[flukus]

> Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting pearls took almost 100 hours a year. After installing this app, the time needed for counting pearls has been reduced by 80%. It takes only 20 hours now.

Depending on what the salary is it barely breaks even, it's saving 2 working weeks a year. Depending how spread out the process is it might not even be time that can be put into something else, if it only save 5 minutes a day for instance, that's 5 minutes that's probably going towards lunch.

It's fairly disappointing for an off the shelf product that does exactly what you want, if you had to pay for any customization or RnD it's probably not worth it.

[morsanu]

Besides the cost cutting, keep in mind that the employees that don't have to manually count are not getting fired. They are providing more and better client services.

[matsemann]

I think this is an important point. It doesn't have to be "machines took my job". When I helped automate/streamline a government welfare program, it didn't mean case workers suddenly were without a job. It meant they could spend less time clicking on a computer, and more time doing the important human to human stuff and provide better care.

[toyg]

It doesn't have to, but eventually it will. At the first inevitable downturn, jobs that get cut in a newly-automated field will never come back.

People are creative, we will find new things to do (particularly as more and more people will get taught automation and coding in school, making them tech-adaptable for life, as opposed to the "boomer" generations who were often fundamentally tech-averse), but let's not kid ourselves that technology isn't burning away a bunch of jobs.

[joosters]

You missed an important part of the article:

...this app not only helps Eiko Pearl to cut 80% of the time needed for counting pearls, but it also helps them reduce 3 months of labor cost.

3 months, not 80 hours.

[flukus]

It's not really clear where that 3 months figure comes from. Do they have 6 people all saving 2 weeks? And if so do the share the device or is the cost scaling with employees? There's also another part:

> When taking inventory, they had 2 members of the staff counting pearls and it took 2 full days.