131–140 of 218 posts
These large companies aren’t well positioned for this. There’s too many human bottlenecks to every decision. You get in trouble for going outside your role. Thats why AI is drudgery at many of these places, often even negative productive.
Smaller companies though started assuming AI will let their employees stretch to broader roles, wear many hats, and given larger agency
That is why one of these narratives is total bullshit. Either “layoffs from AI” are layoffs for some other structural reason in the tech sector, or “AI makes employees way more productive” is total bullshit.
I don’t know which is the scarier lie tbh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. It's funny to me that everyone talks about pandemic over-hiring, as if this hadn't been a thing for a decade before that. Like, when I started at FB in 2013, they…
> when I started at FB in 2013, they probably had […] about 10% of the sales people [they needed] I find that hard to believe. Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... , they had a good revenue growth in the early ‘10s. What did they leave on the table by not having more ten times as many sales people as they did? Revenues? Profits?
So, how they hired salespeople was based on revenue per head. If there wasn't enough revenue in a particular part of the business, no new hires for you. Obviously, that's gonna be a lagging indicator.
And they were honestly leaving a lot of money on the table there, but honestly not as much as they were leaving on the table by having a really, really, really bad and buggy self-serve interface that made it hard for small advertisers to spend money.
When they fixed that, the small businesses all got good results (e.g. hairdressers etc) and those people then convinced all the agency people to put more money into the platform.
Up till 2015 or so, it was a real struggle to convince people to even try FB ads, but after that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
> I find that hard to believe. Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform..., they had a good revenue growth in the early ‘10s.
Also, up to 2013 or so (when feed ads became a thing), most of that money was coming from payments for f2p games, so they had lots of partner managers there, but not enough ads sales people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.
The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things: 1) Unlimited PTO is a scam. Ask anyone who ever got paid out six weeks salary when they changed jobs. 2) “the craft” is doing some heavy lifting here. I happen to enjoy AI-assisted dev, but it is nothing like the work that drew me to the industry. Otherwise agreed on all counts.
Unlimited PTO works great for someone like me who regularly takes half day and full day PTO every quarter for various commitments/life stuff. But I’m also a guy and I have no problem asserting myself/spending my benefits. People who are a little less comfortable with that end up just parking on it and would do a lot better if they were given a set number of PTO days. The ambiguity hurts them in the same way not havin…
I don’t know anyone who takes the high end of that anymore, especially senior/staff folks.
Unlimited PTO takes a liability off the company’s books, and makes every time off request a negotiation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. It's funny to me that everyone talks about pandemic over-hiring, as if this hadn't been a thing for a decade before that. Like, when I started at FB in 2013, they…
AI aside, if we just look at other engineering disciplines in mature sectors, the future is not bright(er). No fully paid golden cadillac benefits packages (for your dog too!), no twice daily uber eats comps, no $150k entry level, no unlimited PTO, no 6 months leave. If you go to your uncles engineering department at the boiler company, these guy's engineering roles are about as pampered as the warehouse managers. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. It's funny to me that everyone talks about pandemic over-hiring, as if this hadn't been a thing for a decade before that. Like, when I started at FB in 2013, they…
AI aside, if we just look at other engineering disciplines in mature sectors, the future is not bright(er). No fully paid golden cadillac benefits packages (for your dog too!), no twice daily uber eats comps, no $150k entry level, no unlimited PTO, no 6 months leave. If you go to your uncles engineering department at the boiler company, these guy's engineering roles are about as pampered as the warehouse managers. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things: 1) Unlimited PTO is a scam. Ask anyone who ever got paid out six weeks salary when they changed jobs. 2) “the craft” is doing some heavy lifting here. I happen to enjoy AI-assisted dev, but it is nothing like the work that drew me to the industry. Otherwise agreed on all counts.
Unlimited PTO works great for someone like me who regularly takes half day and full day PTO every quarter for various commitments/life stuff. But I’m also a guy and I have no problem asserting myself/spending my benefits. People who are a little less comfortable with that end up just parking on it and would do a lot better if they were given a set number of PTO days. The ambiguity hurts them in the same way not havin…
So you take something less than 10 days off a year?
In all developed countries bar one that is against the law for being so few days off.
You are being abused.
I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.
> I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. It's funny to me that everyone talks about pandemic over-hiring, as if this hadn't been a thing for a decade before that. Like, when I started at FB in 2013, they…
FB has what?
Intel has around the same number of people and they make chips, laptops, different types of chips. Hardware, software, supply chain etc.
FB does what? And what do they do with all these very well paid people?!