Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

https://thedeepdive.ca/shopify-employee-breaks-nda-to-reveal-firm-quietly-replacing-laid-off-workers-with-ai/

by notRobot • 3 years ago

461 523 3 years ago

ghaff16• 3 years ago

There's been a pretty steady trend towards automation, chatbots, self-service, etc. replacing getting an empowered human on the line. Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more.

Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online.)

atmosx2• 3 years ago

FYI, I am actively avoiding any service that makes it hard for me to talk to a human. I don’t think I am the only one.

ghaff16• 3 years ago

Unless you're wealthy enough to delegate it to an assistant, I'm sure that's really hard for anything that doesn't involve going to a local store or service. (Or, again, personal advisors of various types but again we're talking lots of money involved.)

ADDED: And the fact that going through online travel/hotel/airline sites is mostly easier (and cheaper) than dealing with most travel agents used to be. Until something goes wrong and you can't walk into your travel agent's office.

fullshark2• 3 years ago

I recently got only FAQs and phone tree leading to automated messages for customer support for Legoland. For a large enough business angering a fraction of a percent of your customers is worth it compared to shelling out for actual customer support.

gnufied2• 3 years ago

Same goes for almost all grocery shops here - Publix, Kroger, target etc replacing checkout with self-checkout kiosks completely.

I absolute hate using self-checkout for non-packaged groceries items. Especially if I have lots of stuff. Freaking "unintended item in baggage area".

Not to mention, I feel like Publix etc in particular employed lots of folks with disability. It warmed my heart to talk to them.

I don't know what humanity plans is. Even if we pay folks free money, they still loose on social interactions.

ghaff16• 3 years ago

Grocery stores and others absolutely still need cashier checkout. If I have a handful of items I can barcode swipe and even a couple pieces of produce that's fine. But they simply aren't designed for a full shopping cart which includes a ton of non-barcoded items.

Ditto with home repair stores. Scan a new smoke detector? Sure. Check out a bunch of lumber etc. That would be no.

In my experience, most stores are finding a reasonable balance. And one of my cheaper grocery stores doesn't use self-checkout at all for now. Which is just fine.

smt882• 3 years ago

So far, I've never seen a Publix with even a single self-checkout. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they're rolling them out much more slowly than the other stores.

This is likely because Publix is 80% employee-owned[1].

1. https://fourweekmba.com/who-owns-publix/#:~:text=Key%20takea....

radicalbyte• 3 years ago

Here in The Netherlands we don't have that thing where they weigh your bag to make sure you haven't stolen something. They instead have two people for 8-10 checkouts and do random inspections where they scan your bags.

Works great and also gave me a huge shock when I went back to the UK and Sainsbury's treated me like a criminal.

phpisthebest5• 3 years ago

I resisted using online ordering at Kroger for a long time, then in 2021 I started using the mobile app, and just picking up my groceries... now I have not be inside a Kroger in almost 2 years and have no plans on going back in.

The Kroger App is great, and having them bring the stuff out, load me up, and I drive away... even if they actually go back to charging $5 for the service I am paying.

>I don't know what humanity plans is

I dont know about humanity, but consumers demand low prices on food, one of the biggest complaints people have today is high cost of food, even if over history we still have some of the lowest costs of food as a percentage of expanded ever...

Grocery is also one of, if not the lowest profit retail businesses to be in, it is not surprising they will look to lower their #1 cost... people.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

I think the automation trend can be annoying when it fails, but self checkout is a weird thing to pick on. In the UK at least they always have a staff member on hand to override the scales. They're soooo much better than waiting in a queue for a human.

canucker2016• 3 years ago

Plus there are some customers who misscan stuff to pay less (they buy a lot of "bananas").

also the discretionary purchases that occurred while waiting in line disappear - no gum/chocolate bar or celebrity/gossip magazine sales

barbazoo• 3 years ago

I don't like self checkout because sometimes I'm clumsy and forget to scan an item or two, oopsie.

neilv• 3 years ago

Most self-checkouts here are surprisingly bad, but Whole Food Markets ones work well enough. However, WFM recently managed to ruin that in a different way...

The WFM self-checkouts here recently started displaying dead-on video camera closeup views of the customer's face, on-screen, during checkout.

They're doing this in neighborhoods with upscale customers, so I'm thinking maybe it's not a rough part of town "you are being watched" security thing. (That would seem incongruous with the premium WFM brand, and how historically they've seemed to want customers to feel about shopping there.)

Maybe the live view of the camera in the customer's face is actually trying to lay foundation for a legal defense that that they weren't secretly recording people, for the inevitable scandal over a data breach/mishandling/misuse.

(Lawmakers and state AGs should be all over this, because history is clear that very few companies take data capture and handling responsibility seriously, unless it's heavily regulated, with teeth that hurt, and maybe not even then.)

Modified3019• 3 years ago

I’ve found it heavily depends on the system the store uses and if improvements are actively made.

Walmart’s self-checkouts are great, and I’ve noticed distinct improvements over the years, reducing or removing common sources of issues.

WinCo’s on the other hand have been and continue to be prone to becoming a pain in the ass requiring multiple employee interventions.

I personally hate interaction at grocery stores, I want to get in and gtfo and not hold up the people behind me.

jacquesm10• 3 years ago

I boycott the self checkout, and always go through the cashier, even if that means waiting a bit longer. The way I look at it that's at least a token towards keeping people employed that make substantially less money than I do and even if my time is valuable it isn't nearly as valuable to me as their employment is to them.

I hoped more people would join me this but it looks like it is a losing battle.

el_benhameen• 3 years ago

I just bought some snacks at an airport store that was “fully” self-directed—swipe your card, walk through the gate, grab your stuff, and walk out. Except it required _more_ human assistants than a typical airport convenience store in order to handle the volume of confused and suspicious shoppers. “Wait, how does this work?”, “How do I get a receipt?”, “How do I know it won’t over charge me?”, etc.

dheera2• 3 years ago

Freaking "unintended item in baggage area".

When that happens I usually just pick up my stuff and start over at another machine. It's usually faster than waiting for them to come over and enter their password. Sometimes by the time I'm done there are 3 machines "waiting for assistance". (I just hope their UX researchers are watching from a corner, but that's their problem.)

Self checkout is supposed to be faster than non-self checkout, if it doesn't meet that bar it is useless.

fy20• 3 years ago

I feel the opposite. I much prefer the self-service experience. Staff are miserable, they usually scan stuff faster than you can pack, and I have to wait in a large line for that. I'd much rather do it myself.

Even with a large cart (family of 3 weekly shop) I have no issues, you just need to be good at stacking items so they don't fall off.

Where I live stores are slowly adopting scan-as-you-shop which is even better.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

There is a billboard on the 101 southbound from SF I drove past last night that said “An AI bot trained on the entirety of human knowledge wants a job on your support team.”

Amusingly, this is the sort of filter you want to push management through to determine levels of both competency and empathy (“what is the true practicality of this?” and “should we do this?”).

