211–218 of 218 posts
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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.
When the AI models hallucinate up a catastrophe, managers will reevaluate that calculus. Humans are accountable and act accordingly, models are not.
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> This sounds like an attempt to rationalize the fact that your business isn't that effective, otherwise adding more people would result in making more money. Yes, or that businesses are expecting a slow down in the economy that hinders their ability to sell (i.e. their customers are going to cutback on spending) This was the case last year (or maybe it was the year before) where technology companies saw their custom…
But if we're assuming that AI is highly effective, shouldn't that lead to short-term growth in the economy as inflation drops? Shouldn't people then be expected to spend even more?
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The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required. You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be. It isn't as if there are enough projec…
I’ve never worked anywhere where lack of work or projects was the bottleneck. Time, headcount, and budget were always the constraints. Even in cost centers like IT or ops, there’s usually an endless backlog of work, technical debt, support requests, and improvements that never get prioritized because resources are limited.
Just because the cost/benefit ratio improves a bit in one area doesn't mean that all of a sudden all projects on the backlog become worthwhile.
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You have a team of two consultants, for what used to be a team of five, kind of. No need to take the 69 out of a magic hat. The other three join the on bench pool. When economy gets worse, the lucky two are the ones staying.
> kind of This is arbitrary nonsense. What “big consultancy” has 5 developers ? What are you even talking about?
(I have no opinion on the quality of that comment otherwise. But complaining about an illustrative number is weird.)
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If you're increasing productivity, you should be doing more and growing, yes? If you're cutting payroll costs and trying to have the same level of capacity...your business sucks and you deserve your stock tanking. Layoffs are a strong signal that a business is not investing in growth and is just trying to wring more profit from the same thing. If investors were rational, they'd walk away. Maybe replacing the expensiv…
> Layoffs are a strong signal that a business is not investing in growth and is just trying to wring more profit from the same thing. If investors were rational, they'd walk away. Not always. A buggy whip maker in 1920 should be laying off people. No amount of investment in buggy whips will bring that market back. A layoff is saying that the investment will not pay off. So long as the company is cutting the right thi…
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If you're increasing productivity, you should be doing more and growing, yes? If you're cutting payroll costs and trying to have the same level of capacity...your business sucks and you deserve your stock tanking. Layoffs are a strong signal that a business is not investing in growth and is just trying to wring more profit from the same thing. If investors were rational, they'd walk away. Maybe replacing the expensiv…
I think the issue is that at any given point the work required to fire a 100-200k engineer is less than making that engineer do work to make you that much. If you're growing obviously it's stupid to fire but if you have plateau'd the easiest gain is to trim the fat, so to speak. Also once a company is acquired by a private fund, everyone becomes a title and a number in a spreadsheet, that's all.
How's that different in public companies?
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In consulting you don't make magically customers out of nowhere, and there is a limited pool of customers to feed from.
Again, shortsighted. There's no reason a business has to have a single product. If you run out of customers for cars, you make HVAC and front end loaders. A lot of companies simply have no direction and aren't looking to build new products. They had a success, rotated in some myopic execs, flipped into rent-seeking mode and are trying to wring more cash out of the same progressive enshittified product.
Conglomerates are seldom efficient.
Return the money to shareholders, and they can invest in companies that are actually good at making HVAC or front end loaders.
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I don't see people complaining about the repetition of the dozens of daily topics about how LLMs will replace software engineers.
Commenting from a shadowbanned account to say that opposition to LLMs is not tolerated on HackerNews.