Thread regarding Shell Oil layoffs

Shell Engineers working with functional support teams

For the Shell Engineers, if you teamed up with staff from the various different functional support teams in US/CA/NL/UK (average total comp: $175k-$200k) for a project and you found out 80% of the work (Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Deployment, Maintenance) was completed by AI, how would you want Shell leadership to respond?

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| 1485 views | | 7 replies (last July 26) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1k1193hzg

7 replies (most recent on top)

@f1 That is fair. Let's see how the second part of the statement below plays out over the next 2 years.

Whether Google expects that 10% number to keep increasing, Pichai didn't say. However, he said he expects agentic capabilities — where AI can take actions and make decisions more autonomously — will unlock the "next big wave".

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Post ID: @f5+1k1193hzg

@ez+1k1193hzg

to be brutally honest, it’s not clear to me that you followed the logic of my post as opposed to seeing the words “google” and “ai” and immediately dismissing it with your own preconceived notions

my posts says coders are 10% more productive, not the whole company.

this is why it’s so hard to coordinate work around the clock with bangalore like the LT hopes, they can’t even interpret longer paragraphs.

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Post ID: @f1+1k1193hzg

@et Google is not a great example because they have the cannibalism issue with AI where it will displace their largest revenue generator which is search, so we don't really know if they are implementing AI as aggressively as other companies will. What happens when Google users are satisfied with the AI overview answer at the top of a Google search and don't bother clicking on any links? On the other hand, many companies like Shell can use AI to offload a lot of the work (Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Deployment, Maintenance) their corporate staff was doing with less people in high cost countries like the US. You're correct that Shell is really comfortable with outsourcing to India since they have been doing it for years, so that will continue. But you're discounting the impact AI will have on white collar work as AI systems become more reliable with AI agents, orchestration, continuous monitoring, and self improvement.

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Post ID: @ez+1k1193hzg

@e3+1k1193hzg

google said their coders are only 10% more productive. that’s right from the CEO.

it has become increasingly clear to me that people have no idea what a programmer’s job is. most of the time spent is on determining the right thing to build and the constraints, not execution.

if coders are only + 10% with ai at freaking google, what are the gains to be had in jobs that are mostly talking, excel, and emails. maybe some saas. the answer is - miniscule.

keep in mind that internet only boosted GDP 1% per year over the expected norm. AI company CEOs are claiming the GDP impact will be in the tens to hundreds of percentage points.

it’s really obvious that the leadership and many laymen are vastly overestimating the impact. feel free to keep living your lives as normal besides ask AI to make your emails and VB macros. we’re all gonna be fine.

india is a much bigger threat to us jobs at shell.

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Post ID: @et+1k1193hzg

The capabilities of "AI" that we all are constantly hearing about are vastly overstated and over-hyped. Many believe it will be transformational for the business (and functions), but that is mostly copium because they lack any other ideas.

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Post ID: @e3+1k1193hzg

Shell leadership should resign en masse. Because AI can replace Shell leadership too. All that human leadership in Shell doing is, organizing couple of web casts, initiating layoffs, sending messages to employees preaching how to be ethical and productive while leadership themselves are wasting billions of dollars in bad timing of asset sales, in production inefficiency, by not spotting a bad project execution early enough, giving away millions of Shell shareholder money to third parties in turn receiving kick backs. To do this, leadership is receiving millions of dollars of compensation. With AI replacing leadership millions of dollars can be saved as web casts, messages and preaching can be done by AI as well.

Despite hype about cost savings, the Shell stock price is still at the same price where it was years ago. Because, the situation on the ground in terms of running the company in a corrupt manner is same.

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Post ID: @ch+1k1193hzg

Bonuses all around, that is a really significant achievement! They should have this and the next several projects all done in a shorted time period.

I presume that a TA1 and TA0 discipline leads reviewed and approved of the methodology and the line management has approved the accuracy and correctness of the calculations. Funny thing is that they have to do industry standard method... using AI is not industry standard. If there is any problem with it, someone is hurt, a drop of oil falls into the water, or there is a hardship to someone, then not doing it the standard way opened up the gates of He-l for lawyers and He-l spawn to come suing for EVERYTHING! (muh Ha Ha! That is supposed to be an insidious laugh.) Prove it meets or exceeds industry standard so we can back it up and do it again. Remember peoples lives could be at stake.

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Post ID: @ab+1k1193hzg

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