Edit: found someone’s photo of it: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/150vold/does_anyon... | https://i.redd.it/kgu48tgk09cb1.jpg

650REDHAIR• 3 years ago

Intercom is the company behind the billboards.

throwaway14356• 3 years ago

i think things will move towards rfid eventually, then you just roll though the checkout and everything gets detected. We have an increasing number of packages with statiegeld, you get some money when you return it to the store. The annoyance is increasing there too but if the tags can be reused it would be interesting.

hn_throwaway_994• 3 years ago

Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online.

It's so interesting to me how generational this is, and how it changed so quickly.

I used to work in something tangentially related to real estate. The sellers/landlords tended to all be older (50+, this was about 10 years ago), while the renters/some buyers tended to be millennials and younger. The older folks went apoplectic when we tried to move more communication onto our online platform: "I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone - if they couldn't complete the whole transaction online they were much more likely to bail.

Not making a judgment about either approach, really just thought it was interesting how stark the divide was and how it changed so quickly.

ghaff16• 3 years ago

Trust me. Every few weeks I hear a complaint from my dad that he can't just go into an office or directly get someone on the phone to make some change. (And I'm certainly not a millennial.) At some level he just resents he needs to do this stuff on a computer. I'm annoyed when I can't reach someone in the event of a problem but I am totally cool with transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system.

I do talk with certain advisors in person and we even share various personal info about what's going on--but most routine things are email.

xmprt• 3 years ago

I'm not sure you can call it a change of opinion when the older generation grew up where phone was the only option. So it sounds more like each generation prefers the method that they grew up with. If in the future everyone ends up doing work in the "Metaverse" for some reason then I'm sure the current online generation would hate it even more. I can't think of a good reason to do anything in the metaverse but maybe the next generation will find a way to make it work.

For similar reasons, a lot of people on Hackernews prefer reading articles rather than watching videos whereas a lot of newer programmers learn a lot from videos more so than books and articles.

version_five• 3 years ago

Communication preference is one thing. But what a lot of modern "online" support is really about is preventing people from getting support and forcing them into a dark pattern doing what the company wants and not what they want.

If I could unsubscribe, deal with billing errors, resolve complaints, etc online I'd love it. But most support systems try and trap you in some Kafkaesque faq hell that never lets you get near something that would solve your problem. That's the real reason people want a person.

rchaud2• 3 years ago

"I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone

This works when the things you are purchasing are uncomplicated, like a toaster or a streaming subscription. Younger folks will realize that big-ticket purchases are precisely the kind of things that you will want to have some kind of human involved on the other side for when things go wrong.

theptip• 3 years ago

I would not bet my brand on generative AI being ready to handle customer-facing conversations without supervision.

Seems insane. But hey, maybe the ROI is there for replacing frontline support. It’s lower quality but way lower price, so you can afford to escalate to a human quicker?

Just to steelman, if I could easily and instantly talk to a support chatbot that was somewhat knowledgeable about the product lineup, it might be useful. Better than the Intercom chat box where the human replies to you in 2-10 hours.

xtracto• 3 years ago

Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more

I cant accept this. Labour cost is as cheap as it has been, as it can be seen in those inflation vs salary increase historic charts.

Similarly with labour shortage: population is just growing and growing, what labour shortage?

I think reality is grimmer: companies are unwilling to pay humans a fair share for their labour, as it happened in the past. Nowadays companies prefer crappy cheap AI with 1/10th of the cost instead of humans.

It's depressing. We need a) steep government taxes to companies that do this so that part of those savings go to society, b) UBI paid by those taxes so that people can keep living a dignified life.

(Btw I'm not American and dont live there, so Socialist measures are OK to me) socialists not communist

lakomen• 3 years ago

If you work with AI, it's on you to refuse those jobs.

photonbeam• 3 years ago

The people labeling data for $15/h are supposed to take the stand?

davb2• 3 years ago

No, the people building the shite customer service chatbots that we all hate using should take a stand.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

They could maliciously label stuff. I'd imagine there is a way to bias a model against wealthy people.

MarkMarine• 3 years ago

No one is talking about 15$ an hour data labeling and I’m pretty sure you know that. Being obtuse on purpose.

If you’re actively replacing people’s jobs rather than helping people… well, you’ve got to look at yourself in the mirror every night.

muskmusk7• 3 years ago

Why?

Have you ever sat in a customer service chat with someone who wasn't very helpful and very slow sat the same time?

There were probably handling several other chats at the same time.

Why shouldn't we replace those interactions with an AI that is fast and infinitely patient and friendly?

I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but I don't see how fighting technological progress that is net positive for almost everyone is productive here.

atmosx2• 3 years ago

Because up to this point my experience with automated systems in banks, phone companies and web services companies has been awful even for trivial requests.

Until shit improves, I will be bashing on those and prefer companies that allow me to get human interaction asap.

graypegg• 3 years ago

I'm curious to see how empowered the LLM customer service of the future is. Are they going to be allowed to process refunds? People will find out how to convince the LLM you do meet the requirements for a refund.

And if you check the requirements using something deterministic (last order was within last 2 weeks, customer has a high loyalty points score, they're subscribed to some premium service) then why do you need an agent at all? The real point of the agent when it comes to something like that is reducing churn by making the process harder. The LLM isn't working for you, just like the human agent isn't working for you.

I do think this sort of thing could be good for digging up information though, as technical support before you get to a technician, could be good. Probably less aggravating than "Before we connect you, please turn on and off the rout-... you pressed 1, that is an invalid option. Before we connect you, please turn..."

Legend24402• 3 years ago

Fuck off. Automation is the only thing that increases real wealth over the long term.

All jobs should be done by machines.

dang• 3 years ago

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

WestCoastJustin2• 3 years ago

No it's not. Everyone has obligations. You cannot un-invent this stuff. That's like trying to stop air planes, rockets, photography, combustion engine, calculators, the personal pc, etc. It's the next phase of technology and it will be developed regardless if you like it or not. It's here to stay and thinking otherwise does everyone a disservice. We should be trying to figure out how to leverage this and ride the next wave.

Honestly, this might even make support much easier to interact with. If you can filter this stuff you could probably have a much better support experience. ChatGPT has proved this to be true. I cannot tell you how many times I've used support and the person is some entry level tech who has no idea.

misnome2• 3 years ago

Wait, you actually think that AI will improve any of this?

xp842• 3 years ago

many times I've used support and the person is some entry level tech who has no idea.

Yes, roughly all the times. every single time. As far as I can tell, most “first line of support” reps are empowered to read you FAQs, and to maybe perform actions you are better able to do yourself online. If like me, the caller is only calling as a last resort after figuring out the task is impossible online, they just repeat a FAQ or tell them misleading garbage information, blame a third party, or transfer them in circles.

Oddly, the “social media support” reps that cell phone companies have that you can message on Messenger or Twitter DMs are 10x as competent as the phone people, with the bonus that you can work through the problem asynchronously, which is a godsend for busy people.

bdcravens4• 3 years ago

Many of us have built software that at some point has eliminated roles. It's turtles all the way down.

