Comment by b800h
1 day ago
Perhaps a version of the Doorman Fallacy, ie. replacing a doorman with an automatic door seems like an obvious win, but it turns out the doorman was performing a number of other vital functions (customer experience, for example) which weren't considered.
This has been my argument for the past few weeks to explain why we aren’t seeing or feeling real world productivity gains as consumers despite many espousing the efficiency of AI they personally see with their own workflows. The hands on work is rarely the actual bottleneck.
My team can crank out high quality work in a few hours and AI could do the same medium to high quality work in a minute or two, but the review, feedback, and sign off takes days of back and forth. AI just slows this part of the process down because editing AI work is often a challenge because, no one is quite as familiar with how it was put together and sometimes it creates things that are not editable at all. And telling AI to make very specific changes is often a mixed bag at best.
Solo devs and small teams with minimal oversight can probably move a lot faster, but corporations are going to see minimal uplift except in areas where no one is looking.
Established successful companies operate in a world where action and change often introduce more immediate risk than staying still. In those companies AI doesn't necessarily offer a lot of "increased productivity" gains because writing the code isn't the bottleneck. But many of them will try to chase cost savings by laying people off or slowing hiring.
There's a couple types of companies where the reverse is true: young companies trying to grow, and dying ones that need a turnaround.
Out of those two, young companies are less likely to be set in their ways. So the first place you really see the result of development moving faster with AI is probably going to be in future months and years when suddenly-big companies start getting widely known with products and business strategies that wouldn't have made sense a decade ago because writing code to try different things to even get the ball rolling was a bottleneck, and you could only do things that wouldn't scale for so long.
Or the productivity gains, albeit substantial, are not as earth shattering as the llm providers would have you believe. As with any new technology adoption is a laggard. The internet "existed" in the late 80's, early 90's. Many companies are still reaping productivity gains from plugging into this first.
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> Solo devs and small teams with minimal oversight can probably move a lot faster
Spot on!
Usually, most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions. It takes 3 - 9 months to get a yes/no on something and for most things that are obvious that need to be done need to go up the chain of command. The decision takes forever, but when the decision is made, they want things to be done quickly, which creates unreasonable stress on the ICs.
The first step to see real productivity gains is for AI to eliminate the executive and middle-management layer, this starts a virtuous cycle, destroys both empire building and massively accelerates true productivity, not just meaningless metrics like LOC.
Speaking realistically, you're going in the wrong direction here. The most likely scenario in the short run is that management will seek to replace labor with automated systems supported by a skeleton crew to aid in implementation and execution level tasks that can't (or shouldn't) be handled by the LLM alone, like deployment.
So the first signs of productivity gains will be shrinking head count, but it's going go from the bottom up, as usual.
I considered it an absolute win when I submitted an LLM assisted PR that removed 30k LOC :)
> most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions
I work in a startup and I find it to be the opposite. Management wants us to go really fast and engineering is like "well wait we should slow down because just because LLMs can write a bunch of code doesn't mean it can build a maintainable app"
That said, I know that our small engineering team can't build an entire business by ourselves. So some management is required. But as you said, getting stuff done quickly is stressful. And with LLMs we're expected to get a LOT of stuff done very quickly. Some colleagues have decided to go on quiet strike by submitting AI slop and citing "no time to review" to prove a point. I don't fault them, but I also know that me and someone else will have to clean up their messes at some point.
And yet amusingly it’s the ICs that are being replaced, not management or executives…
AI. CEOs. Now.
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This is my experience. As a data engineer with years in my current role I can get AI to write good SQL that correctly answers questions or defines metrics. At worst it may take a few back and forths to really nail it.
However, if a PM tries it they will more often than not get a wrong answer because they do not know what to look for or how to ask the right questions.
Prompts still matter a lot especially when you are working in an established enterprise.
What model are you using? I find Claude Sonnet to be quite capable of generating correct queries. Also, are you using a semantic layer [1], because without it the model may have trouble understanding your schema. I would be very surprised if you PM gets a wrong answer with these settings. I have never seen Sonnet 4.6+ produce a bad query.
[1] https://communitysupport.group/t/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-...
This gives me War of the Worlds vibes. "AI would have destroyed the world but Gary in Ads, as always, was a day late with his release approval."
I know the Doorman Fallacy is an established concept, but where did it really ever apply? The automatic door has won despite, devastatingly so (and no your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton).
The doorman was called a doorman because its essential task was the door. Everything else was additional and replaceable or unnecessary in the first place.
Same with AI. Once it has replaced the main task, the rest will adapt around it.
