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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

cnn.com

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#391

Post by trade2play »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #286
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their d…

> Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes The data does not support this. The businesses with the highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings. https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with lower market caps.

Google/Facebooks earnings are so high they can afford to be wildly wasteful with headcount and still be market leaders

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#392

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

matthest wrote: post #355
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? Because they don't have to do that. They could just operate at max efficiency all the time. Instead, they spread the wealth a bit by having bullshit jobs, even if the existence of these jobs is dependent on the market cycle.

> Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic?

I do.

It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever.

I'm a person that would be hypothetically supportive of something like DOGE cuts, but I'd rather have people earning a living even with Soviet-style make work jobs than unemployed. I don't desire to live in a cutthroat "competitive" society where only "talent" can live a dignified life. I don't know if that's "wealth distribution" or socialism or whatever; I don't really care, nor make claim it's some airtight political philosophy.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#393

Post by sauercrowd »

CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

"intern" and "entry level" are proxies for complexity with these comparisons, not actual seniority. We'll keep hiring interns and entry level positions, they'll just do other things.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#394

Post by digianarchist »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #158

"If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up." Silicon Valley and Redmond make desperate attempts to argue for their own continued relevance. For Silicon Valley VC, software running on com…

I saw a tweet the other day that stated AI will cure all diseases within 5-10 years. The tweet cites scientists and CEOs but only lists CEOs of AI companies.

https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1927843826183589960

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#395

Post by trade2play »

ryandrake wrote: post #378
alvah wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping peopl…

People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it. Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut lin…

All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.

Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#396

Post by underlipton »

hluska wrote: post #367
underlipton wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all get 5 conspiracy theories before we advance from "understandably suspicious, given the complexity of the modern world" to "reliable tinfoil purchasers", and one of mine is that the prevalence of Indian execs and, to a lesser extent, Indian and Chinese workers in tech is a backdoor concession to countries who could open a demographic can of whoop-ass on us if they really wanted to. We let them bleed off the amb…

Edited: Actually disregard, this isn’t worth it, but I don’t grant any freebies.

Well, now I'm curious.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#397

Post by dylan604 »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #372
dylan604 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you honestly trying to tell us that the code you receive from an AI is not requiring any of your time to review and tweak and is 100% correct every time and ready to deploy into your code base with no changes what so ever? You my friend must be a steely eyed missile man of prompting

Consider that there are no humans in existence that fulfill your requirements, not to mention $20/mo ones

why would i consider that when there absolutely are humans that can do that. your dollar value is just ridiculous. if you're a hot shit dev that no longer needs junior devs, then if you spend 15 minutes refactoring the AI output, then you're underwater on that $20/mo value

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#398

Post by dehrmann »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #93

Imagine you had a crystal ball that lets you look 10 years into the future, and you asked it about whether we underestimate or overestimate how many jobs AI will replace in the future. It flickers for a moment, then it either says "In 2025, mankind vastly underestimated the amount of jobs AI can do in 2035" or "In 2025, mankind vastly overestimated the amount of jobs AI can do in 2035" How would you use that informat…

Ah, so a straddle.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#399

Post by sabarn01 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #252
geraneum wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees There’s no such a thing as loyalty in employer-employee relationships. There’s money, there’s work and there’s [collective] leverage. We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars.

> We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars. A majority of my friends are blue-collar. You might be surprised. Unions are adversarial, but the relationships can still be quite warm. I hear that German and Japanese unions are full-force stakeholders in their corporations, and the relationship is a lot more intricate. It's like a marriage. There's always elements of control/power play, but the idea is to maximi…

I have been in Union shops before working in tech. In some places they are fine in others its where your worst employee on your team goes to make everyone else less effective.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#400

Post by snowwrestler »

Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies.

This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good ideas and reallocate resources toward them.

In the absence of reliable prediction, quick reaction is what wins.

Anyway, even if AI does end up “destroying” tons of existing white collar jobs, that does not necessarily imply mass unemployment. But it’s such a common inference that it has its own pejorative: Luddite.

And the flip side of Ludddism is what we see from AI boosters now: invoking a massive impact on current jobs as a shorthand to create the impression of massive capability. It’s a form of marketing, as the CNN piece says.

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