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

I'm just wondering when is OpenAI going to jack up their prices once vendor lock-in reaches some critical mass.

josho• 3 years ago

They don’t have lock in yet. They have an advantage in their LLM. But competition is racing and are improving their LLMs fast.

Legend24402• 3 years ago

Every other company with a GPU farm is getting into the LLM space. There will be plenty of competition keeping prices low.

rvz2• 3 years ago

For them to do that, they would need to release a free but extremely limited version of GPT-3, that is downloadable but much better than all the other free LLMs like Llama 2.

Then they can justify increasing the price of either GPT-4 (with more features) or directly in GPT-4.5.

Otherwise they cannot compete against Meta in the race to zero.

dmvdoug2• 3 years ago

The enshittification will continue until morale improves.

stopshills• 3 years ago

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Morale is down because of the enshittification.

marricks• 3 years ago

maybe I'm missing a layer of sarcasm or two but that's the joke

flanked-evergl• 3 years ago

https://english.stackexchange.com/q/371325

dragonmost• 3 years ago

That's exactly the point, and it won't get better anytime soon.

btown• 3 years ago

HOME # the user's position

FD 100

ST # show turtle, whose name happens to be joke

RT 90

PD # pen down

FD 10000000

lolinder• 3 years ago

It's a common joke in situations like this. The form I'm familiar with is "the beatings will continue until morale improves". The saying is used to call out self-defeating treatment of a company's employees: that beatings hurt rather than help morale is the point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/c4tu06/origin_of...

cjs_ac• 3 years ago

It's a riff on the old joke, 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.' It suggests that the problems are caused by poor management practices and has no deeper meaning.

littlestymaar2• 3 years ago

“[some harmful shit] will continue until morale improves” is a meme.

gremlinsinc3• 3 years ago

it's A play on beatings will continue until morale improves. I'm pretty sure nobody likes beatings either.

raverbashing2• 3 years ago

Will the AIs be allowed to work remotely or will they have to be in office as well?

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

I laughed

bigmattystyles• 3 years ago

It's nothing new - Outlook / Exchange and counterparts replaced secretaries. Intelligent IDES let me do the job of many. The list goes on. The rate of replacement may be great or greatly exaggerated. Taxing profits is the key. I'm not holding my breath.

frereubu• 3 years ago

Do you mean taxing revenues?

Barrin92• 3 years ago

The employee’s Twitter thread also raised concerns about the well-being of Shopify’s workforce. Since the layoffs, remaining staff members have reportedly faced increased workloads without proportional compensation or benefits, leading to burnout, anxiety, and stress leave.

Companies who outsource customer support to cheap subsidiaries or bots have no respect for either their customers or their workers, both low and high paid, who will inevitably have to fix and respond to the crap coming their way. For me it has become the most important factor in not choosing to buy anything from a business. It is the canary in the coal mine for future degrading quality.

kwanbix• 3 years ago

I wonder if all company owners just fire everyone and replace them with AI, who will pay for their products and services?

littlestymaar2• 3 years ago

They already tried by not raising inflation-adjusted wages for 50 years, and the solution to that problem was: lower the interest rate and push people to borrow to consume.

cdot2• 3 years ago

Inflation adjusted income has risen pretty consistently. The stat people sometimes cite for that is household income which has more to do with changes in average household size rather than changes in wages

cm20122• 3 years ago

This is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.

RugnirViking2• 3 years ago

in theory: customer support automation frees up support workers from focusing on repetetive customer issues to being able to devote more time to those difficult issues, providing better service at lower cost

in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.

cm20122• 3 years ago

Phone tree support is awful. AI of GPT4 level works because it is 100x better than that. And it will only get better in the next 5 years.

avery17• 3 years ago

We've never had a gpt powered customer support though. It will be fine tuned on all of their recorded customer interactions ever. I could see this being way better than typical customer support where you have minimally trained, low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script.

carlosjobim3• 3 years ago

In practice I see a lot of businesses murdering their competition because they offer better customer service.

rahimnathwani6• 3 years ago

  in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything?

I've used it to cancel orders, cancel subscriptions, change a broadband package, arrange a return/refund for faulty goods.

Do you prefer to talk to a human for things like this?

tempodox2• 3 years ago

How did this “improve” the “per-human output” of those who lost their jobs?

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation

Since 2013 this site has not been the optimistic hacker/startup forum Paul Graham envisioned in 2007. For a decade it has just been a higher quality version of r/technology but with the same reddit-tier doomposting.

frontalier• 3 years ago

What happened in 2013 for things to change?

rchaud2• 3 years ago

And here I am thinking that a place like HN can appreciate that Econ 101 axioms don't translate perfectly to the real world.

Moving call centre jobs to India and Philippines 20 years ago didn't exactly make those that lost their jobs more productive over the long run. The textbook says it should have, as American comparative advantage should be in higher value-added activities.

The only problem is that the textbook also thinks re-skilling is free, everyone has alternate options for employment, and the labour market re-balances instantly.

krsdcbl• 3 years ago

it could be good for humanity IF the societal and economic model for basic survival would evolve in tandem.

If we were moving towards UBI and made employment an optional thing then a world in which machines do most of the human work would be utopic indeed

But reality has evolved differently, and after the need for manual labour and craftsmanship got decimated in the last century, now software is pushing into the fields where all the people needing jobs who aren't needed in production ended up.

If we follow this train of thought, that we'd like to diminish the need for individual labour, without removing the individuals need to work as well, we'll just be enlarging the divide between affluence and utter poverty.

xjapappy3311• 3 years ago

I very much disagree with this idea of productivity being good in and of itself. I don't think that is controversial here. To the contrary, I think your view is controversial.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

This is just the start, just wait until most LLM can outperform junior devs on the quality of generated code.

moltar• 3 years ago

I think they already can if you prompt well.

reustle• 3 years ago

We are just about there, if not past. Check out "Copilot for Pull Requests", "GPT Engineer", and "StarCoder LLM".

Friends and I have all been working to experiment with these sorts of things locally, to reduce the cost to basically zero.

I am sure we can guess what 1-3 years from now starts to look like, as technical project managers and sr devs are able to harness many of these tools (see langchain) and just write english unit tests.

jgilias• 3 years ago

The value of a junior dev is not the code they manage to produce. It’s their potential to become mid and senior later on.

What I’m trying to say is that LLMs don’t change anything here. Juniors are not hired for the work they can produce when hired.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

To become a mid and senior one has to start as a junior.

The upcoming generation better learn how to start as junior architect.

micheljansen• 3 years ago

Especially because every senior dev alive was once a junior dev.

ronyfadel• 3 years ago

I’d be more worried about mid-level devs that will be replaced by a junior++ armed with an LLM.

somewhereoutth• 3 years ago

Might be waiting a long time. Just like self driving cars, the last 1% is the most crucial and the hardest.

Except of course LLM generated code is nowhere near the last 1%, and in any case very much misses what writing code is actually about - namely, communication with other humans.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

That is what architects and business analysts do, so at least those jobs are safe for the foresable future.

