Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1t31dic/big_tech_cut_80000_jobs_and_blamed_ai_experts_say/
I have only worked a handful of “traditional” jobs in which ai could do anything major, and even then it can’t replace any job I had (in my opinion). But regardless, in none of my jobs have I had “too many” coworkers. The only time I’d say as much was when a company was hiring to preemptively fill roles they knew were going to be vacant. Although I did notice bigger companies had the perception they were overstaffed, because they also had no communication with lower rungs at all.
The place I work at I wouldn’t say is “over staffed” but it is maybe “wrong-staffed”.
They have a full time “scrum master” and from what I can tell all she does it share her screen so people can awkwardly tell her which tickets to click on, and she calls on people in order during the morning meeting. That’s a whole-ass job. Meanwhile, devops is like crying blood because there’s like 2 of them managing decades of systems, and no senior engineering roles have been backfilled after people left for years.
That’s it? She’s not involved in planning or anything? Even when I was a dev scrum leader, we’d plan out every sprint as well longer term planning. It was surprisingly time consuming and we had to budget less dev time for me so I could handle the scrum duties.
Glad I didn’t have to do that shit anymore.
Not in any way I can discern! She’s in the planning meetings but her entire role seems to be sharing her screen so people can tell her what to click on. (This is excruciating to witness. It is so slow.)
Sometimes she’ll say “remember to check your capacity!”, but two other people on the team say that too.
She seems to be entirely non-technical, too, so she doesn’t have much input on any of the discussion. The inter-team stuff is handled by two other people. (A lady of importance whose title I don’t know, and some sort of business analyst)
Those experts are whackadoo insane and/or on the payroll.
I can name a ton of bullshit jobs at my company. Heck, I know whole departments that shouldn’t exist. But they do because some management consultant said we needed it to improve our attractiveness to investors or if we IPO or something like that. But they will cut the people that actually do the work.
Everyone always thinks it’s their job that isn’t the bullshit one.
Naa, I actually worked some of these same jobs myself and it was how I became convinced that they were bullshit jobs.
