"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value."

I wish corporations really acted this rationally.

At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, preventing them from seeing as many patients as they otherwise would. Cost savings may look good on spreadsheet, but really the overall efficiency of the system suffered.

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ehnto 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's what I see when companies cut juniors as well. AI cannot replace a junior because a junior has full and complete agency, accountability, and purpose. They retain learning and become a sharper bespoke resource for the business as time goes on. The PM tells them what to do and I give them guidance.

If you take away the juniors, you are now asking your seniors to do that work instead which is more expensive and wasteful. The PM cannot tell the AI junior what to do for they don't know how. Then you say, hey we also want you to babysit the LLM to increase productivity, well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow. Now I am wasting two types of time.

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jack_pp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow

You could actually just do that, leave an agent on a problem you would give a junior, go back on your main task and whenever you feel like it check the agent's work.

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jimbokun 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Everything I’ve read about experiments where they’ve tried this have been massive failures. The AIs always get stuck and can’t make further progress at some point when given the full responsibilities of a human employee.

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ehnto 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It lacks the ability to self correct and do all the adjacent tasks like client comms etc. So if I come back to it in the afternoon I may have wasted a day in business terms, because I will need to try again tomorrow. What do I tell the client, sorry the LLM failed the simple task so we will have to try again tomorrow? Worse, lie and say sorry this 2 hour task could not be achieved by our developers today. Either way we look incompetent (because realistically, we were not competent, relying on a tool that fails frequently)

	▲	jack_pp a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sorry but I'm not familiar with the context you mention, have not worked in a job where I had to communicate with clients and I find it hard to imagine a job where a junior would have to communicate with a client on a 2 hour task. Why would you want a junior to be the public face of your company?

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htrp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

that sounds like a pm problem

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listenallyall 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But wouldnt these spreadsheets be tracking something like total revenue? If a doctor is spending time on admin tasks instead of revenue-generating procedures, obviously the hospital has accountants and analysts who will notice this, yes?

I'll contrast your experience with a well-run (from a profitability standpoint) dentist's office, they have tons of assistants and hygienists and the dentist just goes from room-to-room performing high-dollar procedures, and very little "patient care." If small dentist offices have this all figured out it seems a little strange that a massive hospital does not.

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gwd 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

First of all, it's not unlikely that the dentist is the owner. And in any case, when you have a small system of less than 150 people, it's easy enough for a handful of people to see what's actually going on.

Once you get to something in the thousands or tens of thousands, you just have spreadsheets; and anything that doesn't show up in that spreadsheet might as well not exist. Furthermore, you have competing business units, each of which want to externalize their costs to other business units.

Very similar to what GP described -- when I was in a small start-up, we had an admin assistant who did most of the receipt entry and what-not for our expense reports; and we were allowed to tell the company travel agent our travel constrants and give us options for flights. When we were acquired by a larger company, we had to do our own expense reports, and do our own flight searches. That was almost certainly a false economy.

And then when we became a major conglomerate, at some point they merged a bunch of IT functions; so the folks in California would make a change and go home, and those of us in Europe or the UK would come in to find all the networks broken, with no way to fix it until the people in California started coming in at 4pm.

In all cases, the dollars saved is clearly visible in the spreadsheet, while the "development velocity" lost is noisy, diffuse, and hard to quantify or pin down to any particular cause.

I suppose one way to quantify that would be to have the Engineering function track time spent doing admin work and charge that to the Finance function; and time spent idle due to IT outages and charge that to the IT department. But that has its own pitfalls, no doubt.

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listenallyall 2 days ago | parent [-]

Problem with this analogy is that software development != revenue. The developers and IT are a cost center. So yea in a huge org one of the goals is to reduce costs (admin) spent on supporting a cost center.

Doctors generate revenue directly and it can all be traced, so even an extra 20 minutes out of their day doing admin stuff instead of one more patient or procedure is easily noticeable, and affects revenue directly.

	▲	gwd a day ago \| parent [-]
		You mean, there's a 1-1 correlation between the amount of pointless admin a doctor has to do and the number of patients he sees (and thus the revenue of the clinic). It should be visible on the spreadsheet. Whereas, there's not a 1-1 correlation between the pointless admin a software engineer has to do and the number of paying customers a company gets. But then, why do large orgs try to "save costs" by having doctors do admin work? Somehow the wrong numbers get onto the spreadsheet. Size of the organization -- distance between the person looking at the spreadsheet and the reality of people doing the work -- likely plays a big part in that.

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Eisenstein 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If a doctor is spending time on admin tasks instead of revenue-generating procedures, obviously the hospital has accountants and analysts who will notice this, yes?

I am going to assume that the Doctors are just working longer hours and/or aren't as attentive as they could be and so care quality declines but revenue doesn't. Overworking existing staff in order to make up for less staff is a tried and true play.

> I'll contrast your experience with a well-run (from a profitability standpoint) dentist's office, they have tons of assistants and hygienists and the dentist just goes from room-to-room performing high-dollar procedures, and very little "patient care." If small dentist offices have this all figured out it seems a little strange that a massive hospital does not.

By conflating 'Doctors' and 'Dentists' you are basically saying the equivalent of 'all Doctors' and 'Doctors of a certain specialty'. Dentists are 'Doctors for teeth' like a pediatrician is a 'Doctor for children' or an Ortho is a 'Doctor for bones'.

Teeth need maintenance, which is the time consuming part of most visits, and the Dentist has staff to do that part of it. That in itself makes the specialty not really that comparable to a lot of others.

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htrp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I feel like that's how you get Microsoft where each division has a gun pointed at the other division

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listenallyall 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't really matter the type of doctor, spending all their time on revenue-generating activities would seem to be better than only 75% generating revenue and 25% on "administrative and bureaucratic tasks" that don't generate revenue and which could be accomplished by a much lower-paid employee ("secretaries and assistants").

Perhaps you're correct that the doctors are simply working much longer hours but that's one group of employees among a hospital's staff who do generally have a lot of power and aren't too easy to make extraordinary demands of.

	▲	Eisenstein 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are reasons why the claim might be right, as noted by others, and there are reasons why the claim may not be right, as noted by you. If you think that your idea of how Doctors operate in a hospital is more compelling than other people's explanations of why the claim is legitimate, then keep believing that.

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jimbokun 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Probably because dentists are more cash based and less battling with insurance for payments.

Customers are more price sensitive so the dentists have to be too.

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kylinhacker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm a full-stack developer, Recently i find that almost 90% of my work deadlines have been brought forward, and the bosses' scheduling has become stricter. the coworker who is particularly good at pair programming with AI prefers to reduce his/her scheduling(kind of unconsciously)。Work is sudden，but salary remains steady。what a bummer