The offshoring raw coding jobs, those will be outsourced to machines instead.

tennisflyi2• 3 years ago

Oh no. I thought tech only took jobs away from “low skill” people, e.g., cashiers or baristas and let the smart retire early… I guess the days of pushing a couple emails with cushy AF perks are over.

This is sarcasm BTW (somewhat).

rightbyte3• 3 years ago

There has been automatic barista machines since ... a long time. Turns out a baristas job is not really to make coffee.

BigBalli• 3 years ago

I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged".

nvr219• 3 years ago

As a customer: because the quality of service I get from a robot is much worse than the quality of service I get from a human being, in general.

wussboy• 3 years ago

Agreed. I called because I need a human to fix my problem. If it could have been fixed on the website I would have fixed it there.

yreg5• 3 years ago

Have you as a customer interacted with LLM that replaced a human role?

I don't think experience with pre-LLM chatbots is relevant here.

indy5• 3 years ago

Exactly, almost everyone who reads Hacker News have built their careers on technological progress.

Outrage now that it's coming after their jobs just rings hollow.

krainboltgreene5• 3 years ago

I built careers on making labour easier, I want the result of that labour to benefit the workers, not the exceptionally short term vision of shareholders.

Just because you can't understand why this affects your future doesn't mean it's hollow outrage.

muskmusk7• 3 years ago

I agree :)

7-10 years ago people on this forum thought they were invincible. People who said said software work would be commoditized were ridiculed.

Rate of change is just fast and probably lots of people just thought that a career in tech was a free golden ticket for life. Now that it is threatened people are getting anxious and defensive.

The vast majority of bad things happening in the world are okay as long as they don't happen to "me". Living conditions in sub Saharan Africa are really poor, but noone cares. We are all hypocrites to some degree.

phpisthebest5• 3 years ago

First they said #LearnToCode when the robots came for the factory workers, for I am a programmer and my job is safe

Then they said #learntocode when the robots came for the cashier and bank teller, for I am a programmer and my job is safe

Now that the robot is learning to code it seem they no longer desire progress

emporas2• 3 years ago

New jobs are possible however.

Given the state of A.I. even today, which is not that advanced, we need one terabyte per day or per week for training purposes. Someone has to produce that data and combine human made data with machine generated data. Synthetic data like that will be fed into ML algorithms.

That simple process, in my calculations, will be the biggest industry on the planet by 2030. The data has to grow 1000x every three years or so. So this industry will end unemployment worldwide, for every person on the planet and also all ages.

krainboltgreene5• 3 years ago

Because people want to work and there's money to pay them to work and the "AI" shit is dramatically worse. This is a net negative for everyone except the shareholders and even then that's only in the short term! If you saw someone shooting up in an alley with a smile on their face, you wouldn't be upset with others who are concerned with that person's future. Why do you care here?

the_only_law4• 3 years ago

Why do you care here?

It’s a disingenuous question to stroke the ego of the GP and deride those “outraged”. Either that or GP is just dumb. If they were truly interested in why people are outraged, they simply could have read the numerous comments before theirs (regardless of whether they agree the concerns in those comments are valid or not, it would answer the stated question)

jarjoura4• 3 years ago

What is the response you expect from everyone?

Americans were replaced with off-shore call centers last decade. Now they're replaced with AI. Both are equally shitty because there's a very real human cost here. I certainly don't feel good about building technology that puts anyone out of a job like that. Maybe that person was working there as a means to pay for school to get a better job, and now has to find other work.

Meanwhile, the leadership of Shopify gets to horde more wealth making it also feel pretty greedy to me.

So I can see how, at least some significant share of people, would be "outraged" by that.

mike_hock2• 3 years ago

And you lose quality of service with each move like this. Generic call centers serving a myriad of companies are completely useless to the customer, just read off a script and can't fix anything. AI is essentially the same.

alluro24• 3 years ago

Exactly - I don't understand the argument of "this happened before to people worse off than you, and you are entitled if you complain about it now happening to more people (including you)".

Unless we somehow reform the whole society into a socioeconomic utopia in the next decade or so, what started happening now with AI has all the potential to speed up the wealth gap growth and push everyone else towards the gutter.

maxbond• 3 years ago

I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged".

I think once you've applied the label "outrage" it's very difficult to see what people's concerns are and why. It adds this moral component, where only some people are entitled to be outraged (eg the people you identified as having understandable reasons) and thus by implication everyone else is throwing an unnecessary tantrum. I think that actually obscures what's going on.

I think it's worth resisting applying the label of "outrage," and it becomes easier after that to hear people's concerns and evaluate their merits. Because they don't have to reach the artificial goalpost to justify outrage, they just have to be valid concerns.

malikNF• 3 years ago

Wonder if prompt injection is going to steal the crown from sql injection.

dpflan• 3 years ago

For sure. Or become a new entry point for sql injection. As it is conversational, maybe the combined attack could be called a "speak-ql injection".

throwaway737248• 3 years ago

I would love to see some sort of directory that helps me chose companies where I can talk to humans, not phone trees and robots. Would gladly pay a premium.

fifteen1506• 3 years ago

I thought they were all like family?

Seriously though, what are the mental implications of surprise layoffs?

You stop trusting everyone's word, specially when you're just a number? How does a structured capitalist society hold with this?

Or you just double-down on the false belief those fired deserved it?

the_only_law4• 3 years ago

I thought they were all like family?

Heh to be fair, I’ve seen family screw each other over plenty of times.

imafish• 3 years ago

From my experience with Shopify customer service, I would say firing them all sounds like a great idea.

Let’s free up some humans for other tasks. They weren’t performing the previous tasks that well anyway.

rglover2• 3 years ago

That's the fault of leadership, not the humans.

rglover2• 3 years ago

How I read all headlines like this now: "Shopify just opened themselves up to be less dominate (or non-existent) in the market."

The destruction of brands on the horizon is creating a ton of opportunity for new businesses to develop. One's that can only succeed if they reject the religion of "automate all the things with AI" and take a quality/human-first approach to running their business.

kromem• 3 years ago

Yep.

It isn't going to be in the next 12 or maybe even 24 months, but in the not too distant future any company that made significant downsizing in the early days of AI is going to find out the hard way that they effectively threw away a lot of their lead against competition.

The smart companies right now would be keeping headcount the same, provide their employees with access to AI and training on how to use it effectively to reduce their workload, and then set them towards further specialization with the new freed up workload.

The cost for the productivity that 100 human employees can bring is much harder for a new competitor to match than the cost of 100 AI employees. So if cash flow supports keeping 100 humans on staff, and instead you switch over to AI to try and impress shareholders in the short term, rather than finding ways to maximize the output of the 100 humans for long term growth, you're going to wake up closer to being unseated by companies with less technical and bureaucratic debt (and probably often with some of those same ex employees on staff).

23B1• 3 years ago

then set them towards further specialization with the new freed up workload

Or innovation. Imagine not hiring McKinsey or IDEO to 'innovent' new market opportunities but instead, y'know, listening to your frontline about what they think customers might want...

jarjoura4• 3 years ago

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it.

However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work.

If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it and it's going to be a very long recession where nobody will win.

Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have made it to the top will continue to horde all the profits.

yreg5• 3 years ago

The mean quality of life is sky high compared to 100 years ago and it is such thanks to the advancement made.

digdugdirk• 3 years ago

The mean quality of life is irrelevant if the mode quality of life is only a tenth of that.

almost_usual• 3 years ago

And as the Earth burns away and we choke on the smoke we rejoice as we have our AI entertainment and we can go quietly into the night.

rolandog• 3 years ago

The mean quality of life can be skewed by outliers. I wonder if there are median quality of life indicators with the box-diagram of Upper and Lower Fence values based on the Inter Quartile Range

jarjoura4• 3 years ago

Actually, economists are now saying that the 20th century was an anomaly in terms of QoL and we're reverting back to U shaped distribution of wealth.

It will be very interesting times when all that 20th century earned Baby Boomer wealth moves to the next generation and accelerates the shift even faster.

vbezhenar• 3 years ago

What about quality of life compared to 50 years ago? I guess it depends on country but I feel like my parents generation lived better life compared to mine.

tomrod• 3 years ago

Not sure, sounds like that is a baked measurement intended to superficially mollify people. Medicine and health costs more than ever. Inequality higher than ever. Sure, we can buy cheapish bread and occasional circuses, but is that a valid measure of life?

usednet2• 3 years ago

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

[flagged]

jstx1• 3 years ago

I don't think it will eliminate the vast majority of jobs, more likely that it will significantly reduce the demand for certain jobs in an uneven way. I guess some of this depends on the time horizon you're looking at too.

jarjoura4• 3 years ago

Sure, but I'm not really a believer that any government will have the political power to restructure the economy. At least nothing would actually change unless states utterly collapsed and there's loss of life.

I don't think AI is going to replace everything either. It will be a cheap knockoff replacement for a lot of decent low paying middle class jobs, enough to do real damage, but not catastrophic. We will be forced to adapt like we always do and the wealth disparity continues to widens like it has been.

I guess if anything, we'll make life so efficient that people will start to question if we need our life to be so efficient. There comes a point when you start having diminishing returns on all that efficiency. We'll still have the same problems we always do, with bad relationship breakups, or addiction, or whatever. AI will never fix those things.

So in my mind, the logical conclusion is just a march toward mediocrity and feeling handcuffed to whatever situation you were born into.

Joeri2• 3 years ago

Just because we can’t imagine the jobs that would exist in an AI future doesn’t mean they won’t be there. And there are many ways this thing plays out where we don’t get a world of cheap AI abundance where the AI provides without limit. If nothing else the copyright maffia will do its best to prevent that future from occurring.

bushbaba• 3 years ago

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs.

AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

jacquesm10• 3 years ago

There are many pathways to such a restructuring and not all of them are wide enough to accommodate 8 billion people.

solardev• 3 years ago

Barbarism usually wins. It always has so far.

labster• 3 years ago

I’ll bet one hundred dollars on barbarism. Seems like a sure thing.

polote• 3 years ago

The vast majority of jobs could be eliminated today without AI and still they are not, so we are very safe. Even with AI getting better and better we will be

coldtea2• 3 years ago

is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy

Yes, and basically a fundamental restructuring of the power relations in the economy.

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

socialized economy

Here in Denmark a significant fraction of the population (students, elderly, long-term unemployed) are already on some kind of pseudo basic income.

Why not just do basic income in this future "total AI automation" scenario? Why do so many people on the Internet think only radical socialist revolutions can solve all our problems?

cscurmudgeon• 3 years ago

In practice so far, socialized economy is barbarism.

But next time will be different due to .... magical AI god?

whateveracct• 3 years ago

It's not about efficiency it's about devaluing workers so you have more leverage over them.

BaseballPhysics• 3 years ago

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it.

The only way that'll happen is worker co-ops. The benefits of increased productivity always accrue to the owners, not the employees.

wahnfrieden3• 3 years ago

And somehow most people consider this wrong

theonlybutlet• 3 years ago

Not every innovation, for a long while it was linked to benefits but then I think the 1970's they started stripping away unions, worker rights and pay, hours etc. started becoming detached from productivity.

PheonixPharts• 3 years ago

Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value.

One of the ways that Marx posited capitalist extract surplus value is to have the increase in quality of life always lagging the increase in efficiency. Our quality of life does increase, but only if capitalists are able to increase greater surplus value from our labor than that quality of life increase accounts for.

don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it

Interestingly enough this is one of the major focuses of Capital vol III: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Marx argued that eventually the Capitalist pressure to increase efficiency through automation means that while production continues to be more efficient, precisely because of this the ratio of profit to capital expended decreases. For Marx this was the ultimate threat to Capitalism itself.

vba616• 3 years ago

Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value.

I don't understand the train of thought that lead to the sentence above. "Marx's Labor Theory of Value" is a well-known phrase, but its meaning is probably more precise for you than me.

Do you not think, broadly speaking, there is some economy of scale with longer hours (compared to 15/week), that gaining experience more quickly has some value, that overhead like shift handoffs or putting work aside for the next day becomes more significant the shorter the day/week is?

I'd also suggest it's plausible that automation changes the nature of work to increase the efficiency of long hours. The more education and thought a job requires, the longer it takes to "get up to speed" and to hand off work to other people.

dheera2• 3 years ago

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it.

What I'd personally really hope for is a future in which AI and robotics allow high quality food, housing, transportation, clothing, state-of-the-art medical care, and basic necessities to be available for free to everyone. Basically, a modest, comfortable, safe middle-class-quality life should be free and provided for by robots to everyone in the world.

Anything above that, one would have to work for. It would also likely be a world in which any work humans voluntarily do is interesting work. There might also be some kind of analog art renaissance.

ajsnigrutin2• 3 years ago

One tractor can do the work of tens of people easily, and in the last ~150-200 years, we've gone from a vast majority of people producing food to a tiny minority, while the rest can be social media managers and feng-shui specialist. One excell spreadsheet can do the work of a 100+ paper-based accountants, and that's even before a database and automation.

We could've stopped at tractors, lived the same lifestyle as before, but with 1-2 hours work per day (or even less), but we decided we wanted and needed more, and more is what we got.

CharlieDigital• 3 years ago

Key difference: productivity gains in agriculture made food not only more plentiful, but also cheaper.

We can say the same for the steam engine and transportation. It made it cheaper to move goods and people.

Question is whether advancements in AI translate to making some fundamental goods or services cheaper and more accessible.

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

Hot water, sewers, decent food, television and films, warm & damp-resistant housing, electric lights and much more and I'm glad of it. I remember living in places where hot water had to come from a kettle and the house was cold and in winter the damp rose nearly to the ceiling from the floor. And the food back then was expensive and pretty bad.

whack• 3 years ago

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work.

If you're content to live at the same quality-of-life that people had in 1923, you can certainly achieve that by doing half the amount of work. The cost of living that quality of life is dirt-cheap - median household real-income back then in today's dollars is less than $30k. The average person back then had a life expectancy of ~60, barely traveled long distances, had minimal electronic gadgets, and lived in houses that have none of today's modern amenities.

