Comment by Aurornis
4 days ago
> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee
One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk.
I assumed I’d be welcomed and appreciated for helping make their work more efficient, but the reality was not that simple. The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.
Mind you, the original process was extremely slow and non-parallel so they had a lot of time to wait. The job was still very easy. I spent weeks doing it myself to test and optimize and to this day it’s the easiest manual labor job I’ve ever worked. Yet I as the anti-hero for ruining the good thing they had going.
Imagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs...
What a great comparison; I've never thought of it this way. It's obviously not perfect since the automation is so temperamental shall we say, but this does give me more empathy for the countless workers whose jobs have been re-natured by technology.
From their prospective, the efficiency increases and more gets done, but the hours and wage stay the same and the number of co-workers may decrease.
I don’t even have to imagine it, you just described my job now that we have LLMs.
I believe that was the point
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efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?
The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model.
There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.
There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.
At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.
Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.
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One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.
In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that.
A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.
Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.
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Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!
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Why do the laws exist if its better for (almost) everyone involved? Without the laws why would people not do it that way if its the better approach?
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And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human)
Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.
That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.
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There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades.
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It's narrow vs wide views. Wide views, automation and the like has improved the economies massively. But narrow views, people have lost their jobs, had to retrain and basically restart their career, and some never found another job.
This isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee.
I've not seen a correlation between automation and wealth, though there is an extremely string correlation between energy use and wealth.
I don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example).
> It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards
yeah but it's clear that we're not doing that, and are arguably going the other direction as hard as possible
> removing human labor from production
Karl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
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"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever.
This is putting the apple cart before the horse.
Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".
Very true. We waste alot of valuable labor on “software engineering” that is grossly inefficient. Capital gets allocated to these so called startups that are incredibly inefficient.
This says a lot as relating to the rise of AI and the fear of job loss. There's going to be displacement in areas we can't predict, but overall it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.
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I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly.
They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".
> refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian"
If they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”!
How do you feel about the whole thing years later?
Back in the day one company had a dedicated copier operator who was very unhappy after a Xerox service tech did away with the job by enabling the network printing and scan to email functions. The customer had upgraded their old copier out of necessity but had never changed their workflow.
This will not be unusual for any kind of software engineering work to be honest. A big chunk of work in B2C companies has to do with customer support, for example; building websites, apps, writing content, chatbots, etc with the objective being that people do not call customer support, because people on phones don't scale very well. And the other part is that when they do call, that the CS agent can address the issue quickly and has minimal administrative overhead.
But it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that.
I had that on my very first project. I couldn’t understand why the people on site were so hostile to me. Afterwards I was talking to the salesman about this and he told me they were all fired when the project went live.
> So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.
Couldn't help but imagining Darryl getting mad at you.
Thanks for the story!
Yup same story here, also warehouse optimization. I was the reason the employees got new scanners and oh my... the scanners didn't have a physical keyboard. Now all the 50yo+ would have to aim on a touch display which is apparently impossible.
Also we had to introduce some fixed locations and storage placement recommendations. Our storage workers almost revolted. After a few months it settled though.
Yous story is not about optimization: it is about change imposed to people who did not request it, nor felt the need of it.
It 100% was about optimization. Introducing new devices, with more capabilities (storage place recommendations for example), that weren't 10 years old and broke every 2 weeks is optimizing.
> The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.
The faster the LLM spits out garbage code, the more time I get to spend reviewing slop and dealing with it gaslighting me, and the less time I get to spend on doing the parts of the job I actually enjoy.
Mandatory reference: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer
insane mindset. This kind of thing is why there is no industry left in anglosphere outside US
Insane mindset that people should work modestly, get paid modestly and live in the fruits of a wealthy society? As opposed to breaking their backs to make a boss even wealthier?
The efficiencies are always to the benefit of the wealthy, the wage gap grows. You work hard, you still get fired.
Cap top wages to 5x the lowest, companies can't own housing except socially beneficial housing, individuals get 2 house maximum.