When you say the automatic door "has won" do you mean it's won by rendering doormen obsolete? Because if so, that seems very untrue. According to Vanity Fair and NPR there are over 25,000 doormen working in New York City. 1930 there were an estimated few thousand. So since the invention of the automatic door, the number of doormen has skyrocketed.
Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.
So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.
You can't only compare doormen to doormen, because the number of people and doors have increased too. You need to compare doormen to doors. All the apartment buildings I've known people live at on Manhattan have only had automatic doors. You need to show that automatic doors replaced unguarded doors.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
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NYC seems like a bad example since automatic doors haven’t been widely adopted.
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Perhaps it's a testament to the fact that life used to be full of things that made it a little nicer that have been ripped out in the name of efficiency and profit.
Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.
In the name of profit is so misleading though. The reality is most people don't values a doorman enough to pay for one, and costs are now lower for everyone than they would be if doorman were around.
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Old buildings were beautiful because the cost of hiring someone to build it, and the price of their lives when they fell off the facade, was lower than the value of the beauty.
Modern buildings draw the line somewhere else. I too wish there would be more beautiful buildings, but not at the old price.
I don't know whether you can really call it winning. Who is actually benefiting from the win here? Another small example: something you see now at restaurants are these QR codes being put on the tables, to remove the need for a waiter to come by and ask, or for you to get up and order, but by automating that away you also remove that little bit of social interaction for both the people ordering and the waiters.
There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.
It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?
> remove the need for a waiter to come by and ask, or for you to get up and order, but by automating that away you also remove that little bit of social interaction for both the people ordering and the waiters.
Okay, but were you coming to the restaurant for social interaction with the waiters? Have you stopped going to those restaurants that serve you good food at a reasonable price and which are otherwise desirable places to eat because of the lack of social interaction with waiters?
People dislike places that charge too much for mediocre service, and those places disproportionately use the QR codes for ordering and don't pass on the savings from labor reduction to the consumer. Very few people actually miss their waiter interrupting their conversation to tell them the specials.
The QR codes are an interesting case. Restaurants in my area have been abandoning them. I think it’s because it actually slowed service down.
We stopped going to one favorite place because the wait for a table became interminable. You’d spend forever standing there watching people waiting 15-20 minutes to get a busser’s attention so they could ask a question about the food, and then another 5-10 minutes for someone who actually knows the answer to come out and talk to them. Or, after the meal was over, people would just camp out indefinitely.
My favourite example is the petrol station attendant. Not only something really convenient went away but also the opportunity to upsell.
Loss on every side, still happened.
Anyone who has a positive experience with the doorman is where it applied. The lost family who got directions, the anxious interview candidate who got a boost from their smile, the unsure customer who was warmly greeted on a cold day.
Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.
Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.
It's sad how the stupidest forms of short term cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business long term.
Fair points. But valve have been up to their own shitty anti competitive behaviour too. As far as I understand they don't allow games to be listed on other services at a lower price. Also they take 30 percent compared to epics 12, yet everyone seems to hate epics attempts to break their monopoly. Steam is great, but I try to use gog instead when I can.
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The Doorman Fallacy is real but is poorly named. Doormen weren't replaced by automatic doors, they were replaced by simply not having a doorman. People can open doors themselves - doormen have always been a luxury for the most part.
> where did it really ever apply? The automatic door has won despite, devastatingly so (and no your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton).
The wal-mart greeter is essentially a doorman for automatic doors.
Greeters are an anti-theft measure.
simple test - which hotel would you consider premium ?
the one with a doorman & porter vs the one with just an automatic door and elevator.
people really need to read alchemy by roy Sutherland.
Which would you consider more premium, the hotel with a lobby with marble floors or with linoleum? That doesn't mean marble provides any utility that the linoleum does not.
I suppose doorman and porter would be considered more premium, but personally, my preference is definitely automatic door and elevator.
Doorman and porter means more awkward social interactions with strangers, and “premium” just makes me feel like I don’t belong there. I prefer my hotels to be simple and automatic. Airbnbs with self-service check-ins are ideal.
>your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
On the other hand it also highlights the unrecognised, and unremunerated, efforts of the doorman.
In an ideal world (yeah, I know), it should result in them being paid for what they actually do.
The obvious strategy to manifest that would would be to pay them for what they actually do! That is remarkably easy to organise. But I suspect that would result in them becoming unemployed and it would turn out people don't actually value any of the other things they do.
One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.
> Then it turns out they weren't serious.
the classic revealed preference vs stated preference.
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> One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.
People have no problem paying something for nothing, if it gives them a chance at a disproportionally great return when they actually need it. It's called insurance, and perhaps we should start framing some of the intangibles in this way.