If you're content with that kind of lifestyle, you can easily achieve that by either working as a freelancer for 20 hours per week. Or by working a high-paying job, saving most of your money, and retiring in your 30s/40s.

Most people don't do this because ... they don't want to live like someone in 1923. Our own life expectations today are far higher, and hence, we push ourselves to work 40+ hours/week to meet them.

The risk of hyper-income-inequality is real. Fortunately we also live in a democracy. Billionaires like Murdoch will be able to exploit wedge issues like guns and LGBT for only so long. Sooner or later a critical mass of people will demand sharply more progressive tax rates, and even things like UBI, if too much wealth is concentrated in too few hands.

ChumpGPT4• 3 years ago

These job cuts, according to the employee, were driven not merely by a CEO’s misguided “bet,” but rather a shift towards replacing full-time employees with cheaper contract labor

Good Lord, how much cheaper can you get than Canadian labor? They already get paid poorly and earn about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts. I guess the lack of jobs is why they can pay so little, explains why so many Canadians flee to the US first chance they get.

boringg• 3 years ago

I think you need some numbers there. Pretty sure it isnt 50% ;)

ChumpGPT4• 3 years ago

Well to be honest, our company hired a bright kid out of Waterloo who couldn't find work in Canada for over a year ( Nanotechnologies ). Or at least work that paid more than their minimum wage. Super sharp and is doing great in Material Sciences. If a kid like that can't find work in Toronto, Ontario, I have no idea what the hell is going on up there.

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

Or the best of both worlds: American employment while living in Canada.

But yeah, I’ve worked for ridiculously cheap companies before here. Some who are well-known to conspire with local competitors not to poach each other’s employees to keep salaries down.

mvncleaninst4• 3 years ago

Or the best of both worlds: American employment while living in Canada.

But then wouldn't you get double dipped on taxes?

wahnfrieden3• 3 years ago

Canadian employers are used to far cheaper local labor that got expensive (to them) in the last half decade. The wages Canadians tolerated even for employers making foreign market money is embarrassing. Canadians outside Montreal seem even less organized than Americans, in tech

CoastalCoder• 3 years ago

Funny, just yesterday I watched a Corner Gas episode about bringing a call center to Dog River.

raincole2• 3 years ago

about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts

And how much relative to their Indian counterparts? This thread is about customer service.

topynate2• 3 years ago

What's the disclosure that breaks the NDA this tweeter is supposed to have had? I searched every quote in the thread and they're all already public. Tweet #11 shows as "unavailable", but the archived version at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1681673980682305541.html refers to a "Code Yellow" that did leak, but in March: https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-issues-code-yellow-f...

I tried to find people complaining about being left on hold by shopify support and got nothing on twitter. All the complaints are about the account payments being on hold, i.e. shitty but par for the course risk/compliance issues.

The remaining thread content is the sort of inference and speculation that anyone with the right political bent could have made, given a few hours to research the company.

akira2501• 3 years ago

I see these like Blake Lemoine. Obvious propaganda meant to push the corporate message harder. That message being: "Labor is being devalued. Expect to earn less." The very specific reach and targeting of these articles is a good hint here, I think.

If these "chat bots" were actually capable of what is claimed, none of this would be necessary, and no NDAs would need to be "broken" for the world to know about it.

It's like imagining a Ford factory worker in 1907 breaking an NDA to tell us all "cars are coming."

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

I went through the same exercise as you, I carefully read the thread for any information that could be under NDA or even evidence that the thread author even worked for Shopify and found nothing credible. The author does claim to be an employee but all of the supposed inside information is either publicly available or so vague and unsupported I can't take it seriously. This is not a credible piece.

kaonashi• 3 years ago

There were a couple of deleted tweets in the original thread.

topynate2• 3 years ago

Oh, what did they say?

rvz2• 3 years ago

Like I said before, less employees and more with less. [0]

The ones who are journalists, writers or artists are currently getting destroyed by AI. Engineers are next on the menu and will be affected. Henceforth, as LLMs get better at code, there would be less engineers and jobs created for both juniors and seniors. It does not matter.

AI doesn't complain, get sick, care, protest or give a damn. It is coming and it's not going to stop at all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878482

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

I really, really wanna try laying off CEOs and replacing management with AI- let’s see how that goes.

j45• 3 years ago

Not referring to Shopify specifically, it's surprising to see startups who are able to increase their operational capacity with their existing workforce by using AI... and instead of instantly having freely trained and ready to go employees to grow the business, instead work to shrink their workforce, instead of putting them to work on the new problems their eventual disruptors will solve.

Automation has always been a scary threat for losing jobs for the last 30-40 years. While LLM might be different, there's almost certainly even more in the next 5-10 years we haven't imagined yet.

rightbyte3• 3 years ago

It's probably enshitification. Short term higher profits.

Fire support staff and it tales time for the effects to manifest. Could be either internal support like secretaries, technical writers or external support, like, customer support.

sharts• 3 years ago

Anyone that has ever interacted with a customer service chat bot knows this is pretty stupid.

I’m not sure why people (esp. those in the tech community) think we have evolved the technology in any meaningful enough way to replace people yet.

How do we know this? Those same people would be against AI chatbots replacing their children’s teachers.

mupuff12342• 3 years ago

It doesn't have to replace all people, just good enough to replace the more common cases.

lucb1e• 3 years ago

Or frustrate people enough so they go and figure out the solution by themselves, or not file that complaint, or whatever it was they wanted to do but did not actually necessarily need assistance with, while giving the semblance of trying to be helpful

Not saying this is a good thing, but then I'm not an upper manager with dollar symbols in their eyes

bobthepanda3• 3 years ago

In practice, places will ignore that it doesn't work for everything, cut off any sort of physical call centers, and then people just end up fed up with their services.

I absolutely hate places aggressively adopting chatbots and phone bots.

m463• 3 years ago

I have seen that businesses over the last couple of years HAVE replaced some or all people.

With amazon, I used to be able to email someone. Now I cannot. I have been forced to use a chat session. The chat session is partially automated. It could be completely automated, and I don't know if people will always be able to tell the difference.

Tesla basically forces all service calls to the tesla mobile app.

Getting a hotel is similar. web pages and phone calls are a minefield of dark patterns, where the customer is worn down and worn out by automated systems.

There are exceptions, but it is a supreme battle of will and patience.

smeej4• 3 years ago

Anyone who has ever interacted with a tier 1 customer service agent in an outsourced support farm knows the difference between that and a chat bot is negligible.

True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be.

ke88y2• 3 years ago

True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be.

I disagree. Those agents are useless by design. They exist to do nothing in most cases, but none-the-less need to exist because of the regulatory + political + market backlash if they didn't.

Chatbots don't fulfill the core requirement of being able to tell regulators and juries that you did, in fact, have an employee look into the customer's issue.

avodonosov• 3 years ago

I haven't, but saw this in movies: https://youtu.be/BqnFnWSYzaQ

johnnyworker2• 3 years ago

I once worked in a call center as tech support for an ISP that also did phone and TV. One day a women called about her continuing problems with the phone service crapping out. She had been in contact with us for months, and at some point she said she got the feeling people didn't take her seriously because she was a woman. She was a widow who was taking care of her 40 year old heavily disabled son, where any second there could be a life-threatening emergency requiring her to call an ambulance.

