The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts. For careerists, “number of people managed” is a key performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging right).
The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their own careers by being the manager that manages more people - is completely misaligned with these future efficiency hypotheses
As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat and companies hiring way more people than they need.
How do you go from Sr. Manager to Manager, you manage a large team, and create a need to have your org have multiple managers.
So yes, lots of perverse incentives to grow your org so-as to grow your career.
There are some other tides working in the favor of bloated salaries and payrolls. One is the focus of "stakeholder capitalism". Most of the large companies are held by ETFs. The large banks that run the ETFs are less concerned about individual efficiencies of any one company (they own them all anyway), but are more interested in other things (green initiatives, social causes, etc). So the decisions being made at these companies are less about profit and more about servicing "stakeholders", be it their employees, the community, the environment. That's all fine, but it's difficult to track and hold executives responsible. A bloated staff is fine because you don't want to lay off employees. Or various money losing departments are okay because they're servicing the community.
No org is perfect, but I keep seeing this take again and again and again, yet rarely any form of acknowledgment that it could be good for the company to incentivize proactively growing a team
Perhaps that's not quite the right comparison - even though the population hasnt doubled since 1970, the number of people employed has (80M->160M, approx [0]). Adjusting for that, Bank Teller employment level is basically unchanged.
I think it is hubris to say that anything a human can do cannot eventually be replaced by a machine. When we will actually reach that point is the real question.
Fednow should alleviate some of this.
The number of tellers is expected to drop by 12% over the next decade while general jobs are expected to grow by 5% according to government forecasts btw.
Being a cashier used to be a tougher job because you needed to know all the inventory. Now it’s ok for a grocery store cashier to not know what parsley is.
If automation makes it practical to do an embarrassingly small task in order to provide a value to someone richer, yeah, you can be hired into it. Maybe a lot of people will. But that’s not prosperity that’s capitalism holding you by the balls.
Not everyone is equally capable, which implies that some people are on the left side of the distribution. Some jobs that simplify the essential actions bring the job to meet the capabilities of the worker.
Lowering the bar is not needed or helpful. People who are so incapable that these jobs are their peak potential should probably just be on social programs.
(I had a family member, since passed, who was significantly mentally handicapped by a difficult birth sequence. She loved nothing more than to feel like she was included and being helpful to the limits of her ability.)
Jordan Peterson - What Kind Of Job Fits Your IQ
Population growth doesn't account for regulatory changes and it takes a while to automate anything that interfaces with the law because of the inherent risk in getting it wrong. Banks are acutely exposed to this because they're often the ones who are ultimately responsible - they're the default insurance policy against counterparty risk.
Edit: Tellers also tend to be general purpose account managers at smaller banks, so if you called up the bank you'd eventually get forwarded to someone on the floor at your local branch instead of a call center.
Additionally, people are much more reliant on financial services and payment rails. Credit cards weren't as common (and required for almost everything) 20 years ago. People used cash for probably 10X as many transactions as they do now, so you probably had more 'cash economies'
All those branches closed during covid. I have 6 within walking distance and there isn’t a human anywhere.
I count half a dozen Chase branches that have gone up near me in the past few months. I don't get it.
I’m not sure I buy into the bank analogy (probably due more to technology making bank products cheaper/more accessible and thus more customers and thus more bankers) but I definitely buy this.
If you believe fundamentally in basic market dynamics and that humans are generally productive creatures, then any automation that comes about will simply shift where the human labor is most useful, and we will generally always have enough human powered work to go around. The tech and automation is just making it more efficient for everyone.
If I could get quarters form an ATM, there would be no reason ever for me to.
What are people using tellers for?
They need to look you in the eyes to see if you are pure of heart and deserve a mortage.
Why am I stuck with WF? A longer, boring-er story.
It hasn't in 250 years of automation.
Regardless time will tell
Imagine an economy where there were no ATMs. Any time you wanted cash, you would have to walk to the bank and wait in line to talk to a bank teller and cash a check. And every week you'd be paid by a check. Paper records were collected for everything and an army of employees had to reconcile the records. No spreadsheet software was available.
In fact, the number of bank tellers (not even bank employees) actually doubled since the advent of ATMS:
> The number of human bank tellers in the United States increased from approximately 300,000 in 1970 to approximately 600,000 in 2010. Counter-intuitively, a contributing factor may be the introduction of automated teller machines. ATMs let a branch operate with fewer tellers, making it cheaper for banks to open more branches. This likely resulted in more tellers being hired to handle non-automated tasks, but further automation and online banking may reverse this increase.
But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine