AI, to me, seems perfectly positioned to replace a lot of middle managers. Maybe not "every manager at X level", but if you've got some central tool that flows information up and down the chain, and can dig into data on your local network for backup/proof, you could make most middle managers much more efficient. Suddenly, one scrum master covering 4 teams is very feasible. They already know what they need to know, and their status has been reported long before they even started the meeting.
I could see a world where a manager is able to cover more teams, reducing the need for as many layers / middle managers.
Like… for year end reviews and bonuses, a manager might have a dashboard of feedback from an AI of everyone’s technical accomplishments, as AI can review their PRs and designs. At that point, an AI could even rank engineers based on contributions, so the manager just verifies that the feedback is all correct.
Not saying that’s necessarily a good thing, but I could see a world where that happens. It already does seem to with Amazon warehouse workers.
Most of these are solved by having better leadership, and unfortunately for job seekers, also solved by hiring fewer, higher-caliber people in the first place.
This is the idea. However, many of these "higher-caliber" people are going to burn out because productivity expectations, especially in software development, are rising insanely due to AI tools.
I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.
True. A lot of work done in big companies is waste.
6. A lot of unneeded complexity is added.
Perhaps if we can only use AI to understand the wasted effort.
Also, I rather have the ICs with some slack and time for clear thinking to address the big issues than always be busy on a mountain of work that goes now where.
My big company just throws more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Our managers are quiet quitting as we're mostly told to just figure it out for ourselves. I've asked for more money due to having more responsibilities, but the answer is "we can't have that conversation now". I suspect I'll get the same answer in a few months. Hey, the stock is up though.
Talking to friends in other places, and reading the article, it isn't really different elsewhere. Given the disarray the US government is in & their refusal to give us benefits we've already paid for, employers know they have all the power at this time.
They may have all the power, but all of this shows is they have no idea how to wield it. The job market is horribly broken, there are inefficiencies everywhere, and their hedging/procrastination on what to do with hiring and growth is tanking the economy (and their customers ability to purchase their products).
If their goal is reducing wages through layoffs/attrition and lowballing new hires, they aren't going to get it without triggering a recession or worse.
> ...more and more work at fewer and fewer people.
Many people around me want to leave tech because of this. I'm considering it too, but unfortunately, I have no other skills outside of IT. I guess I would need to get re-qualified. These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT.
> These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT.
Meh, nurse pay seemed alright till I learned how much they’re worked. Maybe physicians get a pretty good deal, but the reasons for that are also why you won’t be able to transition to that career.
Why not simply quietly refuse to jump on that train? Maintain velocity, keep working as per your contract, not a second more. Don't pick up phones outside work hours, weekends are for yourself, recharging and family. You know, humane working conditions, the only setup sustainable long term without risking permanent (both mental and physical) health damage.
No amount of money is worth that, despite many otherwise brilliant people get into tunnel vision (mortgage, some investment, chasing some top performer image or whatever else) and then SHTF.
Maybe its my European perspective, maybe I am old enough to realize its just a job and life satisfaction and legacy is defined by very different things, maybe I don't give a fuck anymore. Maybe all of it.
Maybe it is possible when you have a sane social safety net. If I don't work and I get sick, I will not be able to afford treatment. If I need a loan for a new car (might be necessary to find a new job) or home repairs, and they see I'm not working. I will not be approved.
Tech companies need engineers to create the products, and as long as people like yourself are knowingly and willingly tolerating those environments, they'll continue.
The economies of the west (and some eastern ones) are facing a k style growth where a small fraction of the population gets all of the gains.
It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.
> It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.
(Joke), well, if they keep convincing the small part of the population to spend ever increasing amount of money on "better" widgets...
In reality, if too many people are unemployed, no one's going to be able to buy things so that companies can have profits!
That being said, what I read is that a lot of companies are doing general housekeeping and trying to avoid bloat.
I don't think AI has anything to do with this. For a while, investors were using headcount as a metric for growth, even though startups often showed very poor utilization of their new hires. Hiring was done for the sake of hiring. Trying to achieve more with less is simply a reasonable response to a market where money is much more expensive than before. Many tech companies were unreasonably ineffective with their manpower, this is a much bigger problem now.
Agreed. There is sort of a vicious feedback loop at play too:
1. Large tech firms overhire like crazy
2. Interest rates go up, firms layoff tens of thousands of workers who never should have been hired in the first place
3. Firms pile more work on to remaining people, cut their pay relative to inflation
4. Existing workers threaten to leave, companies let them because "Look at all the talent on the market!"
It's abject lunacy, and companies are all too enthusiastically degrading the quality of their own workforces. The upshot is that this will pry some entrenched talent and experience out of large employers and into smaller companies. But the latest crop of MBA whiz kids are really something special.
