??? @ snek @lemmy.world

"Once you've been to Gaza, you'll never stop wanting to beat Benjamin Netan

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I would really appreciate it if anyone could share some video or article or something that explains the relation between stocks and layoffs.

Simple job + having ton of examples of it already + it’s just another case of automation taking jobs that has been a thing for centuries + predictions from 4 years ago that automation would take away one third of jobs by the end of the decade and so on.

Okay, thanks. I think I understand your opinion better now.

The number doesn’t really matter if they’re fine with just achieving the same result with less workers (less money). Customer care especially in English is already dogshit so AI achieving dogshit results is not hard to believe.

I guess we disagree here. If the number doesn't matter, then they could just make it all up and move on. Seems like Klarna had no real number to share anyway, and depend on people believing that "it's easy for AI to take over any such job".

It’s customer care we’re talking about. Chatbots have already replaced a lot of it.

Yeah, but only to its detriment. Tricky problems go unsolved and chatbots are used by companies to create a wall between themselves and their clients. Revolut is one example that comes to mind. If customers cannot ever even reach a human being to tell them what's going on, then there's no problem!

I suspect Klarna is doing a similar thing. I also suspect that the worker unions in Sweden will not be satisfied with this reason for layoffs. Not sure if these layoffs are taking place globally or in Europe.

Hmmm, okay, but let's take this one step further, what makes you believe that an AI can replace 700 customer care agents?

Yeah, I can see that happening. I’m honestly not sure why you are having such hard time with this.

I have skepticism about all large companies, especially having worked for many, and especially having seen how far they will go with lies to lay people off. Klarna lays off hundreds of employees as a frequent occurrence.

In my opinion, both as an ML professional and as a chatbot professional who has built such systems or finetuned them for such tasks, it's extremely unlikely that chatbots would be able to replace 700 employees unless those employees were just doing simple zombie tasks.

The only sentence we get from Klarna in the article is this:

with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents. Klarna

But nothing to elaborate. What was the satisfaction rating prior? No idea. So excuse my doubt when I don't want to believe a large company that lives to make money.

The idea of AI fully replacing a large workforce seems to be a bunch of BS driven forth by big companies like Klarna. Others in the field seem to be more careful about what AI can "help in" vs "replace". Have they A/B tested this? What is their KPI? Can we trust that KPI?

You’ve been the only one talking about trust.

I invite you to read the rest of the comments under the thread. I think you're wrong.

Easy to believe them when the claim itself is easy to believe and they’d be the ones to have those metrics. So you take the easy to believe claim (1) and you take them being in the position to have those metrics (another 1, but let’s call it 2 to differentiate) so simple 1+2.

Ummm, sorry but how is this an explanation?

"Why are they easy to believe?".... "Oh, it's just not very hard to believe, they have the metrics, they said so! 1+1!"

It's easy to believe because they are a big company and big companies have metrics?

But, what about the trust part? How does that make you trust them? What part of that is "enough" evidence for you to rationalize that they have a good motivation for laying off 700 people?

I just explained why their claim isn’t hard to believe. You even quoted it??

Sorry, let's pretend I'm a total idiot, could you quote it for me?

In high-school and university it always disappointed me that Palestinians didn't have enough representation and a platform in global media. During this war on Gazans, I've seen every conceivable human rights organization involved criticize Israel and report on its crimes. I've seen the CNN write detailed investigate reports about the victims of the Israeli terror state. I've seen world leaders demand a ceasefire... and I thought to myself, "surely this time things are better! we are in the media, countries support us (sometimes as people, sometimes as governments, sometimes as both)... now we have all these amazing Palestinian voices speaking on television and in university lectures and media and film festivals... surely this time things will change."

But no, it turned out to worse than the Nakba. 🙂 Turns out lack of representation and media coverage wasn't the only issue plaguing Palestinians.

So tell me, what is it that makes Palestinians so unimportant in the eyes of Biden? So unworthy of human rights?

Reminds me of that into to that song by DAM (YT, Piped, lyrics in English):

وين ما اروح باشوف حدود ساجنه الأنسانيه

ليه أطفال العالم حره وأنا ما الي حريه ؟

"Wherever I look, I see borders that jail humanity. Why are all the children of the world free but there is no freedom for me?"

Waiting for the average Zionism defender saying:

• That's just a report!!!
• You've clearly been tricked since Hamas told them to go stand there!!!
• The IDF were not even there, okay? Didn't you hear their side of the story?
• Probably Hamas members were there, surrounding themselves by innocent civilian zombies who clearly have no free will and just do as Hamas tells them even when they are about to lose all 6 children of theirs.

