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A comment on The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine. Parent comment

Re:The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype m... by ryandrake on Friday May 30, 2025 @08:54PM (#44141106)
People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it.

Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them.

I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.

What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype m... by trade2play on Friday May 30, 2025 @09:25PM (#44141230)
All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.

Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype m... by alvah on Friday May 30, 2025 @09:34PM (#44141274)
Have you heard of Twitter? 80-90% reduction in numbers, visible effects to the user (resulting from the headcount cuts, not the politics of the owner)? Pretty much zero.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype m... by hnaccount_rng on Saturday May 31, 2025 @05:37AM (#44143111)
That’s a difficult example. I don’t think anyone would reasonably expect the engineering artifact twitter.com to break. But the business artifact did break. At least to a reasonable degree. The Ad revenue is still down (both business news and the ads I’m experiencing are from less well resourced brands). And yes, that has to do with “answering emails with poop emojis” and “laying off content checkers”
[ Parent | on HN ]