221–230 of 414 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. A company that is cutting staff is creatively bankrupt and has clearly no idea where to spend effort in anything new. I wouldn't invest in a company that is reducing headcount in this manner.
You’ll be holding a lot of your investments outside of stocks for a while, then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easier to not care about anything if you decide your only principle is "the free association of people". It's one of the easiest ways to do whatever you want in your life and not give a damn about the impact it has on others without having to feel any guilt or cognitive dissonance.
Nothing wrong with free association of people though. Unionization is also an example of free association: people coming together to maximize leverage and minimize power imbalances.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. True...contrast Microsoft's decision to take an $800m hit in letting go 10,000 employees with its earnings report showing $16.4b operating profits.
"I saved the company $800M, I should get 10% of that"?
Only at the executive tier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> their job is to increase value for investors Is their job to increase it in the short or the long term? These “I know we’ve been doing great for 3 years, but the past 3 months haven’t been so hot, so we’re going to cut jobs.” Messages seem incredibly shortsighted.
Public companies have an incentive to focus on the short term (quarterly reports). This really makes a difference in management behavior. Bill Clinton and Warren Buffett have both talked about this, and presented regulatory approaches to fixing it, but here we are.
Why?
Incentivized by whom? This is choice they make. See the OP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.
Because it seems like a majority of engineers believe themseles to be above-average, and believe that any kind of collective action would reduce all engineering pay to the lowest common denominator. Additionally in the USA there seems to be a strong belief that union leaders only care about themselves while the company execs have the worker’s best interests at heart. (I’m not sure where any of these ideas come from)
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell. If it's not sarcasm, here's some articles about the Teamsters union.
- https://allthatsinteresting.com/jimmy-hoffa
- https://themobmuseum.org/blog/feds-agree-to-reduce-oversight...
- https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-10-28-850313...
But you don't understand! These people who were laid off are important ! So much so they didn't need a union, because the company couldn't possibly let them go. Unions are for all those other people who aren't important ! Perhaps some of you are beginning to understand the term Solidarity Forever.
Then that massive no-poaching collusion amongst dozens of the top tech companies in the US surfaced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
It wasn't just "Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay", the practice spread to "dozens" of other companies:
> Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210912195239/https://pando.com...
It's actually pretty insane what's revealed in the documents, they knew exactly what they were doing, they were completely ruthless.
Anyway, now I think that we do need unions, or something, because these folks are clearly willing to do anything they think they can get away with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing wrong with free association of people though. Unionization is also an example of free association: people coming together to maximize leverage and minimize power imbalances.
There's nothing wrong with the principle itself. I'm obviously not a fan of slavery etc. Just when people narrow in on it and act like it's the only priority/thing worth talking about. I was trying to criticize the myopic focus on that.
What a funny write! Despite it being funny, if it wasn't for the outright satire, it would be virtually indistinguishable from the recent tech layoff messages: Gitpod - https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run Microsoft (this is maybe the classiest) - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing... Zuck/Meta - https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes... Stripe - https:/…