[lich_king]

> In practice this still doesn't mean 50 % of white collar can't be automated though.

Let me ask you this, though: if we wanted to, what percentage of white collar jobs could have been automated or eliminated prior to LLMs?

Meta has nearly 80k employees to basically run two websites and three mobile apps. There were 18k people working at LinkedIn! Many big tech companies are massive job programs with some product on the side. Administrative business partners, program managers, tech writers, "stewards", "champions", "advocates", 10-layer-deep reporting chains... engineers writing cafe menu apps and pet programming languages... a team working on in-house typefaces... the list goes on.

I can see AI producing shifts in the industry by reducing demand for meaningful work, but I doubt the outcome here is mass unemployment. There's an endless supply of bs jobs as long as the money is flowing.

[jmalicki]

Meta has 80k employees to run the world's most massive engine of commerce through advertising and matching consumers to products.

They build generative AI tools so people can make ads more easily.

They have some of the most sophisticated tracking out there. They have shadow profiles on nearly everyone. Have you visited a website? You have a shadow profile even if you don't have a Facebook account. They know who your friends are based on who you are near. They know what stores you visit when.

Large fractions of their staff are making imperceptible changes to ads tracking and feed ranking that are making billions of dollars of marginal revenue.

What draws you in as a consumer is a tiny tip of the iceberg of what they actually do.

[kreyenborgi]

So like parent said, mostly bs jobs that would improve the product if removed </s>

[jmalicki]

Totally fair! I think my point might be this is more malice than incompetence.

[ehnto]

There are many reasons why we are seeing cuts economically, but the fact that it is possible to make such large cuts is because there were way too many people working at these companies. They had so much cheap money that they over-hired, now money isn't so cheap and they need to reduce headcount. AI need not enter the conversation to get to that point.

[suttontom]

This is unfair and dismissive of many roles. Coordination in a massive, technically complex company that has to adhere to laws and regulations is a critical role. I don't get why people shit on certain roles (I'm a SWE). Our PgMs reduce friction and help us be more productive and focused. Technical writers produce customer-facing content and code, and have nothing to do with supporting internal bureaucracy. There are arguments against this in Bullshit Jobs but do you think companies pay PgMs or HR employees hundreds of thousands of dollars a year out of the goodness of their own hearts? Or maybe they actually help the business?

[slopinthebag]

It's also because as you increase organisational complexity, you need to manage it somehow, which generally means hiring more people to do that. And then you need to hire people to manage those new managers. Ad infinitum. The increased complexity begets more complexity.

It sort of reminds me of The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. These companies are their own microcosms of a complex society and I bet we will see mass layoffs in the future, not from AI but from those companies collapsing into a more sustainable state.

[lich_king]

You realize that the reason you need to manage this organizational complexity is largely because the organization is so huge?...

The reality is that you could run LinkedIn with far, far fewer people. You probably need fewer than 100 for core engineering, and likely less than 1,000 overall if you include compliance, sales, and so on - especially since a lot of overseas compliance stuff is outsourced to consulting firms, it's not like you have a team of lawyers in every country in the world.

Before there was so much money in the system, we used to run companies that way. Two decades ago, I worked for a company that had tens of millions of users, maintained its own complex nationwide infra (no AWS back then), and had 400 full-time employees. That made coordination problems a lot easier too. We didn't need ten layers of people and project management because there just wasn't that many of us.

[jmalicki]

When doubling the number of employees can triple your revenue, you do it.

Keeping a website running with high uptime is not the goal. Maximizing revenue and profit is. The extra people aren't waste, they're what drive the incremental imperceptible changes that make these companies profitable.

[0x3f]

This seems like a just-so story.

[jmalicki]

You can see it happen in reverse with X/Twitter.

Did reducing waste affect the user experience or uptime of Twitter? Not really.

But advertising revenues plummeted, because those extra employees were mostly not about the user experience or keeping the website up, they were about servicing the advertisers that brought the company revenue.

[0x3f]

I thought advertising revenues plummeted mostly for content/optics/PR reasons, not ad-buyer-facing feature reasons.

[ahtihn]

And how much revenue did that company bring in compared to something like Meta?

Maybe there's a correlation there?

[0x3f]

I think the person you're replying to is perfectly aware of the correlation, considering it was a primary feature of their comment.

[ahtihn]

Not really? The main point of their comment is that companies could be much smaller based on their experience at a much smaller company.

I'm implying that big companies couldn't make as much money as they do without all the employees they have.

[0x3f]

Their last para seems to acknowledge the correlation, but flips your assumed causal direction. I.e. they seem to be implying that the that excess money causes the complexity.