There’s a model of white-collar employment I think is missing here. (I also thought it was missing at some points in the Moral Mazes sequence, but never got around to writing it down then).
The model is underutilized employees as option value.
Imagine yourself as a manager, running a small team at some company somewhere.
Most weeks, your team has 40 hours of work to do.
Every so often, there is a crisis. Perhaps your firm’s product is scheduled to release in 2 weeks when a regulator suddenly dumps 500 pages of compliance questions on you and refuses to approve your product until they are answered. Perhaps a security flaw is discovered in a major library you use and you need to refactor your whole codebase. Perhaps someone makes a mistake and your firm’s biggest client is ticked off. In any case, you have 200 hours of work to do that week, and if it is not done that will be Very Bad.
How many employees should you hire?
You could hire one employee. This employee would be busy but not unmanageably so most weeks...and then as soon as something went wrong, there would be a disaster.
So instead you hire perhaps four employees. Most weeks they each have 10 hours of work to do, and spend the rest of the time chatting around the water cooler or playing solitaire on work computers or whatever. And when a fire drill happens, you get them to drop the solitaire games and maybe put in a few extra hours and you have enough people to handle it.
The thing you are buying with these three extra employees is not the 10 hours they each work in a typical week. It is them being around and available and familiar with the job when something goes wrong.
-------END OF MODEL, BEGINNING OF ARGUMENT------
Many people seem to me to be operating on a model something like this:
“There is X hours of work a week to do in your job. If you do those X hours of work, you are Doing Your Job. Employers want you to be e.g. in the office 9-to-5, even if that is not needed to Do Your Job, because they are evil monsters who enjoy the taste of your tears.”
Under that model, if you can do your job in 10 hours a week with GPT that is great! This high productivity should lead to some improvements, either in you having more free time, or in you being able to get more jobs and make more money.
Under my model, of course you can do your job in 10 hours most weeks. This has nothing to do with GPT! Your job can be done in 10 hours most weeks because most weeks nothing is on fire.
But if you have two employees:
Alice shows up at the office, does 10 hours of work, and plays solitaire for 30 hours.
Bob works from home, does 10 hours of work, and then switches to Job #2.
Bob is actually worth much less as an employee. Because when something goes wrong, you can grab Alice, call in your option, get her to stop playing solitaire, and have her do a bunch of work that was needed...but when you try to call your option on Bob, he’ll be on a call with his manager from Job #3. Your actual binding constraint is how much work needs to get done during a crisis, and Bob contributes very little to that.
A related bit is that you can’t generally respond to occasional weeks when you need 200hr of work by bringing in new people, or people from other areas of the company. You need people who already understand your systems, understand the general shape of the work (at least in normal times), and know how to work together.
You also need to be able to handle losing an employee. Even if you could get along fine with a single competent highly utilized person, if everything depends on them and they quit you’re in massive trouble. Much less so if you have three people who could each do all the work on their own.
There are often large gains to be found in finding lower priority work for people to be doing that replaces the solitaire, though pushing too hard here risks losing people.
This can also be solved by having multiple people work on multiple projects each. For example, you have 4 people and 4 projects, everyone works 25% on each project. The idea is that some projects have higher priority, some have lower, so when you need extra power on the important project, you can tell all 4 to prioritize it and give it 50% or 90%.
And it sucks a lot. Typically because each project has a separate project manager, and even if one is low-priority, its manager typically insists that you keep working on it at the usual speed, even when you keep getting extra tasks on the high-priority one.
I like this model, and it usefully describes a reality that I sometimes see in the workplace.
However, I claim that this is not the model that anyone’s employers are using. The decisions made around hiring budgets, as they have been explained to me, plan for the standard case: in your example, 40 hours of work per week and so one employee gets hired. In the event of crisis the employee is expected to put in extra time (which costs nothing in the US for salaried employees), perhaps they bring in help from other teams, and astonishingly often they just eat the failure.
Under the Moral Mazes view of things, this is because no one can be blamed in a meaningful way. Hiring just enough people to do the routine work is efficient under business logic, and so the people who do hiring budgets are blameless. No one predicted the spontaneous 500 pages of compliance that week, so the project managers are blameless. As a practical matter no one can be expected to quintuple their output overnight so even the employee is blameless; they get punished not for failing to do the work fast enough but for being lowest in hierarchy and therefore most expendable.
