Dose AI really raise productivity floor that much? Do we have some good example of that?

Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.

I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.

Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.

This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable

Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome.

Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.

I didn't say anything about engineers. Big tech over employs across all professions.

But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...

Broadcast announcers and radio discjockeys -20.8 - this doesn't sound like AI related, more like a social/political phenomenon. Same with sales engineers.

I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.

> like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects

Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects.

Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.

Yes because the most optimized company builds the most wealth and power and puts you out of business or destroys you.

Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.

One reason would be that if they can create more value in another industry

Adds more coordination…

IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.

Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.

What is "shareholder greed"? They're not running a charity.

Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2].

The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.

[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).

[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).

[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.

It’s been true since pre llm’s.

In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.

I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.

I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda

No surprise, it has been true for a while.

That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.