I.e. paying the premium for possibility of human interaction isn't paying for niceness-as-a-service, it's an insurance policy that pays out in kindness whenever you need it, wherever you are. But like every insurance policy, it only works if there's critical mass of people pooling resources, and stops working if they evaluate it as investment.
"The obvious strategy to manifest that would would be to pay them for what they actually do! That is remarkably easy to organise."
How? How do you set a price based on what someone does?
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Nobody is paid for effort. Unless you cut down on supply of doormen or increase demand the comp won't change.
And depending on the job, AI might replace the vital functions leaving us all holding doors
it comes with the analogy of art, Art is something that comes with human emotion, not something that's just beautiful enough
Perhaps another version is bullshit jobs, where the doorman really doesn’t want to be there, and the other tasks such as greeting people or providing some sense of security really wasn’t his raison d'être
i haven't seen a real doorman in ages
I haven’t seen a real customer experience in residences in ages.
Maybe there’s a connection.
I just watched a Japanese movie where a character stopped in for some gas. A man comes out, she tells him what type, he fills the gas tank for her (using a cloth to handle the car parts of course!). While it’s pumping, he wipes down her windows. He gets her money and runs to get her change. He steps a bit into the road to aid her leaving. He waves as she leaves.
Is it more efficient in America? Yeah. Is part of that scene her being bored while waiting? Yeah. Are gas prices there probably a bit higher? Yeah.
But there really was something appetizing about it. I’m not sure I could put my finger on exactly what.
This is appetizing in the abstract until you're in the middle of New Jersey and its horrendously cold and rainy and the pump jockey hates your guts because he had to leave his heated hut where the Bruins were on, and makes a half hearted wipe at your icy windshield to guilt you into tipping him for doing something you'd be happier doing yourself.
Not sure if you even realized it but you pointed directly at the very problem with the American version of this scenario.
The tipping.
It's fucked because it distorts the relationship between staff and customers, not to mention it lets businesses get away with underpaying their staff.
Fortunately Japan doesn't do this.
I've lived in NJ my entire life and I've never once tipped somebody at the pump. I've had them wipe down my windshield a single-digit number of times. Where was this?
> …and the pump jockey hates your guts because he had to leave his heated hut where the Bruins were on…
Why would he be watching the Bruins and not the Devils?
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Seems like "it's horrendously cold and rainy" is the worst example to choose to illustrate negative aspects of gas station attendants...? I got to stay in my warm and dry car in this scenario?
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Full service gas stations are the standard in the vast majority of the world. It's also way faster and more pleasant. Same thing at e.g. retail outlets where you'll walk into and have your own little personal army of helpers. I think the major difference is in relative cost of living and labor costs.
Low end labor costs tend to track cost of living costs. In high cost-of-living places, you have high labor costs and vice versa. Most places are much cheaper than America, which means you can afford to hire more people to do tasks that would otherwise be uneconomical.
> Full service gas stations are the standard in the vast majority of the world.
Do you happen to know where one could find statistics on this? This doesn't mesh with my experience at all, and a quick search did not turn up reliable data in either direction. Not-logged-in ChatGPT gave me an estimate of 40-60% worldwide, but that obviously has very low certainty.
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FWIW self-service gas stations are quite common in Japan.
In Italy you can have both at the same gas station if you wish. They usually have self-service and serviced pumps and the price is a bit higher at the latter. Almost makes sense :)
> But there really was something appetizing about it. I’m not sure I could put my finger on exactly what
It's the fact you were not there.
You've described the state of Oregon, where "full service" (they pump, not you) is legally required.
<edit> Ah, my Oregonian neighbors inform me that in the last few years, this mandated institution is no longer in force.
That's changed a bit in the last few years! I'm in somewhat rural Oregon (The Dalles) and in practice none of our gas stations really do full service anymore. Gas prices didn't go down at all
Not anymore, that changed in 2023.
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Got the American version in New Jersey but it’s much less appealing
I live in Oregon. All three of the gas stations on the way to work pump my gas and wash my windows. Not the waving and stuff, but the rest of it is my normal life.
Except if you ask an AI it will tell you that.
> it turns out the doorman was performing a number of other vital functions (customer experience, for example) which weren't considered.
That's just bullshit. And barbaric.
Making someone stand in place all day primarily to open a frickin door (or other menial tasks) for others is a degrading job.
What "vital functions" exactly?
