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

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

#881

Post by cavisne »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
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.…

This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hir…

My theory for these PM's is its basically a cheap way to take potential entrepreneurs off the market. Its hard to predict if a startup will succeed but one genre of success is having a Type A "fake it till you make it" non technical cofounder who can keep raising long enough to get product market fit.

These types all go to the same schools and do really well, interview the same, and value the prestige of working in big tech. So it's pretty easy to identify them and offer them a great career path and take them off the market.

Technical founders are way trickier to identify as they can be dropouts, interview poorly, not value the prestige etc.

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

#882

Post by ghaff »

oblio wrote: post #851
Slow_Hand wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to undercut your point - because you’re largely correct - but this is my reality. I have a decent-paying job in which I work roughly 15 hrs a week. Sometimes more when work scales up. That said, I’m not what you’d call a high-earning person (I earn < 100k) I simply live within my means and do my best to curb lifestyle creep. In this way, Keynes’ vision is a reality, but it’s a mindset and we also have to know whe…

You're lucky. Most companies don't accept that. Frequently, even when they have part time arrangements, the incentives are such that middle managers are incentivized to squeeze you (including squeezing you out), despite company policies and HR mandates.

40 hours/week is of course just an established norm for a lot of people and companies. But two 20 hour/week folks tend to cost more than one 40 hour/week person for all sorts of reasons.

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

#883

Post by ghaff »

timacles wrote: post #687
tim333 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think something Keynes got wrong there and much AI job discussion ignores is people like working, subject to the job being fun. Look at the richest people with no need to work - Musk, Buffett etc. Still working away, often well past retirement age with no need for the money. Keynes himself, wealth and probably with tenure working away on his theories. In the UK you can quite easily do nothing by going on disability…

What percentage of people would you say like working for fun? Would you really claim they make up a significant portion of society? Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that I’m good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15 years find that I would much rather spend time with my family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend another hour doing work for other people. the work never st…

I think a lot of people would work fewer hours and probably retire earlier if money were absolutely not in the equation. That said, it's also true that there are a lot of things you realistically can't do on your own--especially outside of software.

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

#884

Post by tim333 »

monkeyelite wrote: post #302
michaeldoron wrote: post #78

Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and…

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. But that didn’t happen. All of the people like pg who drew these accelerating graphs were wrong. In fact, I think just about every commenter on COVID was wrong about what would happen in the early months regardless of political angle.

I remember scientists, especially epidemiologists being quite accurate. I guess the key is to not even have a political angle but instead some knowledge of what you are talking about.

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

#885

Post by tim333 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

It's like all the farmers soil shoveling jobs were stolen by tractors. People moved on to more interesting things.

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

#886

Post by JumpCrisscross »

steveBK123 wrote: post #802
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks Most people with a modest retirement account could retire in their forties to working 15-hour workweeks somewhere in rural America.

The trade is you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have a high savings rate. Avoid spending it all on VHCOL real estate. And then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”, possibly before your kids head off to college. Most cannot meet all those conditions and end up on the hedonic treadmill.

> you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have a high savings rate

Yes to the latter, no to the former. The states with the highest savings rates are Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachussetts and Maryland [1]. Only Massachussetts is a top-five COL state [2].

> then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”

This is the real hurdle. Ultimately, however, it's a choice. One chooses to work harder to access a scarce resource out of preference, not necessity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...

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

#887

Post by e40 »

rbultje wrote: post #880
Lu2025 wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, R&D change is what triggered 2022 tech layoffs. Coders used to be free, all this play with Metaverse and such was on public dime. As soon as a company had to spend real money, it all came crashing down.

This is a weird take. Employees are supposed to be business expenses, that's the core idea of running a business: profit = revenue - expenses, where expenses are personnel / materials, and pay taxes over profit. Since the R&D change, businesses can't fully expense employees and need to pay (business) taxes over their salaries. Employees - of course - still pay personal taxes also (as was always the case).

Yeah, free is a bit of a odd take. ! ZIRP + section 174 was a huge simultaneous blow to tech.

I would add one more: me too-ism from CEOs following Musk after the twitter reductions. I think many tech CEOs (e.g., Zuck) hate their workforce with a passion and used the layoff culture to unwind things and bring their workforce to heel (you might be less vocal in this sort of environment... think of the activists that used to work at Google).

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

#888

Post by kayamon »

paulluuk wrote: post #33

Around the time when bitcoin started to get serious public attention, late 2017, I remember feeling super hyped about it and yet everyone told me that money spent on bitcoin was wasted money. I really believed that bitcoin, or at least cryptocurrency as a whole, would fundamentally change how banking and currencies would work. Now, almost 10 years later, I would say that it did not live up to my believe that it would…

Bitcoin was $2000 dollars each in 2017. Now in 2025 it's $104,000. It's set to keep countering global inflation until 2140.

It ain't done yet.

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

#889

Post by IncreasePosts »

Izkata wrote: post #535
SteveNuts wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc. The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless, otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..

This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid... For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.

There might be a reason it is a series of 3 second clips

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

#890

Post by appleaday1 »

ghaff wrote: post #882
oblio wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're lucky. Most companies don't accept that. Frequently, even when they have part time arrangements, the incentives are such that middle managers are incentivized to squeeze you (including squeezing you out), despite company policies and HR mandates.

40 hours/week is of course just an established norm for a lot of people and companies. But two 20 hour/week folks tend to cost more than one 40 hour/week person for all sorts of reasons.

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