Cycling back to the top of the comment, I still think the optionality model is good. It seems like it should be chosen strategically in some cases, like some startups or any business with a lot of variance over the short term.
There’s a model of white-collar employment I think is missing here. (I also thought it was missing at some points in the Moral Mazes sequence, but never got around to writing it down then).
The model is underutilized employees as option value.
Imagine yourself as a manager, running a small team at some company somewhere.
Most weeks, your team has 40 hours of work to do.
Every so often, there is a crisis. Perhaps your firm’s product is scheduled to release in 2 weeks when a regulator suddenly dumps 500 pages of compliance questions on you and refuses to approve your product until they are answered. Perhaps a security flaw is discovered in a major library you use and you need to refactor your whole codebase. Perhaps someone makes a mistake and your firm’s biggest client is ticked off. In any case, you have 200 hours of work to do that week, and if it is not done that will be Very Bad.
How many employees should you hire?
You could hire one employee. This employee would be busy but not unmanageably so most weeks...and then as soon as something went wrong, there would be a disaster.
So instead you hire perhaps four employees. Most weeks they each have 10 hours of work to do, and spend the rest of the time chatting around the water cooler or playing solitaire on work computers or whatever. And when a fire drill happens, you get them to drop the solitaire games and maybe put in a few extra hours and you have enough people to handle it.
The thing you are buying with these three extra employees is not the 10 hours they each work in a typical week. It is them being around and available and familiar with the job when something goes wrong.
-------END OF MODEL, BEGINNING OF ARGUMENT------
Many people seem to me to be operating on a model something like this:
Under that model, if you can do your job in 10 hours a week with GPT that is great! This high productivity should lead to some improvements, either in you having more free time, or in you being able to get more jobs and make more money.
Under my model, of course you can do your job in 10 hours most weeks. This has nothing to do with GPT! Your job can be done in 10 hours most weeks because most weeks nothing is on fire.
But if you have two employees:
Alice shows up at the office, does 10 hours of work, and plays solitaire for 30 hours.
Bob works from home, does 10 hours of work, and then switches to Job #2.
Bob is actually worth much less as an employee. Because when something goes wrong, you can grab Alice, call in your option, get her to stop playing solitaire, and have her do a bunch of work that was needed...but when you try to call your option on Bob, he’ll be on a call with his manager from Job #3. Your actual binding constraint is how much work needs to get done during a crisis, and Bob contributes very little to that.
A related bit is that you can’t generally respond to occasional weeks when you need 200hr of work by bringing in new people, or people from other areas of the company. You need people who already understand your systems, understand the general shape of the work (at least in normal times), and know how to work together.
You also need to be able to handle losing an employee. Even if you could get along fine with a single competent highly utilized person, if everything depends on them and they quit you’re in massive trouble. Much less so if you have three people who could each do all the work on their own.
There are often large gains to be found in finding lower priority work for people to be doing that replaces the solitaire, though pushing too hard here risks losing people.
This can also be solved by having multiple people work on multiple projects each. For example, you have 4 people and 4 projects, everyone works 25% on each project. The idea is that some projects have higher priority, some have lower, so when you need extra power on the important project, you can tell all 4 to prioritize it and give it 50% or 90%.
And it sucks a lot. Typically because each project has a separate project manager, and even if one is low-priority, its manager typically insists that you keep working on it at the usual speed, even when you keep getting extra tasks on the high-priority one.
I like this model, and it usefully describes a reality that I sometimes see in the workplace.
However, I claim that this is not the model that anyone’s employers are using. The decisions made around hiring budgets, as they have been explained to me, plan for the standard case: in your example, 40 hours of work per week and so one employee gets hired. In the event of crisis the employee is expected to put in extra time (which costs nothing in the US for salaried employees), perhaps they bring in help from other teams, and astonishingly often they just eat the failure.
Under the Moral Mazes view of things, this is because no one can be blamed in a meaningful way. Hiring just enough people to do the routine work is efficient under business logic, and so the people who do hiring budgets are blameless. No one predicted the spontaneous 500 pages of compliance that week, so the project managers are blameless. As a practical matter no one can be expected to quintuple their output overnight so even the employee is blameless; they get punished not for failing to do the work fast enough but for being lowest in hierarchy and therefore most expendable.
Cycling back to the top of the comment, I still think the optionality model is good. It seems like it should be chosen strategically in some cases, like some startups or any business with a lot of variance over the short term.