Looking back at recent years. I can give AI as a true innovation. But outside that. What new thing has been actually done by all of these people? Say in past 5 years? Lot of hiring, but what has been the outcome?
For years, we've talked about how much of the workforce was "bullshit jobs". HN would be full of incredulous comments from people confused by the headcount at various companies, wondering what all those people were doing every day.
Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.
America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.
Biden did exactly what you are asking for in “massive investment and employment in industries with positive externalities” and your average voter didn’t give a shit.
>thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs [...] we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment.
Jobs are neither fungible nor mutually exclusive; there is no reason to assume that someone working in a bullshit job would thrive in a non-bullshit job that contributes to society in more productive ways, nor does the existence of bullshit jobs prevent people from working non-bullshit jobs. I hate to say it, but perhaps many people are employed in bullshit jobs because they are not capable of anything more challenging.
"Bullshit job" has a specific meaning that's less about being in a pointless field-of-work (like adtech or many parts of fintech) and more about occupying a pointless role, regardless of the field. David Graeber (the originator of the term) gave the following examples [0]:
— Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters
— Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
— Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage
— Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration
— Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
My point stands. Its an incentive game. People work in BS fields because they pay more. People work BS jobs because again: they pay well. There is no incentive to work somewhere else.
We live in a very complex system, beyond any one persons comprehension. Some people think devolved decision making allocating resources to things like, advertising better, is the most efficient way of allocating resources. The invisible hand. How much is bullshit and how much is just beyond your awareness? If you were king and allocating so the work, would it be better? For who? I'm doubtful about bullshit jobs.
Twitter is a concrete demonstration of this. There were so many prognostications [0] that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees following Musk's takeover, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [1].
Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.
Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.
I would categorize what happened to the site and it being rendered unusable by anyone even halfway serious as catastrophic - but perhaps my bar is a little higher for the "smartest man in the world" than "I can still get a 200 response from the site" (which actually is also down, in terms of outages).
I agree that the site is barely usable, but that's entirely due to a shift in Twitter's userbase caused by top-down policy changes (e.g. boosting right-wing spam), not any engineering shortcomings.
If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
It’s rhetoric like this that has created the market we have today.
The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.
Twitter's failures are solely due to Musk's changes in corporate governance (e.g. boosting fringe right-wing content causing its existing userbase and advertisers to flee the platform), not due to any engineering problems caused by reducing headcount. Strictly from an engineering standpoint, Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.
As I wrote in another post, if Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took over
Just because it works on your phone doesn’t mean there are no engineering problems behind the scene. You’re just not aware of the problems that exist because it’s a private company and you’re not privy to the information.
This kind of “hope growth” and LLM based metrics speaks to rot within the economy. Don’t hire more, just say you’re going to build new products and launch something half baked with a skeleton crew that’s also maintaining the legacy products.
These incumbent companies are able to keep doing this because there’s no one around to eat their lunch. Maybe it’s cheaper to just buy (and kill) any company who legitimately threatens the status quo.
Companies should be hungry for real growth. You should not be able to financially engineer your way into stock growth.
Interesting insight. High interest rates keep new startups low. Well, not counting AI startups I guess.
And the lack of new (non-AI) startups allows bloated incumbents to get by without innovating or offering new products. Quality destroying measures like offshoring and outsourcing are easier to pull off. As is allowing services and standards to slide.
Maybe we'll only know once interest rates come back down. Or once the AI-replacing-workers veil has been lifted.
I think this dynamic is an under appreciated source of the chart that shows the decoupling of the job market with the stock market [1]
Interest rates aren't high, they're manipulated by the government and they're too low. When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low.
If growth is happening with high interest rates then that means capital can remain out of the hands of the public but debt replaces it
If I’m a billionaire my goal is to own everything and have everyone in debt to me based on my personal currency I issue - like points or miles or a corporate debt vehicle for example.
Surely we aren’t seeing a increase in debt also right? /s
This implies a kind of efficiency gain that is pretty much unheard of outside of acquisitions and layoffs. Inefficient organizations need huge culture and incentive shifts to move the needle on efficiency. Humans (especially the bureaucrats) resist changes in culture, so it's often necessary to shift the culture by shifting the humans. LLMs that don't quite fully replace any role aren't going to do it.
As long as the government keeps printing money and handing it out to unproductive sectors like the sample companies in the article the scam might work.
If it collapses, maybe AirBnB will still be able to rent out (illegally in many cases) apartments to rich foreigners from productive countries.
