[bko]

I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs.

Imagine an economy where there were no ATMs. Any time you wanted cash, you would have to walk to the bank and wait in line to talk to a bank teller and cash a check. And every week you'd be paid by a check. Paper records were collected for everything and an army of employees had to reconcile the records. No spreadsheet software was available.

In fact, the number of bank tellers (not even bank employees) actually doubled since the advent of ATMS:

> The number of human bank tellers in the United States increased from approximately 300,000 in 1970 to approximately 600,000 in 2010. Counter-intuitively, a contributing factor may be the introduction of automated teller machines. ATMs let a branch operate with fewer tellers, making it cheaper for banks to open more branches. This likely resulted in more tellers being hired to handle non-automated tasks, but further automation and online banking may reverse this increase.

But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine

[spaceman_2020]

All these people theorizing the end of work have never actually worked in a large company, and don’t understand the motivations of people making hiring decisions.

The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts. For careerists, “number of people managed” is a key performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging right).

The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their own careers by being the manager that manages more people - is completely misaligned with these future efficiency hypotheses

As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat and companies hiring way more people than they need.

[bushbaba]

To go from Sr. Manager to Director requires having experiencing managing managers who report to you. How do you get more middle managers? You hire more people.

How do you go from Sr. Manager to Manager, you manage a large team, and create a need to have your org have multiple managers.

So yes, lots of perverse incentives to grow your org so-as to grow your career.

[jiggawatts]

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code written.

[shapefrog]

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of monitors they have.

[Aeolun]

Exactly, except that managers do not seem to get judged for striving for that metric.

[throw868788]

I see that in places I've worked. I've always resisted growing my team's headcount as I've seen it break efficiency first hand. However I'm well aware it makes our team less noticed, and less attractive when other companies ask what's my current reporting count as a metric of how senior you are.

[seesaw]

You must be me. I have a very strong technical team, and our work is foundational for the product. But it is harder to convey that impact in interviews, compared to saying you have a larger team and manage a large budget. I feel companies don’t value efficiency.

[bko]

Right, so more efficiencies could free up resources to hire even more middle managers or administrative staff. It's only natural that well funded startups will have roles for "experience coordinator" or something. You think FAANG would have such a large headcount if they didn't have crazy margins?

There are some other tides working in the favor of bloated salaries and payrolls. One is the focus of "stakeholder capitalism". Most of the large companies are held by ETFs. The large banks that run the ETFs are less concerned about individual efficiencies of any one company (they own them all anyway), but are more interested in other things (green initiatives, social causes, etc). So the decisions being made at these companies are less about profit and more about servicing "stakeholders", be it their employees, the community, the environment. That's all fine, but it's difficult to track and hold executives responsible. A bloated staff is fine because you don't want to lay off employees. Or various money losing departments are okay because they're servicing the community.

[mixmastamyk]

If there's anything folks like more than reports, its money. Like the savings and goosed stock price from offshoring, especially "offshoring to local robots," which are even more reliable.

[StanislavPetrov]

Which folks? A lot of careerists and middle-managers on a salary in big corporations don't get profit sharing or options.

[mixmastamyk]

Leadership usually doesn't care too much about those folks either.

[dadoge]

Counterpoint: if the company actually had good upper management, they will only let the mid level managers grow their team if it brings value to the company.

No org is perfect, but I keep seeing this take again and again and again, yet rarely any form of acknowledgment that it could be good for the company to incentivize proactively growing a team

[ac29]

> But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth.

Perhaps that's not quite the right comparison - even though the population hasnt doubled since 1970, the number of people employed has (80M->160M, approx [0]). Adjusting for that, Bank Teller employment level is basically unchanged.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CE16OV

[babypuncher]

The invention of things like saddles and carriages only made horses more and more valuable over the years, until automobiles became a more practical replacement.

I think it is hubris to say that anything a human can do cannot eventually be replaced by a machine. When we will actually reach that point is the real question.

[mixmastamyk]

Banks in the US are not a good example because they are several decades behind the rest of the world. I haven't stepped purposely into a bank except to open an account, in about twenty years.

Fednow should alleviate some of this.

[atdrummond]

Fednow will be great for most domestic transfers but I still expect any international ones to require either a third party service (Wise, Xoom, etc) or a call/visit to the bank.

[ElevenLathe]

Will Fednow not interoperate with SWIFT?

[atdrummond]

It does (at least when I last looked at FedNow ISO 20022) but that still only handles things until the first out of States routing institution, which means I don’t expect personally (from my experience in the field) for wire transfers and domestic sends to exist on the entirely same rail and payment forms.

[oneoff786]

Automation does not remove jobs. It simplifies them, and makes them lower skill and thus lower wage jobs. A bank teller today is a terrible job making terrible wages. It has basically no career trajectory. There may be more of them, but they’re not the same job at all.

The number of tellers is expected to drop by 12% over the next decade while general jobs are expected to grow by 5% according to government forecasts btw.

Being a cashier used to be a tougher job because you needed to know all the inventory. Now it’s ok for a grocery store cashier to not know what parsley is.

If automation makes it practical to do an embarrassingly small task in order to provide a value to someone richer, yeah, you can be hired into it. Maybe a lot of people will. But that’s not prosperity that’s capitalism holding you by the balls.

[sokoloff]

This reads to me that only being capable of doing an embarrassingly small task is the problem. If that’s your ability, you’d prefer a world where that’s possible to one where the minimum floor for ability is higher than your own.

