue is up last quarter despite redundancies meaning they have a lower headcount. Adding robotics to a car production line can massively increase the productivity of a single factory despite needing less headcount, often allowing other factories to shut.

Something like Intellij or Copilot can make the entire tech workforce more efficient _far_ in excess of what it cost to make.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#113

Post by tjpnz »

brigadier132 wrote: post #19
tjpnz wrote: post #7

How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources? It should be obvious to most, yet the supposed "smartest guys in the room" are the first to stumble through it.

> How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources? Efficiency gains. How many "resources" are consumed by a piece of software relative to the "growth" that resulted from it? I can now have a machine generate 100 mediocre pieces of art for $20, two years ago each one would have cost $100 and taken a week for an actual artist to produce.

What if the metric driving your stock is engagement and you've managed to somehow maximise it? How do you continue to grow when there's a finite number of people in the world and a finite number of hours in the day? There's also a finite number of ads you can show before you've enshitified your product and start shedding users, and a finite number of ways you can make efficiency gains when it comes to serving them (including layoffs).

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#114

Post by dukeyukey »

nicoburns wrote: post #81
brigadier132 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources? Efficiency gains. How many "resources" are consumed by a piece of software relative to the "growth" that resulted from it? I can now have a machine generate 100 mediocre pieces of art for $20, two years ago each one would have cost $100 and taken a week for an actual artist to produce.

You can some gains this way, but they're limited in a couple of ways: 1. Yes, the resources consumed to make software are smaller, but they're still non-zero and will never be zero. So ultimately you're still limited by finite resources. 2. Many things just can't be implemented in software. I would point to A. Housing and B. Food production as things that are pretty hard to optimise. That isn't to say that we can't o…

"Infinite" growth is funny, cos infinity is funny. Eventually there's gonna be some hard cap, but for all we know that's thousands of years away, so it's not really worth talking about. But we're still getting way more efficient at growing food and building infrastructure.

Like, about 150 years ago an American farm could get about 26 bushels of corn per acre. The last few years, we've gotten 174, about 6x more. And that's in a very favourable agricultural zone, chances are it's even greater in more marginal areas!

Source: https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/07/perspectives-on-na...

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#115

Post by taneq »

robertlagrant wrote: post #93
tombert wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it's a corporate platitude. It doesn't "mean" anything, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. "Taking full responsibility", to me, would imply some sort of sacrifice on your end. Words are cheap; hell, I can say that I take full responsibility for the Google layoffs. I have never worked for Google but I did about as much as Sundar Pichai to take responsibility for the layoffs.

He's saying don't get angry at anyone else at Google, I think.

I agree, but that’s still manipulative. “Get mad at me, with whom you have no recourse whatsoever, rather than considering whether anyone else might have contributed that you could possibly effect.”

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#116

Post by ghaff »

scott_w wrote: post #103
rcme wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A boom/bust cycle is over-hiring to the point that you need to lay people off. You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation.

Honestly, I think this is a wicked problem, in that it's impossible for us to know in advance what the right decision would have been. Was it foreseeable that the economy would be volatile post-pandemic? Yes. Was it guaranteed that it would mean layoffs? No. In addition, what about the boom itself? What if you're cautious but, during that boom period, you get outcompeted in key areas as a result? This might put you i…

Or lots of individuals just don't get hired and you'd have had lots of people railing against headlines like "Despite surging demand, companies keep hiring choked off."

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#117

Post by iepathos »

Tade0 wrote: post #62
underratedbug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are presupposing that boom and bust hiring is bad, and worse than a more steady state approach. If one assumes perfection is impossible, it seems you suggest erring on the side of perpetually under-hiring as opposed to ever over-hiring. Why is that better?

People often have to uproot their lives to get into a new role. It's only ultimately worth it if it's a long-term commitment on both sides. Also later in life having to suddenly switch jobs is neither easy nor desirable.

This is more true in non-tech fields pre-pandemic. These days remote positions are more prevalent than ones that require relocation in tech and some other fields.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#118

Post by passwordoops »

DrScientist wrote: post #98
tombert wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah; the thing that kind of triggered me on this was the Google CEO saying in December or January that he "takes full responsibility" for all these layoffs. "Full responsibiliyt"? Really? How are you doing that exactly? By still getting your full paycheck and bonus while you fired twelve thousand humans because you didn't consider that the economy after years of a pandemic might be volatile?

By saying that he is directing internal heat ( and external heat - like yours ) to himself, rather than HR, or middle managers etc in Google. I suspect that's the reason for saying that. If you feel the need to blame somebody - blame me ( not other people or external conditions or shareholders ). Ultimately it is his fault - even if it was forced on him be shareholders - he'd have the option of resigning ( following…

>directing internal heat ( and external heat - like yours ) to himself, rather than HR, or middle managers etc in Google.

The reason this is irrelevant is because it's not what Western society values. If he is sincere about taking responsibility, he would either resign with no compensation, or take a severe paycut for failure. If a CEO is handed a bonus when the company does well, then it must follow that their head rolls when it doesn't.

"Taking heat" should be part of the day-to-day of a CEO's job and not the "punishment" for failure.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#119

Post by alentred »

tjpnz wrote: post #7

How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources? It should be obvious to most, yet the supposed "smartest guys in the room" are the first to stumble through it.

> How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources?

For the sake of the argument below, consider that there are two types of growth: 1) "evolutionary" - as you correctly observe it is limited by the availability of the known resources, and 2) "revolutionary" - which discovers entirely new growth potentials.

History teaches us that so far the growth was not limited, but innovation was always a prerequisite for the growth and often unlocks new resources.

Now, it is true that in the past couple of centuries humanity was gifted, through a lot of human effort, with a series of innovations that were accelerating the growth ever since. Truly, we don't know if this will continue as such, or slow down, or accelerate even more, or if we are going to hit a wall before the next scientific revolution.

Finally, indeed it appears that resources are limited at some point (importantly: according to our current understanding of physics). But I trust that for all observable future there is still a seemingly unlimited potential for the growth, as long as we continue to innovate and don't destroy the resources. Sustainability (between the scientific revolutions?) appears to be a new part of the equation and we must take it seriously.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#120

Post by iepathos »

juunpp wrote: post #5

I don't know, seems like a weak article. It just names the obvious examples of companies ("tech"!) that over-hired and all that. Others still celebrated the increased demand but also planned ahead, and not everyone has laid off. Guess they don't talk about those.

Yeah, also doesn't mention the super low 3.4% unemployment rate the US still has. Most of the people being laid off are being re-hired within a very short timeframe. The Fed has wanted unemployment back up to ~6% for over a year and can't get it.
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