I took down all the details, and, briefly detailed that she tried everything she could on her end. All previous tickets were closed with "seems fine", basically. Which ticked me off, but I tried to be somewhat professional about it, other than spending more time on that than my employer would have liked. But then I also did what was totally verboten, I wrote down her customer number, and a week later I checked in on her account again. As I expected, the ticket got closed again. So I did the SUPER MEGA verboten thing (because we got paid for inbound calls), I called her, asked if the problem still persists, it did. So I went through all the details again and wrote a super detailed ticket including the medical situation, that she had replaced the phone and everything else she did. I knew better than to be full on snarky, but I also did not hold back. I was fuming. 1-2 weeks later I checked again, it was solved, I called her, she said a tech had shown up and been super nice and helpful. I don't recall what the issue was, but they fixed it. I was so proud, and I couldn't even tell anyone about it.

The only reason I did that was that I figured if they fire me from this minimum wage job I can get just another minimum wage job -- but I would not be able to live with myself to just go by the script in such cases. And I had plenty discussions with team and project lead about my average handling time, you bet. But they never fired me -- because I did solve problems, and with things that were standard procedure I was quick, I ended up quitting.

A bot cannot do that, be disobedient. Too few people can even do that.

whimsicalism• 3 years ago

I strongly disagree, I don't care how terrible their english is or whatever - having a live person is almost always infinitely better compared to the bot.

gnicholas3• 3 years ago

I've tried Amazon's chat function and it's put me in an infinite loop on several occasions. I don't know why they didn't have an agent available (it was business hours). I was surprised that a company with Amazon's resources doesn't have a better handle on this, until I remembered that this is the company that doesn't let you say the reason is "wrong size" when returning clothing items. They're not stupid — they're trying to make things difficult for you.

sahila• 3 years ago

Amazon support is amazing, there’s an option for chat or a receiving a call and always pick call.

madog• 3 years ago

They also do not have an option to report an item they sent as counterfeit/fake which is amusing given how prevalent it is with their mixed bins between 3rd party items and legitimate goods.

The closest related option is "not as described" or something like that.

Even if you contact support chat that is the only option available to the advisers too.

So it's actually impossible to report something as counterfeit.

I always imagine some C-level exec looking at the stats and congratulating themselves on having no counterfeit items reported. Well done Bob! We did it again.

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

a company with Amazon's resources

How do you think they got to be that big?

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

I'm assuming that you're looking at it from the point of view of someone who only contacts tech support when human intervention is actually required.

And honestly, probably 90% of people are like this.

In terms of who actually takes up the majority of the support reps' time, however, is the 10% of people who are bored, lonely, genuinely mentally handicapped, whingers, and people who get really angry about some bizarre inane detail.

I'd honestly love it if companies weren't so allergic to offering good, paid support or just dropping troublesome customers so that the rest of us could get through quickly.

addisonl• 3 years ago

probably 90% of people are like this

I think you’re overestimating the average person.

tmpz222• 3 years ago

is the 10% of people who are bored, *lonely*

I heard this is especially prevalent for suicide hotlines - because of the strict requirements to take and stay on such calls they have to put up with a lot of sexual harassment and its more or less swept under the rug by supervisors.

tempestn• 3 years ago

I don't know if that's going to be the case for long. GPT-4 is far more useful than almost any customer support rep I've dealt with.

Der_Einzige• 3 years ago

Nope, the same people would recognize that AI chatbots are the best thing coming for education in a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

svieira• 3 years ago

IFF they produce facts and only facts they would STILL fail at their goal, because education is the transmission of virtue and machines cannot be virtuous.

As a lossy interface on top of the global library that is the internet LLMs do just fine.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

esp. those in the tech community

It’s a vocal minority of the tech community that shares that opinion. The silent majority knows it’s just fud marketing. Personally when i encounter a customer support chat bit i immediately assume low quality services and products. When i meet a software engineer blown away but chatgpt’s “coding skills” i assume that engineer is not particularly competent. There are valid use cases and the tech has obviously got potential but we are not there yet.

jiggawatts4• 3 years ago

Few people are "blown away" by the absolute skill level of ChatGPT. It's more that there exists an AI that can do this at all. This just wasn't a thing three years ago, and the first truly capable version (GPT 4) only become publicly accessible this year.

Some things I've seen GPT 4 do is "as good as human", often better than average. For example, spotting bugs or reverse-engineering code and then writing doc comments for it.

The real power is not in having an AI as smart as you, it's having something "good enough" that can be deployed cheaply at scale to do rote, menial tasks. Review code, check for vulnerabilities, fix spelling mistakes in comments, etc...

ksec• 3 years ago

The silent majority

I only wish this is true. Because so far "The silent majority" are no where to be seen in many other subjects.

bpm1402• 3 years ago

Every time I am forced to endure shitty hold music for an extended period of time, my thought is, “let the CEO sit on hold for ten minutes and see how fast this gets changed.”

What this means is I still want to believe that crap customer experience is due to a disconnected CEO, when we all know it’s a feature, not a bug.

ChildOfChaos• 3 years ago

"The drastic changes in Shopify’s approach have led both employees and customers to question the company’s integrity and commitment to its original mission of empowering small businesses. Many see the company as straying from its roots, becoming more akin to the corporate giants it once aimed to oppose."

This seems to me like most start ups or companies as they grow and get big, they start out by disrupting and fighting the way things are done, mixing up the space and taking on 'the man', then they become that which they opposed and then pivot to act in the same way, until someone new comes along and the cycle repeats.

tennisflyi2• 3 years ago

Dark Knigt meme, yeah.

WhackyIdeas2• 3 years ago

At least their chatbots might be better than the ‘humans’ we spoke to a few years ago at Shopify.

Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears.

We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!).

Long story short: these big e-shop hosters seem to share something in common - Twattery.

echelon• 3 years ago

These are businesses at scale. They're not going to hold your hand. Be reasonable.

WhackyIdeas2• 3 years ago

Hold hand? Seems you are being quite presumptuous about what the contact was regarding!

zht• 3 years ago

I always wonder why people simp for large companies.

It’s not as if Shopify is some poor, sad, 3-person operation that’s barely scraping by.

Their last quarter net income was 83m on 1.6B revenue. They can afford less shitty customer support

FridgeSeal• 3 years ago

That might be true, but is it what we want and should tolerate?

We should be holding organisations up to high standards, they won’t always meet them, but better to get them to at least try rather then throwing our hands up and letting them get away with testing people like dirt.

donmcronald3• 3 years ago

It’s $300 USD / year for a business plan at wordpress.com. They shouldn’t have unstaffed chat an an email response time measured in days, which I’ve recently experienced.

I would say the sites I’ve dealt with are using <$50 / year of compute. The $250 extra is considered ok because it’s viewed as paying to have something backed by, and supported by, a commercial organization.

