I don't think AI has anything to do with this. For a while, investors were using headcount as a metric for growth, even though startups often showed very poor utilization of their new hires. Hiring was done for the sake of hiring. Trying to achieve more with less is simply a reasonable response to a market where money is much more expensive than before. Many tech companies were unreasonably ineffective with their manpower, this is a much bigger problem now.
Agreed. There is sort of a vicious feedback loop at play too:
1. Large tech firms overhire like crazy
2. Interest rates go up, firms layoff tens of thousands of workers who never should have been hired in the first place
3. Firms pile more work on to remaining people, cut their pay relative to inflation
4. Existing workers threaten to leave, companies let them because "Look at all the talent on the market!"
It's abject lunacy, and companies are all too enthusiastically degrading the quality of their own workforces. The upshot is that this will pry some entrenched talent and experience out of large employers and into smaller companies. But the latest crop of MBA whiz kids are really something special.
Looking back at recent years. I can give AI as a true innovation. But outside that. What new thing has been actually done by all of these people? Say in past 5 years? Lot of hiring, but what has been the outcome?
For years, we've talked about how much of the workforce was "bullshit jobs". HN would be full of incredulous comments from people confused by the headcount at various companies, wondering what all those people were doing every day.
Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.
America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.
Biden did exactly what you are asking for in “massive investment and employment in industries with positive externalities” and your average voter didn’t give a shit.
Maybe I'm too optimistic and we're just doomed, but I think the average voter would have cared more if a handful of things had gone differently.
For starters of course, Biden's rapid cognitive decline and the poor handling of it from the DNC made a mess of everything and prevented a unified platform message to tout the successes of those programs.
Also, the timelines were tough to make work for short-term political gain. There's necessarily going to be a span of time between a law being passed to eg, create tax incentives or loan programs to support building a factory and when those factories are actually built, operational and impacting the economy.
Finally, most of the programs from the Biden administration were hamstrung by trying to jam every left wing and liberal ideal into every program. Instead of saying "Go build a battery factory" they said "Go build a battery factory that's owned by racial minorities and run by women and employs union workers paid at a minimum of 110% of the prevailing wage and provides childcare onsite and doesn't negatively impact local housing affordability and ..." until the whole thing became impossible to implement.
Basically, I think an Ezra Klein type of Democrat could succeed. To be determined if that's the direction the party goes though.
>thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs [...] we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment.
Jobs are neither fungible nor mutually exclusive; there is no reason to assume that someone working in a bullshit job would thrive in a non-bullshit job that contributes to society in more productive ways, nor does the existence of bullshit jobs prevent people from working non-bullshit jobs. I hate to say it, but perhaps many people are employed in bullshit jobs because they are not capable of anything more challenging.
"Bullshit job" has a specific meaning that's less about being in a pointless field-of-work (like adtech or many parts of fintech) and more about occupying a pointless role, regardless of the field. David Graeber (the originator of the term) gave the following examples [0]:
— Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters
— Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
— Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage
— Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration
— Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
My point stands. Its an incentive game. People work in BS fields because they pay more. People work BS jobs because again: they pay well. There is no incentive to work somewhere else.
We live in a very complex system, beyond any one persons comprehension. Some people think devolved decision making allocating resources to things like, advertising better, is the most efficient way of allocating resources. The invisible hand. How much is bullshit and how much is just beyond your awareness? If you were king and allocating so the work, would it be better? For who? I'm doubtful about bullshit jobs.
Twitter is a concrete demonstration of this. There were so many prognostications [0] that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees following Musk's takeover, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [1].
Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.
Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.
I would categorize what happened to the site and it being rendered unusable by anyone even halfway serious as catastrophic - but perhaps my bar is a little higher for the "smartest man in the world" than "I can still get a 200 response from the site" (which actually is also down, in terms of outages).
I agree that the site is barely usable, but that's entirely due to a shift in Twitter's userbase caused by top-down policy changes (e.g. boosting right-wing spam), not any engineering shortcomings.
If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
That's because software is immortal. It will continue to run even if you do nothing. What happens, though, is that stuff around it moves.
Of course twitter still works. Even with 0 engineers, it would still work. That's never been the goal of a software company. I can compile Mario 64 right here, right now, decades later. Should Nintendo just go home? Call it quits? Of course not.
It’s rhetoric like this that has created the market we have today.
The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.
Twitter's failures are solely due to Musk's changes in corporate governance (e.g. boosting fringe right-wing content causing its existing userbase and advertisers to flee the platform), not due to any engineering problems caused by reducing headcount. Strictly from an engineering standpoint, Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.
As I wrote in another post, if Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took over
Just because it works on your phone doesn’t mean there are no engineering problems behind the scene. You’re just not aware of the problems that exist because it’s a private company and you’re not privy to the information.
> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.
Not true. The main reason I stopped clicking Twitter links in the first place was the abysmal chance of the tweet loading and not just displaying a generic "Failed to load. Try again?" after the takeover. I mean it occasionally happened before as well, but it became the default behavior.
It lasted long enough that by the time (over a year) they'd finally fixed it, the platform had deteriorated to a right-wing cesspool anyway.