Whenever I see someone in a job where they're not even provided a chair, I feel ashamed. Like doormen, guards, "traffic police" that act as meat-based traffic lights, standing right smack dab in the middle of exhaust fumes all day without even a face mask.. it all seems such a ridiculous and archaic ceremony
Should we also bring lamplighters [0] and phone operators [1] back?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator
Growing up, many apartment buildings had doormen sitting behind a desk in the lobby. Some of the functions they provided:
- Identifying suspicious people and situations.
- Helping people carry things through the lobby.
- Passing messages before cellphones.
- Receiving packages.
- Making sure people in the lobby behaved.
And probably more that I never realized as a child. Doorman doesn't necessarily mean "suited guy standing attention outside the building next to a door". The locks were also electronic, so they didn't even have to stand up to answer intercom buzzes.
There are buildings where the doorman sits behind a desk. Perhaps it varies by city.
And a lot of places, like hotels, they handle things such as luggage... definitely not just standing there all day just for a door, that's ridiculous.
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What about powerpoints ?
i thought HN loved to complain about bullshit jobs?
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A substantial amount of NYC apartment buildings still have doormen, people claim to like it. I do not place enough value on a doorman that I would want to live in one where I need to pay for what can be done by an intercom.
Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.
> what can be done by an intercom
The Doorman Fallacy is exactly this—thinking that one function of a job is the whole job. The doorman doesn't just open doors nor relay messages. They're eyes and ears, security, friendliness, an extra hand with bags, local knowledge, emergency response... The list goes on and on. Almost none of their functions can be replaced with an intercom.
The modern alternative is elevators where you can't push buttons but just wave a card at it, which themselves mean obnoxious tech systems to deal with delivery people and packages and visitors, and other automation that seems to border on the paranoid. Which—just by its existence vs a human—further removes you from society and day-to-day practice at normal human interaction.
Much of the US has buildings that are too small to justify a doorman regardless, but something is lost for it.
"Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings." - Terry Pratchett
It seems like you're breezing past the concept of the fallacy entirely.
The value of the doorman isn't the intercom functionality.
People like doorman buildings because the building has a real person with eyes on the premises at all times.
An intercom or automatic door opening system can't deal with delivery people who can't figure out the intercom system, don't follow delivery instructions, leave your package/food somewhere random, etc. And that's only a fraction of the value a doorman provides.
An intercom system won't deter trespassers, petty crime, etc.
As long as the building is large enough, the cost is negligible.
I randomly picked a listing in NYC, 219 East 69th Street. 145 apartments on 13 floors.
Let's say you're paying a doorman 24/7 at $30/hour, that's $150/month/resident.
$150 a month for someone competent and engaged, who knows most residents by face, when I need a hand or a cargo elevator unlocked for 5 min it can “just” happen, security for loved ones or children onsite, a human interface to kickoff interactions with the apartment admin staff if needed, and all around helpful guy? 100% worth the extra 150.
Hell the smoother interface and interaction model with the apartment admin alone is worth it.
I’ve lived in NYC buildings with doormen and without. Making friends with them is key. They are very helpful to the residents that treat them with respect.
But if you never bother talking to the person at the door then you won’t see much value and thus an intercom seems just fine.
I’d choose the building with rather than without.
> $150/month/resident
Was this supposed to be negligible?
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Doormen are awesome.
First they provide real security an intercom does not. They know everyone and won't let an unknown go through the door without checking in.
The courier leave their wares to them, and can hand over packages for the courier.
There's no extra cost, really, to having them do dry cleaning since all they do is hand over all the dry cleaning to a service that comes by.
There’s probably some double fallacy here, like “x is valuable in this specific situation so it must be valuable in all situations” - I think that’s actually a named fallacy but anyway.
I’m sure it’s similarly true for travel agents, real estate agents, probably lawyers, etc. Just because there are circumstances when someone values them doesn’t automatically justify them everywhere or refute that many of them basically don’t do anything.
The point of the fallacy is that you don't know what value they bring or when they bring it.
Real estate agents are a good example. They might be the only people involved aware of the processes everyone's engaged in and moving things forward. Having helped build tools for a local shop I can tell you that their checklists and flowcharts can't and won't be built with AI because hoarding and sharing information has always been part of their competitive advantage.
A corollary might be that the value of human involvement is unknowable because human beings aren't rational. The Doorman is a buffer against chaos.
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Currently in NYC trying to pick up a key my friend left with their doorman to feed their cat. Been waiting 20m and they are nowhere to be found :(
Well, they are human beings who do sometimes need to take bathroom breaks.
Did you get the key?
We have to know how long it took.
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I guess the main reason to have a doorman these days is for security and handling of mail/packages. Packages left unattended in a busy street of NYC would probably be almost instantly stolen.