If there’s zero support, which seems to be a general trend lately, why not self host for a fraction of the cost? At least that way I’d have the access needed to fix my own problems.

prayze• 3 years ago

I have to echo your same sentiments. I swore off them a year ago when I provided support with step-by-step screenshots of how to produce my exact error, and even the error itself. The support told me it wasn't an issue and closed it.

steve_adams_862• 3 years ago

A friend and coworker of mine went to work for shopify in support. He was the engine behind two amazing support teams at the companies we worked at, and he was so excited and optimistic to take on that task at shopify.

He’s so over it now. He hasn’t been affected by layoffs but deeply wished he was, because it would give him the financial mobility to make a change. He has expressed that the support they offer has deteriorated dramatically since he started, and I’ve wondered how much that’s his own dissatisfaction vs reality… But what I’m reading suggests he’s probably on point. It seems pretty bad.

worik• 3 years ago

This is another case of "enshitification".

CrazyCatDog• 3 years ago

Who was calling customer service to begin with? I’m not a user, but I suspect there’s more margin with customers who are large enough to have a firm or internal team handle Shopify for them, and that’s not the type of person (one would hope) that would call customer service unless there was an account-level issue. If that’s the case, then they are simply evolving away from the mom-and-pop priority that made it so popular to begin with :(

boringuser2• 3 years ago

CSR is kinda done.

AI is just better at this task to a shocking degree

My company is talking about this as well, and they're right to do so.

Now, massive layoffs during a period of stagflation, depressed wages and overpriced necessities like housing, transportation, and healthcare is really, really bad, so anyone comparing this to other technologies in a hopeful manner is way off the mark.

That being said, you can't really predict the future, and ruminating on potential negatives is always bad.

dorkwood2• 3 years ago

One great thing that came from the NFT gold-rush was that it exposed a lot of well-known figures as grifters -- Tobi, the Shopify CEO, being one of them. After that ordeal, this kind of thing doesn't surprise me in the least.

steve_adams_862• 3 years ago

What kind of grifting did he do? The only crypto related information about him that’s readily available is that he joined the Coinbase board.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

Tobi was part of the group which changed their name on twitter to name.eth. As soon as I saw his name as tobi.eth I added him to my block list of all the others who also changed their names as it was a very easy signal for me to know which people do not have original thinking and are grifters.

dreamcompiler• 3 years ago

After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away."

This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same web page that you are, with no more ability to change anything than you have. And it will take 30 minutes to get one of them on the phone because "we are experiencing unusually high call volume" which translates as "the new vice president fired 10 more customer service agents to make his numbers look good."

If robots are involved it means "the new vice president wanted his numbers to look even better."

Companies have apparently run the numbers and decided it is cheaper to effectively ignore and dissuade dissatisfied customers than to try to resolve their issues. And since most companies insist on binding arbitration now, they're not even worried about class-action lawsuits.

LoganDark3• 3 years ago

After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away."

Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.

jq-r3• 3 years ago

Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support.

TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it.

The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having.

Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload?

Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc

All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.

MichaelZuo• 3 years ago

This is too cynical. For serious B2B customer service, and higher end B2C businesses, they are genuinely there to make sure every last inquiry is resolved to satisfaction.

Of course that's because they don't charge a fixed rate, usually a pricier variable rate.

ravenstine• 3 years ago

Given how The Google seems to still set the standard for everything, should this be new information to us?

moomoo11• 3 years ago

The goal is to sell.

Just like how people go nuts over “insane” MRR/ARR while fueling unsustainable enterprises. I guess it’s one way to wash money.

martin84122• 3 years ago

All you need to do is to speak the magic codeword, charge back.

gnicholas3• 3 years ago

IME big companies have pretty solid procedures for battling these, and in some cases for punishing people who do this. IIRC, people have lost FB or Google accounts over valid chargebacks.

generj• 3 years ago

If they are in a consolidated market they will just tell you to go ahead and chargeback…they’ll deny list you and make you pay a big fee when yo I get tired of their (lack of) competitors and come crawling back.

fragmede6• 3 years ago

And then you can't use Uber, or Doordash, or Instacart. It works for single transaction merchants, but for platforms that having become critical to functioning in today's modern society, it's unfortunately not the magic password.

quikoa• 3 years ago

Perhaps a small claims court would be better. Large companies really hate those because they have to send an actual person and they might lose.

rainbowzootsuit• 3 years ago

I think you misspelled "shibboleet."

sometimes_all• 3 years ago

When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could.

Good customer service inspires loyalty to a company in a way discounts/advertising cannot. Their topline might not be the best, but they'll never go out of business.

mieubrisse• 3 years ago

I've had this experience with Ally bank. Their SMS-only 2FA, lack of international wire transfers, and compete failure to work with Plaid drive me insane, but I'm still using them because I get a kind, helpful human every time I call.

speleding2• 3 years ago

As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace.

For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose issues make them fall outside the golden path of standard procedures: an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question, if you add up all cost associated from the employees involved, obliterating any margin from that customer. I doubt that AI will change this much. So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. The best you can hope for is that someone will create a ticket that someone else will look at at some point if a lot of similar tickets accumulate.

inertiatic• 3 years ago

an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question

How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be?

So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you.

How is it a question of intellect? Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action (untick a box somewhere, offer a refund, whatever).

And how would that be profitable long term? Just by virtue of the fact that in a market with actual competition, leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable.

fatnoah• 3 years ago

"I've lost my password"

IMHO, this is the main reason L1 support "sucks" so much. Having been a support guy in a previous life, nothing feels worse than skipping the annoying trivial question (e.g did you install the software after diwnloading it?) only to find out after 25 minutes of debugging that they, in fact, did not actually install the software. That particular call started with "all I see are codes" as the opening line. Had I asked if they'd installed the web application on their server instead of extracting random .js and .aspx files and double-clicking on them in Explorer, I could have saved everyone a lot of time.

nonstopdev• 3 years ago

I’ve been in the contact center consulting space for years and unfortunately, some industries just know there aren’t many alternatives or the effort to move somewhere is so high they really don’t need to strive to make the customer feel special or welcome.

Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them.

Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan.

The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.

lynchdt• 3 years ago

I mostly agree with this. If you observe the KPI set used to run support teams, especially with large inbound you will see NPS used as a proxy for quality of resolution but folks mostly don’t respond to those prompts.

More interesting to support team managers are things like deflection rate (didn’t get to an agent) involvement rate (needed an agent) and eventually resolution rate (resolved issue). The last one in the absence of feedback is only a very weak proxy for a resolved issue.

If you consider customer support a cost center, you can guess how managers would optimize these numbers.

I don’t necessarily think there is much wrong with this - having a good product with excellent design, build and proactive support (docs, manuals, walkthroughs, proactive comms) - is likely very good for both customers and the business serving them.

DangitBobby2• 3 years ago

Can't wait for their stock price to go up after this leak.

thdespou• 3 years ago

If it's true I see that as a prime example of Ruthless Capitalism. It only serves to make businesses profit.

Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

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