101–110 of 333 posts
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? A few issues to consider: 1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable. 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the…
> If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying. What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional u…
> If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free
I don't think this is implied unless all productive work across all industries is automated. Practically speaking, this would happen over time, meaning that a fully automated company today could significantly reduce its costs, but would still have to purchase goods and services from upstream providers and pay to market and distribute their products.
And since companies essentially operate on greed, the leadership of these companies would carve out space for themselves, and the short term goal would almost certainly still be to maximize profit, meaning goods are not free, even if the marginal cost is low (gotta pay for all of that automation R&D after all).
Somewhere there is a tipping point where enough automation would throw the system into chaos without major changes. If it could be achieved overnight, then hypothetically we could all have free stuff.
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people.
Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society.
I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths.
Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.
Isn't this kind of weird? Some try to blame capitalism, but AI is not capitalism. It is technological progress. Every president and dictator, no matter what type of economy or political system they have, are trying to develop AI right now. It's something that goes beyond any economic system and is a fact and force that can't be stopped and one must simply reckon with. What we have in the US today is not capitalism. I…
Capitalism fundamentally depends on government enforcement of contracts and property rights. It is not possible to have capitalism without government interference in the economy.
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not about running a deficit (most are free cash flow positive), it’s about improving returns on capital with leverage.
I'm financially illiterate, but what does this mean? Companies have the revenue to pay their employees, but they choose to terminate them instead, because... why?
Theoretically, if a company has money to pay employees it keeps them if the present value of their project is positive, and terminate them if the present value of their projects is negative.
Let's say an employee earns $100K this year. The project they're working on this year will generate 40K of revenue in 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years. Is the project worth doing?
Let's assume the discount rate is 5%. A dollar now (which we call 'present value (PV)') is worth $1.05 a year from now ('future value (FV)'). And 1.05^2 in 2 years. And 1.05^n in n years. And a dollar in n years (FV) is worth 1/(1+discount)^n dollars today (PV). It's a mechanism similar to inflation, or paying interest. (IRL the discount rate is the WACC + some factor for riskiness, but that's too much to talk about.)
Let's say the discount rate is 5%. Is the project worth doing? The present value (PV) is -100K + 40K/1.05 + 40K/1.05^2 + 40K/1.05^3. So if you approve the project, the future profits and expenses are as if you earned $8,930 today. You approve the project.
Let's say interest rates go up, and you now need to use 10% as the discount rate. -100K + 40K/1.10 + 40K/1.10^2 + 40K/1.10^3 = $-526. If you approve the project, you will lose money. So you don't approve the project. Now you don't need the employee anymore, and you get rid of the them, by reassignment, reorganization, or layoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big tech clearly overhired during the pandemic. The layoffs over the last 12-24 months are a return to the mean.
It actually feels like a semi-coordinated effort to push down wages. With high inflation, workers would have demanded raises, but with the specter of layoffs, they keep their heads down. Musk bought Twitter in April 2022, had huge layoffs and then rest of tech followed in Nov 2022 onwards. Prior to current trends was it common to announce great earnings and then announce layoffs?
Musk made layoff palpable to investors, ZIRP ended, the industry is correcting for over hiring when assuming the 2020s growth would continue forever.
Just a bunch of things that happened. As always.
“We didn’t start the fire”
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
For the sake of argument, does that mean all those employees were useless or does it mean the management isn't doing a good job of allocating them to effective work? I've been at a few companies that were rudderless and yeah, letting go of people wouldn't have made much difference because the leadership didn't know what to do with them anyway.
This is much better than the "you get what you use" resource allocation where organizations never shrinks, we want them to shrink when they don't have any useful work to do.