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aplusbi | 4 months ago

Perhaps I'm being uncharitable but this line "each person will be more load-bearing" reads to me as "each person will be expected to do more work for the same pay".

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whatevertrevor|4 months ago

To me, it's the opposite. I think the words used are not exactly well-thought-through, but what they seem to want to be saying is they want less bureaucratic overhead, smaller teams responsible for bigger projects and impact.

And wanting that is not automatically a bad thing. The fallacy of linearly scaling man-hour-output applies in both directions, otherwise it's illogical. We can't make fun of claims that 100 people can produce a product 10 times as fast as 10 people, but then turn around and automatically assume that layoffs lead to overburdened employees if the scope doesn't change, because now they'll have to do 10 times as much work.

Now they can, often in practice. But for that claim to hold more evidence is needed about the specifics of who is laid off and what projects have been culled, which we certainly don't seem to have here.

0cf8612b2e1e|4 months ago

We’re not talking about an overworked nurse. Same Facebook-AI-researcher-pay is likely an eye watering amount of money

Windchaser|4 months ago

Still, regardless of the eye-watering amount of money, there's still a maximum amount of useful work you can get out of someone. Demand too much, and you actually lower their total productivity.

(For me, I found the limit was somewhere around 70 hrs/week - beyond that, the mistakes I made negated any progress I made. This also left me pretty burnt out after about a year, so the sustainable long-term hourly work rate is lower)

overfeed|4 months ago

> We’re not talking about an overworked nurse.

We're talking about overworked AI engineers and researchers who've been berated for management failures and told they need to do 5x more (before today). The money isn't just handed out for slacking, it's in exchange for an eye-watering amount of work, and now more is expected of them.