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