91–100 of 107 posts
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That does not need to be a part of it. Governments can choose to pay market rate for labor and not waste money in the long term.
.. and yet, almost none do. Maybe they see it differently from you?
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.. and yet, almost none do. Maybe they see it differently from you?
They have the ability to punt today’s labor costs to future taxpayers via unaccounted debts in the form of underfunded defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. So what they see is promise low taxes today, get votes today, let tomorrow’s taxpayers deal with debt problems. I cannot blame them, the voters give the leaders the wrong incentives.
Smaller, family-owned companies can be loyal to a fault. Long-time employees can be hard to get rid of. One good deed, closing one big deal, sticking with the company during tough times, being buddies with the right people... A lot of owners can be sympathetic to certain people as well. Keeping employees that miss work for any excuse, moochers that get raises for no reason, bad performers, it can be tough for other e…
HN, sticking up for Corporate Man even on a Dilbert comic.
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As described, it is literally survivorship bias: > They work forever at one place, maybe survive a few layoffs [emphasis added]
> it is literally survivorship bias I think you need to look the term up if you want to use it correctly. It's about statistical sampling, not about generalizing from one or two examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias it does not merely refer to people who've survived at something.
From your link.
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HN, sticking up for Corporate Man even on a Dilbert comic.
I wonder if you've ever had the pleasure of working for a small company full of the owner's incompetent friends and family. Loyalty is nice within reason, but it can be pathological.
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I wonder if you've ever had the pleasure of working for a small company full of the owner's incompetent friends and family. Loyalty is nice within reason, but it can be pathological.
I wonder what possessed you to think that I was sticking up for small companies. Or any kind of company.
- GP says that loyalty isn't always always a good thing because it causes small companies to keep incompetent or lazy employees.
- You make an ideological remark about how GP is "sticking up for Corporate Man" by saying that.
- I respond that yes, in fact, small companies often do employ useless people out of misplaced loyalty, perhaps you just haven't personally experienced it.
- You somehow misinterpret my comment as accusing YOU of sticking up for companies. I did not. Don't worry, I fully understand that your entire philosophy boils down to "companies bad".
- You are here.
Does that clear things up, or are you still lost?
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I agree. The only reason it’s “inhumane” to lay people off is because of our horrible safety net and ridiculous cost of education. If we could solve those issues, then we wouldn’t need any loyalty from companies. Imagine if we had that in place and instead of the job destruction by ChatGPT being a tragedy, it was an opportunity to update our economy, with hundreds of thousands of people trained in new industries. Not…
> I agree. The only reason it’s “inhumane” to lay people off is because of our horrible safety net and ridiculous cost of education. It goes way beyond that point. Your tenure in a company requires you to specialize and develop your skills to meet the needs of your employer. When you are fired then the employability of those skills might be none or even detrimental to finding jobs anywhere else. The longest you work…
In fact asking for employers to use empathy only makes the problem worse. Because then the ones who actually have it use it, then they are surpassed by those without it. So the world is even more slanted toward those without empathy. It also prolongs the problem by letting people ignore the problem because it’s not that bad yet.
Companies run on machine language. Legalistic policies and KPI’s are a form of machine language. There’s no empathy in that. It’s no easier to make a company act responsibly and ethically toward people than it is to make a computer do so.
If we were working for computers, we wouldn’t expect them to give us quality of life out of the kindness of their hearts, we’d define the inputs and outputs, policies etc, and create a context that manages their lack of empathy and prevents it from destroying everything
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I agree. The only reason it’s “inhumane” to lay people off is because of our horrible safety net and ridiculous cost of education. If we could solve those issues, then we wouldn’t need any loyalty from companies. Imagine if we had that in place and instead of the job destruction by ChatGPT being a tragedy, it was an opportunity to update our economy, with hundreds of thousands of people trained in new industries. Not…
>our horrible safety net This is intentional- an employee who feels secure is an expensive employee. Mitch Mconnell debating $200/wk Covid relief funding: "my god, they won't work!"