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A comment on DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well as Humans. Parent comment

Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by Supermancho on Thursday December 15, 2022 @12:06PM (#34002511)
I have observed that companies will choose not to invest further in irreplaceable labor, under any circumstance. Every single company with, that I have been part of over the decades (30ish?), exhibits the same behavior when it becomes common knowledge that someone is a linchpin. Put the company in a game of chicken for a raise (which includes an implicit, or-I-quit) and they let the "irreplaceable" employee go. Every single time. It's not hard to see why. No company wants to have a disgruntled linchpin nor do they want to be beholden to some lower level character.
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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by blacksmith_tb on Thursday December 15, 2022 @12:17PM (#34002659)
My experience is similar, though I would personally attribute it at least partly to stupidity - on the one hand, in most cases when I have worked with someone crucial, they've been with the company longer than the people managing them, so the person or people making the firing decision don't really understand what's at stake. Or to put it another way, their cost-benefit is flawed, they know what it'd cost to keep the key employee, but they fail to imagine what it will cost to let them go.
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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by Supermancho on Thursday December 15, 2022 @01:53PM (#34003912)
> My experience is similar, though I would personally attribute it at least partly to stupidity

Every company has suffered from the decision, in my experience. Never has it destroyed the employer, but I have heard stories about such eventualities.

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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by soperj on Thursday December 15, 2022 @12:50PM (#34003096)
Don't know why you'd stay on then?
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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by robertlagrant on Friday December 16, 2022 @04:57AM (#34012747)
Why do you think previous commenter is in that position?
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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by microtherion on Thursday December 15, 2022 @01:09PM (#34003333)
Much as I'd like to side with labor here, the companies are probably right. Even if the linchpin is high level and happy, building around a single, irreplaceable employee is not a sound long term strategy.

For all the important contributions Steve Jobs made to Apple when he returned, maybe the least heralded and hardest to implement is that he managed to NOT make himself irreplaceable. To many people's surprise, Apple did not collapse after his retirement and death. So maybe his most genius contribution was not to make Apple dependent on his ongoing genius contributions.

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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by andrekandre on Thursday December 15, 2022 @01:47PM (#34003827) 

  >  So maybe his most genius contribution was not to make Apple dependent on his ongoing genius contributions.
i wonder if we all acted in this way, would things be better than they are? do we as individuals put our need/want to be depended upon above what is (for lack of a better term) the long-term good?
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Re:DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well ... by coldtea on Thursday December 15, 2022 @06:36PM (#34007393)
>No company wants to have a disgruntled linchpin nor do they want to be beholden to some lower level character.

That's because its even lower level characters in managements deciding...

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