Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1t31dic/big_tech_cut_80000_jobs_and_blamed_ai_experts_say/
The inefficiencies come from the top.
Management comes up with unrealistic ideas, people run in circles trying to keep up, and then management decides the reason that their revenue goals or whatever aren’t being met is because of over staffing, not their harebrained ideas.
It’s not like 25-75% of employees are just playing video games all day (though there’s people who do that). They’re dealing with the corporate machine - the real “culture”, not the one that’s so carefully “cultivated” by management dictating office hours. Getting in meetings that should be emails, answering “just a quick question” that destroys their thought process, and dealing with AI being crammed down their throat.
They make far too much money to be ‘over staffed’. They are overcommitted to billionaire shareholders. They always blame a blameless entity for shitty actions. See ‘the economy’ etc. Might as well blame the weather.
I have only worked a handful of “traditional” jobs in which ai could do anything major, and even then it can’t replace any job I had (in my opinion). But regardless, in none of my jobs have I had “too many” coworkers. The only time I’d say as much was when a company was hiring to preemptively fill roles they knew were going to be vacant. Although I did notice bigger companies had the perception they were overstaffed, because they also had no communication with lower rungs at all.
They’ve been saying they over hired during the pandemic for years, now. There’s no way they hadn’t already shed those “extra” employees by now.
The goal is zero employees and 100% profit.
And without customers, 100% of 0 is still 0
Oracle terminated 30k employees.
Those experts are whackadoo insane and/or on the payroll.
There are strong incentives to tell someone to downsize rather than staying the same size. Investors love the occasional human sacrifice, and you can always achieve a short-term productivity increase by reducing the denominator (headcount), at least until real metrics start showing the qualitative decline that almost inevitably follows. And then you can sneakily recruit some new suckers.
In this case it’s Marc Andreessen. He’s not on the payroll. He is the payroll.
The man with the most egg shaped head who doesn’t understand introspection or thinking about… things?
The man is actually a moron. Straight up someone who I don’t think I could have a pleasant conversation with without making fun of the money man.
I can name a ton of bullshit jobs at my company. Heck, I know whole departments that shouldn’t exist. But they do because some management consultant said we needed it to improve our attractiveness to investors or if we IPO or something like that. But they will cut the people that actually do the work.
Everyone always thinks it’s their job that isn’t the bullshit one.
Naa, I actually worked some of these same jobs myself and it was how I became convinced that they were bullshit jobs.
Such as?
We have a partner team that ostensibly manages the partners, but the sales team already does this as all sales go through partners, so the partner team just makes up reports and busy work for the sales people to extract data from them.
We have a sales engineering management team, but the sales engineering team just used to report into the regional sales leads, which gave them about double the time to do actual work because now this unneeded management layer has to create work, initiatives, and reports to justify their existence, but all it accomplishes is sapping about half of their teams time away on tasks that usually actually make their effectiveness worse.
I have held both of these jobs.
The worst thing is that all of these silos are fighting over the same KPI’s so if one wins the other loses. The sales account managers are stuck in the middle because they decide how to make the reports work so that one or the other side wins. That’s the job I hold now and it’s the one where all the work actually happens to hold up these other dead weight roles.
Yeah, a lack of revenue can also be stated as “overstaffed”, I suppose. “We have too many people for the business we no longer have.”
And it’s not even a lack of revenue. Profits are still coming in the billions, it’s just that they have to keep it going up every quarter to keep the shareholders happy.
Constant growth till death, like cancer.
Welcome to capitalism! It needs geometric growth but we life in a world of linear constraints.
I manage a web team for a pretty big company. It’s just me and a Jr dev. Even with AI, we still can’t keep up.