The existing org chart is the biggest barrier to AI productivity improvements, because tasks/responsibilities and departmental boundaries are set up for the old way to get things done. This is why adding AI to an existing org chart results in modest (at best) improvement.
Starting over with a new org chart is the fastest path to higher productivity, but it should also work to gradually migrate to a more efficient structure by not hiring. Of course this could take many years and meanwhile you'll be outperformed by a smaller org.
When there's enough money on the sidelines, the pendulum swings, and big bets come back in fashion.
Downsizing is not a big bet.
Nobody leads tech to save billions and have money sit on the sidelines. It's a weak, shallow bet that should be reserved for discount retail and commodity markets.
The savings will be spent on engineering, eventually.
How does this jive with all of the big tech cos sitting on a Smaug's cave level of dollars? There's rainy day funds, but having billions in cash and cash equivalents seems odd.
I hope you are right, but my understanding is that the high headcount in engineering could, in large part, be offset by American tax exemptions for engineering salaries and that this exemption is being actively sunset.
However, I wonder how long it takes company policies to catch up with the reality of that reversion. How many are still operating as though it was never reverted?
https://kanebridgenews.com/more-big-companies-bet-they-can-s...
There is a HUGE amount of waste in big companies from:
1. People being blocked on others
2. Lack of focus (Upper management ordering lower ICs to build bridges to nowhere, stop midway, start another bridge to nowhere project)
3. A lot of work being purely performative
4. A large chunk of REAL work having negative returns (management telling people to do stuff you'd be better off not doing financially)
5. ICs having slack.
AI doesn't need to do any of the real work. If it can increase efficiency ANYWHERE in this chain, it could have huge rewards.
Most people are focusing on getting AI to do REAL work.
But most "work" is waste or exceptionally low value, and I think more effort should go to AI reducing (instead of increasing) that.
AI, to me, seems perfectly positioned to replace a lot of middle managers. Maybe not "every manager at X level", but if you've got some central tool that flows information up and down the chain, and can dig into data on your local network for backup/proof, you could make most middle managers much more efficient. Suddenly, one scrum master covering 4 teams is very feasible. They already know what they need to know, and their status has been reported long before they even started the meeting.
I could see a world where a manager is able to cover more teams, reducing the need for as many layers / middle managers.
Like… for year end reviews and bonuses, a manager might have a dashboard of feedback from an AI of everyone’s technical accomplishments, as AI can review their PRs and designs. At that point, an AI could even rank engineers based on contributions, so the manager just verifies that the feedback is all correct.
Not saying that’s necessarily a good thing, but I could see a world where that happens. It already does seem to with Amazon warehouse workers.
The Scrum lords and managers might use LLMs to add beurocratic complexity instead of becoming efficient.
Most of these are solved by having better leadership, and unfortunately for job seekers, also solved by hiring fewer, higher-caliber people in the first place.
> ...higher-caliber people in the first place.
This is the idea. However, many of these "higher-caliber" people are going to burn out because productivity expectations, especially in software development, are rising insanely due to AI tools.
Ok but finding good leadership is hard. Using an AI api is easy
I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.
True. A lot of work done in big companies is waste.
6. A lot of unneeded complexity is added.
Perhaps if we can only use AI to understand the wasted effort.
Also, I rather have the ICs with some slack and time for clear thinking to address the big issues than always be busy on a mountain of work that goes now where.
2. Has me damn ready to leave the industry if I’m not forced out.
My big company just throws more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Our managers are quiet quitting as we're mostly told to just figure it out for ourselves. I've asked for more money due to having more responsibilities, but the answer is "we can't have that conversation now". I suspect I'll get the same answer in a few months. Hey, the stock is up though.
Talking to friends in other places, and reading the article, it isn't really different elsewhere. Given the disarray the US government is in & their refusal to give us benefits we've already paid for, employers know they have all the power at this time.
They may have all the power, but all of this shows is they have no idea how to wield it. The job market is horribly broken, there are inefficiencies everywhere, and their hedging/procrastination on what to do with hiring and growth is tanking the economy (and their customers ability to purchase their products).
If their goal is reducing wages through layoffs/attrition and lowballing new hires, they aren't going to get it without triggering a recession or worse.
Companies don't care about triggering a recession. They care about profits and stock price (If they're publicly traded).
> ...more and more work at fewer and fewer people.
Many people around me want to leave tech because of this. I'm considering it too, but unfortunately, I have no other skills outside of IT. I guess I would need to get re-qualified. These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT.
> These days, I think it's better to be in healthcare than IT.
Meh, nurse pay seemed alright till I learned how much they’re worked. Maybe physicians get a pretty good deal, but the reasons for that are also why you won’t be able to transition to that career.