[oneoff786]

You’d prefer a job where you can develop some sort of skill and grow at the company; rather than hit a terminal position of sedentary button pusher.

[sokoloff]

Yes, on average, people would prefer to be more capable rather than less.

Not everyone is equally capable, which implies that some people are on the left side of the distribution. Some jobs that simplify the essential actions bring the job to meet the capabilities of the worker.

[oneoff786]

It’s a misleading argument. People can be trained on the job for many things and that’s how it’s historically worked.

Lowering the bar is not needed or helpful. People who are so incapable that these jobs are their peak potential should probably just be on social programs.

[sokoloff]

Why should X% of people be on social programs if 75% of them can type a number from the parsley tag into the computer (or scan the tag on the parsley)? Isn't it a more dignified life to have a purpose of helping your fellow humans select and pay for their groceries than to sit around being paid by a social program because we didn't want to make cashiers' jobs more automated? I think for those people lowering the bar is helpful to their psyche.

(I had a family member, since passed, who was significantly mentally handicapped by a difficult birth sequence. She loved nothing more than to feel like she was included and being helpful to the limits of her ability.)

[gombosg]

This reminds me of this video:

Jordan Peterson - What Kind Of Job Fits Your IQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mxdrTP-os

[akiselev]

> But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?

Population growth doesn't account for regulatory changes and it takes a while to automate anything that interfaces with the law because of the inherent risk in getting it wrong. Banks are acutely exposed to this because they're often the ones who are ultimately responsible - they're the default insurance policy against counterparty risk.

[bko]

Sure, that makes sense when talking about employee count in aggregate. But specifically the number of bank tellers has doubled. Surely bank tellers should have more tools at their disposal to be more efficient, and surely fewer people would use bank tellers with things like ATMs and online banking. But somehow we have more bank tellers.

[akiselev]

Tellers could have gotten twice as efficient and still double in size if the number of transactions requiring human intervention increased four-fold, especially if the move to online banking has driven an increase in fraud and user error. It's a number that scales with regulatory demands, transaction count, total volume, and so on - not number of active users.

Edit: Tellers also tend to be general purpose account managers at smaller banks, so if you called up the bank you'd eventually get forwarded to someone on the floor at your local branch instead of a call center.

[pcthrowaway]

Maybe the percentage of people who are unbanked has decreased significantly since ATMs were introduced.

Additionally, people are much more reliant on financial services and payment rails. Credit cards weren't as common (and required for almost everything) 20 years ago. People used cash for probably 10X as many transactions as they do now, so you probably had more 'cash economies'

[hindsightbias]

That’s because the banks took their 2008 bailouts and built a million branches.

All those branches closed during covid. I have 6 within walking distance and there isn’t a human anywhere.

[wonderwonder]

Branches exist for the most part as places for people to open accounts. Everything else is understaffed and exists as a side effect to get more accounts opened at the bank.

[7speter]

Around where I live, they opened branches with 5 atms and maybe 2 people "assisting" account holders with the atms.

[echelon]

And yet they're still building new branches left and right!

I count half a dozen Chase branches that have gone up near me in the past few months. I don't get it.

[zmmmmm]

Probably because they've ascertained that one of the key things customers look for in selecting a bank is whether there is a branch near them. Never mind if there is literally anything in there other than an ATM ...

[rco8786]

> I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs

I’m not sure I buy into the bank analogy (probably due more to technology making bank products cheaper/more accessible and thus more customers and thus more bankers) but I definitely buy this.

If you believe fundamentally in basic market dynamics and that humans are generally productive creatures, then any automation that comes about will simply shift where the human labor is most useful, and we will generally always have enough human powered work to go around. The tech and automation is just making it more efficient for everyone.

[60secs]

The only reason I have interacted with a bank teller for the past 2 decades is to get quarters.

If I could get quarters form an ATM, there would be no reason ever for me to.

What are people using tellers for?

[rightbyte]

> What are people using tellers for?

They need to look you in the eyes to see if you are pure of heart and deserve a mortage.

[freedude]

For everything other than $100, $20, & $5 I use a teller. Translates to I use a teller every week or 2. Why? because in many parts of this world cash is still king. Get out of the city for a change. Bring Cash.

[pirate787]

Large counter deposits, cashier's checks. And my parents go in the bank to socialize with the tellers

[atdrummond]

How do you do a wire transfer from an atm? Even with a private banker I still have to call someone to move money above X amount - I can’t do everything through a web portal. Maybe my bank just sucks, though.

[djbusby]

Crappy Wells Fargo app can't handle mobile deposits of Western Union and other Money Orders. So, I have to go to a branch, only 2.5 hours away.

Why am I stuck with WF? A longer, boring-er story.

[maxerickson]

My credit union is located near the route I take home from work on not very busy. So I use tellers for everything other than withdrawing cash.

[kylehotchkiss]

Cashiers Checks!

[wonderwonder]

to open accounts, thats it.

[WalterBright]

> I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs.

It hasn't in 250 years of automation.

[paulryanrogers]

For how many thousands of years did innovation only increase the employment of horses? Until suddenly their employment suddenly dropped, and hasn't increased in a century.

[WalterBright]

Your analogy only works if people are horses. If you could employ a horse as an office manager, you might have something.

[paulryanrogers]

Compared to future AI we may be horses. Or even just comparing those who can automate to those who cannot.

Regardless time will tell

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

The number of people working in agriculture has shrunk significantly.