You don’t think a big company like Klarna has metrics to follow the efficiency of their workers? Even small businesses where I live that and every single big corporation. What makes you think Klarna would be different?

I never said they have no KPIs. What I said is their KPIs are likely broken, just like almost every other large company in existence.

You misunderstood. I said try to make most money out of the resources, so efficiency. That’s what we’re talking about…

I think you're the one who misunderstood. So for reference again, I am talking about this: about the belief that Klarna has sufficiently motivated this decision to lay these people off and actually has good KPIs that measure the performance, specifically that of customer care agents…

I don't see why or how I would want to discuss that a company is an entity that makes money through products from resources... think that'd be a bit too basic, no?

Lol.

?

It’s not very hard to believe what they’re saying here and they’d be the ones to have those metrics. So simple 1+1.

But can you explain what makes you trust them? What gives a company like Klarna a high trust ratio in your eyes? They don't seem to have provided those metrics in any way, just spelling it out in words. So how can we trust them?

It’s not very hard to believe what they’re saying here

Maybe not for you, but the rest of us are skeptics and would like to know what exactly makes this easy for you to believe. Thanks for explaining in advance.

It’s not blind trust to think companies probably try to make the most money out of the available resources. It’s sorta what they do

Okay, just to be clear here, we're talking about the belief that Klarna has sufficiently motivated this decision to lay these people off and actually has good KPIs that measure the performance, specifically that of customer care agents... not that companies make money with resrouces.

Usually people with this kind of opinion like yours maybe haven't experienced work at a large company or maybe don't understand that office politics are alive and kicking. But I'd still like to hear why... Let me ask you, what makes you think Klarna is being honest about their measurements?

I'm sure your blind trust in Klarna is totally reasonable.

700 people deserve some kind of study at least before their livelihood is cut off.

So "customer service" (the bastard child of huge companies and low wages) is actually just a really bad product to start with, and now Klarna has just replaced it with something that functions just as bad? Yeah I think that makes sense.

Preserving democracy in the Middle East = Indiscriminate bombing of civilian families

Maybe killing you would save 100,000,000 lives in the future. Does that make it acceptable then?

Wordpress? What the fuck.

So now we have to explicitly go into each ticket and mark it as dissatisfied, since they don’t take into account how long the ticket was open, how many meetings had to be called over the ticket, etc. just whether it was closed without clicking the extra “we’re dissatisfied” button

That sucks. A rigid KPI that is never open to change and only made to show some BLING in meetings, it will always lead to failure.

And when the KPIs are bad, they blame us. We had lots of failures in streaming videos on our platform and it was growing across a range of mobile OSs and devices, and they would just say, very sternly, "We need you to deliver better results!". Meanwhile, they had us do a huge migration and rebuild the entire UI across all devices all while maintaining the legacy systems that are sometimes riddled with bugs. Fucking idiots! They shouldn't expect X performance with Y² the number of tasks (I would have said 2*Y if it was "double" the work... it was more like being on steroids, it was Y² the work, everyone was burnt out, people barely took the summer off). We met those KPIs by a margin previously, and we're not about to meet them now unless they hire more staff or give us more time until their new UI launch. Spoiler: the launch did not go well.

🤣 yeah true

I feel like customer service has been on a decline for the past 10 years or so. I owe it to being underpaid and treated badly as an employee. .

@Lmaydev@programming.dev exactly this in the comment above!

When Klarna says "customer ratings of the AI are the same as for human workers", what on earth do they mean?

It also contradicts the experiences people have been having with GPT powered chatbots recently. A model that takes a few prompts to start hallucinating is better than a living breathing human being? Really? I'd be curious to give it a try.

I worked for large companies before, and I even interviewed for Klarna (they have been hiring lots recently, maybe for different tasks/positions), and they always lie. Always.

At one company I worked at before, some KPI was calculated incorrectly and had been for years. When we informed the relevant person of this, they got very defensive and refused to change it. Only our team knew the calculation was total BS. It was become success/money was at stake for him. This person continued to send the fake KPI calculations to everyone every week.

I got laid off from the company where I work with absolutely ZERO motivation as to how me being laid off would increase "efficiency" (even though that was their claim --- they are slimming down the company to increase "efficiency"). The company ignored every piece of evidence I provided to show that me and my team are completely overworked and that they should probably cut jobs elsewhere if they don't want all of our data ingestions and ML models to collapse.

I don't think companies have enough to motivate such a layoff if they can't solidify their numbers and make then transparent to the public. I'd certainly like to see the union fights Klarna will have with the Swedish worker unions now. I have never been to such a meeting though, but I've provided motivation for the union to use to oppose layoffs in such meetings - my understanding is that it's a bit of a shit show.

with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents.

Citation needed? We're going to take Klarna's word for it?