Comment by 8cvor6j844qw_d6
4 days ago
Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount.
For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
4 days ago
Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount.
For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.
Except it is a horrible metric to determine who is the least effective in an org and should be cut.
I've all-ways asked the managers can you kindly disclose all confidential business information. In which they obviously respond with condescending remarks. Then I respond with, then how am I going to give you a answer without all the knowledge of how the business runs and operates? You can go away and figure out what is going to make work for the business then you can delegate what you want me to do, it is the reason why you pay me money.
I know at least two different companies in Italy that are very hard on shoving NotebookLM and Gemini down their employees (not IT companies, talking banking/insurance/legal).
Which for the positions/roles involved does make some sense (drafting documents/research).
But it seems like most people are annoyed, because the people shoving those aren't even fully able to show how to leverage the tools, the attitude seems like "you need to do what you do right now under lots of pressure, but also find the time to understand how to use these tools in your own role".
At my job a certain department was very enthusiastic about AI, and were going out of their way to show the top managers that they can leverage it in the best possible way. Maybe they thought they must appear to be at bleeding edge tech-wise, I'm not sure. 75% of people from that dept were let go because of how successful their AI trial was.
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
You know what is an insult? Supermarket on my street putting on display sloppy ads with ramen bowl that has 3 different thickness chopsticks and cartoon characters with scrambled faces. Now that is an insult, because there was a human being doing that job, and I am sure there was a great "productivity boost" related to that change.
I am a heavy AI user myself, and sure as hell I am not putting my foot in that place again.
I think these pictures are a perfect and accessible metaphor for the problems of vibecoding slop and asking an actual engineer to fix it.
The end results evokes a sense of unease even in laymen, and the more you know about the subject matter, the more wrong it looks..
And 'fixing' it essentially requires as much if not more effort as writing it from scratch.
Dignity has no calories, though.
Yeah but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times, not the responsibility of the private sector to hold back progress and inefficiency just so more people can stay in employment even if they're not needed anymore.
The governments however have been and continue to be ill prepared to the rising increases of globalisation labor offshoring and automation.
There was a news article yesterday in my EU country about a 50 year old laid off CEO of a small company that continues to be unemployed after a year because nobody will hire him anymore so he lives off welfare and oddjobs and the government unemployment office has no solution.
What happens in the future when AI and offshoring culls more white collar jobs and there will be thousands or tens of thousands of unemployable 50 year old managers with outdated skills that nobody will want to hire or re-train due to various reasons, but they still need to keep working somehow till their 70s to qualify for retirement? Sure you then go to re-train yourself to become a licensed plumber or electrician, but who will want to hire you to gain experience when they can hire the 20-something fresher rather than the 50 year old with bad knees?
Governments are not prepared for this.
5 replies →
Is it an insult to human dignity? Let’s go through the thought process.
Commodities are used in an enterprise. Some of the commodities are labor. That labor commodity does work. Involving automation. Eventually (so we are told) those labor commodities manage to automate some forms of labor. Making those other labor commodities redundant.
The labor commodities are discarded. Because why (sigh) use a cart when you now have a car? And you don’t even own a horse.
All of the above is presumably not an insult to human dignity. No. The insult to human dignity is being “kept busy” instead of letting billionaires hoard automation made through human labor.
Of course the real solution is not busywork. But the part about busywork was not on the top of my mind with regards to dignity in this context.
> Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving,
To put a fine point on it, yeah? Ultimately.
That's how capitalism works. It doesn't matter if your job is useful but if you don't do anything, you don't get money.
More people without jobs will be a heavy burden on social security systems, so in the end it's literally about starving.
Assuming large-scale automation[1]: workers have in aggregate automated themselves. It takes labor to automate. And yet those former workers are now a “burden”? We’re assuming automation, so was the making of the food stuff, the transportation of the food stuff, the automation of the infrastructure maintenance... was that done or not? Where is the burden being felt?
You’re gonna call the people that built everything a burden?
Either we are talking in terms of propagandistic guilt assignment, or we’re talking realpolitics. Either:
1. we can trivially support the “burden” because of automation (no burden); or
2. billionaire resource hoarders (a burden?) do not need the vast majority of their underlings (maybe just a few for Epstein 2.0) and can let them fend for themselves or die off. (It’s literally not even a question of whether they have a big red Automation Button that would sustain the “burden” indefinitely. What incentive do they have to press it?)
[1] I notice scale is a favorite buzzword now
2 replies →
Suggest replacing managers with AI
"Ideas for AI to help reduce headcount" sounds like the title everyone should start using on resignation letters.
If anyone still resigns that is. They seem to have automated that too.
Never seen it actually work though...incentives matter.
> Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount.
If the manager doesn’t have ideas, it is they who deserve the boot.
Manager is to manage optimal delivery, not coming up with ideas.