[Grombobulous]

The thing is, a profitable company that sees an obvious efficiency staring it in the face is still going to take that efficiency.

I don’t think a lot of us employees will be happy to admit that AI is turning out to be a legitimate productivity aid that is allowing individuals to accomplish more work per person.

We’d rather sit here and stew about companies “blaming AI for layoffs” but I imagine that is only sometimes the case.

A somewhat related tangent: I have had the thought that many parts of the Japanese system of hiring for life might actually be really appropriate for the AI age. That system seems to result in a lot of companies finding ways to reshuffle employees into making some kind of product that has market value rather than the Western reaction that that seems to favor downsizing and focusing the company on a smaller set of markets in the name of ruthless efficiency. This seems to result in many Japanese firms making a wide breadth of interesting products at very high quality levels.

If your company is profitable because AI is increasing efficiency (allegedly, of course), why layoff 7% of your employees when you could instead assign them to make something new or complementary to your current product line? Western companies seem to refuse to do that out of a sense of focus and efficiency, but maybe giving that strategy a go more frequently would result in unrealized opportunities.

[majormajor]

> I don’t think a lot of us employees will be happy to admit that AI is turning out to be a legitimate productivity aid that is allowing individuals to accomplish more work per person.

Growth companies respond to efficiency by asking "what can we do now that we can get more done."

Stagnant companies say "how can we cut costs."

The math is pretty simple. If you expect that doing more will have positive ROI, you do more; if you think your position is about as strong as it can ever be, and don't have ideas for growing the space or your spot in it, you assume that more spend on new things would be negative ROI.

And if you're stagnant and there are prevailing narratives giving you an excuse to cut costs without scaring investors into thinking you've lost optimism, you jump on it even if you haven't even verified if the productivity gains are real for your employees.

[throw234234234]

You are thinking growth in product and opportunities. But that doesn't always require or translate to more engineering especially in the face of AI efficiency if that work to support that growth can come from AI (NOTE: I'm not saying it can; I believe some people believe and are acting like it can which is enough). For these people the new bottleneck to growth may be new market segments, adoption and integration which could mean more sales like staff - AI seems more of a boon to the non technical, AI hypers and sales pitchers IMO than it is to engineers. On a side note personally this makes the industry less desirable to work in - it devalues effort/intelligence/craftsmanship/product and values connections, marketing, status and "the hustle" a lot more.

As the supply curve of software becomes more vertical due to AI the argument that growth equals a proportional amount of engineering demand may be violated. We may see 2x growth in some companies even as the "people engineers" are cut. They could still be pursuing growth; it just that engineering costs are now lower or are less of a need to pursue that growth in general.

AI is the first technology that I've seen that has potentially hurt technology engineering demand rather than creating it; which is why the usual arguments don't always apply here.

[Grombobulous]

Essentially what I am suggesting is companies leaving growth phase or who are generally “stagnant” to not just cut employee headcount but instead redeploy them to seek out new opportunities. This is especially true if the company isn’t facing any pressing financial crisis or net loss.

[kanbankaren]

> many parts of the Japanese system of hiring for life

This is a terrible strategy. It encourages inefficiency to metastasize throughout the company.

No wonder Japan is stuck in a rut since the 90s and its debt-to-GDP ratio is 205% which is one of the highest in the world.

Your romantic idea of Japan would get destroyed by just browsing www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/

Japan has one of the worst work culture and low productivity in the world.

[Grombobulous]

That’s why I said “many parts” and not “all.” I wouldn’t want to pick up a good number of their practices, but I think a company seeing layoffs as an embarrassing last resort is a positive trait.

I also think that concepts like debt to GDP ratio are somewhat detached from corporate policies.

[kanbankaren]

> I also think that concepts like debt to GDP ratio are somewhat detached from corporate policies.

Corporate policies ultimately decide growth. More growth leads to higher profits and higher tax collected by the Government which in turn means they don't have to borrow more.

[andsoitis]

> but I think a company seeing layoffs as an embarrassing last resort is a positive trait.

Don’t most companies think of layoffs as a last resort? I don’t think one ought to be embarrassed about correcting course when you have made a mistake. It takes courage.

[NetMageSCW]

How many mistakes does it take to layoff 30% of your work force in a few months (Lucid)?

Embarrassment should always be warranted when you make mistake on a scale where you are laying off a percentage of your work force instead of a couple of people.

[grey-area]

> The thing is, a profitable company that sees an obvious efficiency staring it in the face is still going to take that efficiency.

Judging by this CEO’s vapid post stuffed with meaningless LLMisms, and the condition of this company, the efficiency savings don’t seem to be there and are at best illusory.

Good luck to any companies who think they’re improving operations by jamming generative AI (or worse unreliable ‘agents’ based on the purported intelligence of GAI) into all sorts of processes where they don’t belong.

We’ll see over the next few years whether the 10x efficiencies are real or a mirage.

[brianwawok]

I’d love to hire for life, but what commitment can an employee give? It can’t be one sided or it’s terrible.

[Grombobulous]

The level of commitment to employees from Japanese corporations is astoundingly high compared to ones in the US.

Not that I would romanticize them as a whole, as a lot of aspects of Japanese corporate work culture are not to be envied.