Hacker News Reader

Comment by wooque | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

That’s a bit reductive and misses the core issue. Of course companies want to reduce headcount or boost productivity, but many are pursuing these initiatives without a clear problem in mind. If the mandate were, say, “we’re building X to reduce customer support staff by 20%,” that would be a different story. Instead, it often feels like solution-first thinking without a clear target.

Edit: not even going to reply to comments below as they continue down a singular path of oh you ought to know what they are trying to do. The only point I was making is orgs are going solution-first without a real problem they are trying to solve and I don’t think that is the right approach.

> “we’re building X to reduce customer support staff by 20%,”

I've never understood the "do X to increase/decrease Y by Z%". I remember working at McDonalds and the managers worked themselves up into a frenzy to increase "sale of McSlurry by 10%". All it meant was that they nagged people more and sold less of something else. It's not like people's stomachs got 10% larger.

The sad part is that companies doing this will very soon figure out that the 20% less staff they "achieved" is only at a cost of 100% increase in development and fees to LLM vendor. Moreover, after a few years these fees will skyrocket because their businesses are now dependent on this technology and unlike people, LLMs are monopolized by just a few robber barons.

That is not a goal that can be shared without alienating the current workforce. So you can bet that goal was clearly stated at CXO level, and is being communicated/translated piece wise as let’s find out how much more productive we can get with AI. You’re going to find out about the goal once you reach it.

That is not to say you should work against your company, but bear in mind this is a goal and you should consider where you can add value outside of general code factory productivity and how for example you can become a force multiplier for the company.

yes my organization head at my employer has asked us to submit: "Generative AI Agent" proposals for upcoming planning session. Apparently those ideas will get the big seat at the planning table. I've been trying to think of many ideas but they all end up being some sort of workflow automation that was possible without agent stuff.

Agreed with your annoyance at "they are replacing you" comments. like duh. Thats what they've been doing forever.

I agree, and would like to hear examples of where this has not been the case. I'm sure they're out there. But pretty much everything has been "how can we use LLMs" and "it doesn't matter if it was a problem that we had that needed to be solved; we need to gain experience now because AI is The Future and we can't be left behind".

Occasionally it works and people stumble across a problem worth solving as they go about applying their solution to everything. But that's not planning or top-down direction. That's not identifying a target in advance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com