Why not simply quietly refuse to jump on that train? Maintain velocity, keep working as per your contract, not a second more. Don't pick up phones outside work hours, weekends are for yourself, recharging and family. You know, humane working conditions, the only setup sustainable long term without risking permanent (both mental and physical) health damage.
No amount of money is worth that, despite many otherwise brilliant people get into tunnel vision (mortgage, some investment, chasing some top performer image or whatever else) and then SHTF.
Maybe its my European perspective, maybe I am old enough to realize its just a job and life satisfaction and legacy is defined by very different things, maybe I don't give a fuck anymore. Maybe all of it.
Maybe it is possible when you have a sane social safety net. If I don't work and I get sick, I will not be able to afford treatment. If I need a loan for a new car (might be necessary to find a new job) or home repairs, and they see I'm not working. I will not be approved.
The US is systemically anti worker.
Tech companies need engineers to create the products, and as long as people like yourself are knowingly and willingly tolerating those environments, they'll continue.
I left tech for this reason.
Employers don't have all the power, employees do because they can quit and work for a competitor. All businesses must compete for employees.
That’s only true when there’s jobs available for the employees to move to.
No, this isn't true and it's especially not true when, as I mentioned, so many benefits are tied to employment.
The economies of the west (and some eastern ones) are facing a k style growth where a small fraction of the population gets all of the gains.
It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.
> It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.
(Joke), well, if they keep convincing the small part of the population to spend ever increasing amount of money on "better" widgets...
In reality, if too many people are unemployed, no one's going to be able to buy things so that companies can have profits!
That being said, what I read is that a lot of companies are doing general housekeeping and trying to avoid bloat.
I don't think AI has anything to do with this. For a while, investors were using headcount as a metric for growth, even though startups often showed very poor utilization of their new hires. Hiring was done for the sake of hiring. Trying to achieve more with less is simply a reasonable response to a market where money is much more expensive than before. Many tech companies were unreasonably ineffective with their manpower, this is a much bigger problem now.
Agreed. There is sort of a vicious feedback loop at play too:
1. Large tech firms overhire like crazy
2. Interest rates go up, firms layoff tens of thousands of workers who never should have been hired in the first place
3. Firms pile more work on to remaining people, cut their pay relative to inflation
4. Existing workers threaten to leave, companies let them because "Look at all the talent on the market!"
It's abject lunacy, and companies are all too enthusiastically degrading the quality of their own workforces. The upshot is that this will pry some entrenched talent and experience out of large employers and into smaller companies. But the latest crop of MBA whiz kids are really something special.
Looking back at recent years. I can give AI as a true innovation. But outside that. What new thing has been actually done by all of these people? Say in past 5 years? Lot of hiring, but what has been the outcome?
Forget the last 5 years. Take the last 15 years. What exactly has say Meta contributed to the world? What true innovation?
Social media has certainly made very big changes in societies, but overwhelmingly negative
I'm not a fan of Meta, but I like their open source contributions, specifically PyTorch.
React...
For years, we've talked about how much of the workforce was "bullshit jobs". HN would be full of incredulous comments from people confused by the headcount at various companies, wondering what all those people were doing every day.
Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.
America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.
Biden did exactly what you are asking for in “massive investment and employment in industries with positive externalities” and your average voter didn’t give a shit.
Maybe that's because the voters are not impressed by government central planning.
>thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs [...] we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment.
Jobs are neither fungible nor mutually exclusive; there is no reason to assume that someone working in a bullshit job would thrive in a non-bullshit job that contributes to society in more productive ways, nor does the existence of bullshit jobs prevent people from working non-bullshit jobs. I hate to say it, but perhaps many people are employed in bullshit jobs because they are not capable of anything more challenging.
> I hate to say it, but perhaps many people are employed in bullshit jobs because they are not capable of anything more challenging.
Because bullshit jobs paid mode. Your average engineer working on ad targeting or at a hedge fund makes a lot more than working in say medicine.
"Bullshit job" has a specific meaning that's less about being in a pointless field-of-work (like adtech or many parts of fintech) and more about occupying a pointless role, regardless of the field. David Graeber (the originator of the term) gave the following examples [0]:
— Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters
— Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
— Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage
— Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration
— Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
My point stands. Its an incentive game. People work in BS fields because they pay more. People work BS jobs because again: they pay well. There is no incentive to work somewhere else.
We live in a very complex system, beyond any one persons comprehension. Some people think devolved decision making allocating resources to things like, advertising better, is the most efficient way of allocating resources. The invisible hand. How much is bullshit and how much is just beyond your awareness? If you were king and allocating so the work, would it be better? For who? I'm doubtful about bullshit jobs.
Twitter is a concrete demonstration of this. There were so many prognostications [0] that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees following Musk's takeover, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
[1] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.
Grok is a separate product created by xAI. It is integrated into Twitter yes but they hired a ton of engineers at xAI to make it happen.
Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.
I would categorize what happened to the site and it being rendered unusable by anyone even halfway serious as catastrophic - but perhaps my bar is a little higher for the "smartest man in the world" than "I can still get a 200 response from the site" (which actually is also down, in terms of outages).
I agree that the site is barely usable, but that's entirely due to a shift in Twitter's userbase caused by top-down policy changes (e.g. boosting right-wing spam), not any engineering shortcomings.
If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
It’s rhetoric like this that has created the market we have today.
The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...
Twitter's failures are solely due to Musk's changes in corporate governance (e.g. boosting fringe right-wing content causing its existing userbase and advertisers to flee the platform), not due to any engineering problems caused by reducing headcount. Strictly from an engineering standpoint, Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.
As I wrote in another post, if Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took over
Just because it works on your phone doesn’t mean there are no engineering problems behind the scene. You’re just not aware of the problems that exist because it’s a private company and you’re not privy to the information.
To be fair a lot of the fired people were moderators and it shows today.
This kind of “hope growth” and LLM based metrics speaks to rot within the economy. Don’t hire more, just say you’re going to build new products and launch something half baked with a skeleton crew that’s also maintaining the legacy products.
These incumbent companies are able to keep doing this because there’s no one around to eat their lunch. Maybe it’s cheaper to just buy (and kill) any company who legitimately threatens the status quo.
Companies should be hungry for real growth. You should not be able to financially engineer your way into stock growth.
Interesting insight. High interest rates keep new startups low. Well, not counting AI startups I guess.
And the lack of new (non-AI) startups allows bloated incumbents to get by without innovating or offering new products. Quality destroying measures like offshoring and outsourcing are easier to pull off. As is allowing services and standards to slide.
Maybe we'll only know once interest rates come back down. Or once the AI-replacing-workers veil has been lifted.
I think this dynamic is an under appreciated source of the chart that shows the decoupling of the job market with the stock market [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-scary-is-the-scariest-ch...
Interest rates aren't high, they're manipulated by the government and they're too low. When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low.
Interest rates only go down to stimulate growth
If growth is happening with high interest rates then that means capital can remain out of the hands of the public but debt replaces it
If I’m a billionaire my goal is to own everything and have everyone in debt to me based on my personal currency I issue - like points or miles or a corporate debt vehicle for example.
Surely we aren’t seeing a increase in debt also right? /s
This implies a kind of efficiency gain that is pretty much unheard of outside of acquisitions and layoffs. Inefficient organizations need huge culture and incentive shifts to move the needle on efficiency. Humans (especially the bureaucrats) resist changes in culture, so it's often necessary to shift the culture by shifting the humans. LLMs that don't quite fully replace any role aren't going to do it.
If large companies were prepared to really change then they could grow faster by _removing_ headcount.
As long as the government keeps printing money and handing it out to unproductive sectors like the sample companies in the article the scam might work.
If it collapses, maybe AirBnB will still be able to rent out (illegally in many cases) apartments to rich foreigners from productive countries.
The existing org chart is the biggest barrier to AI productivity improvements, because tasks/responsibilities and departmental boundaries are set up for the old way to get things done. This is why adding AI to an existing org chart results in modest (at best) improvement.
Starting over with a new org chart is the fastest path to higher productivity, but it should also work to gradually migrate to a more efficient structure by not hiring. Of course this could take many years and meanwhile you'll be outperformed by a smaller org.
Enough of the wsj posts with their engagement-bait
Growth through savings is limited.
Greed is sustainable.
When there's enough money on the sidelines, the pendulum swings, and big bets come back in fashion.
Downsizing is not a big bet.
Nobody leads tech to save billions and have money sit on the sidelines. It's a weak, shallow bet that should be reserved for discount retail and commodity markets.
The savings will be spent on engineering, eventually.
How does this jive with all of the big tech cos sitting on a Smaug's cave level of dollars? There's rainy day funds, but having billions in cash and cash equivalents seems odd.
I hope you are right, but my understanding is that the high headcount in engineering could, in large part, be offset by American tax exemptions for engineering salaries and that this exemption is being actively sunset.
See: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof...
https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startu...
This was reverted.
This was reverted in the big beautiful bill.
However, I wonder how long it takes company policies to catch up with the reality of that reversion. How many are still operating as though it was never reverted?