111–120 of 333 posts
The title seems to presume that "you all" are contributing to the company doing so well. If you're not, then firing you will have no effect on the company doing well or not, except it will reduce costs. Arguably the company may do better without you as by firing you they have reduced costs.
Isn't this kind of weird? Some try to blame capitalism, but AI is not capitalism. It is technological progress. Every president and dictator, no matter what type of economy or political system they have, are trying to develop AI right now. It's something that goes beyond any economic system and is a fact and force that can't be stopped and one must simply reckon with. What we have in the US today is not capitalism. I…
Under (ideal) socialism, automation reduces how much human labor is required to provide welfare. Under capitalism, automation displaces workers from jobs, creating structural unemployment. It's up to the workers to justify their continued existence by re-skilling and finding a new job.
A major problem with socialism was laziness. If income isn't tied to work, why work at all? And if nobody works, there's no income. Usually, this is answered by authoritarianism - you must justify your existence to the Party, rather than the market. This is less relevant with automation, since machines don't need financial incentives. Socialism should become increasingly viable as automation makes UBI cheaper.
...whereas the endpoint of capitalism, it seems to me, is serfdom, as it becomes increasingly difficult to justify any wages, so a person's value becomes purely a function of the capital they own - such as shares in increasingly autonomous megacorps.
You are employed because the company expects the profit/savings you generate to exceed the cost of employment. If that stops being true, then naturally it's no longer profitable to employ you.
You'll notice there is no mention of the overall profitability of the organization in that equation. It holds equally true for both profitable and unprofitable orgs.
Obviously the world in messy, and it isn't always clear whether a given department or unit is or will be profitable.
In addition, the CEO and board of directors should have a tax increase of 15% on their income and capital gains taxes for 5 years.
I'm pretty sure a lot of this is connected to the bond market. Companies are running out of operating capitol. When they try and get an operating loan the terms are onerous. Rather than refinance they are electing to perform layoffs to maintain solvency. It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going…
but this is not true of the giants like Microsoft and Google right? They chose to fire thousands and yet have sufficient to invest further into markets all over the world. Burn and churn is just much easier and lax labor laws do not prohibit such tendencies!
To be clear, this is not people being fired for bullshit jobs. This is people being fired because their 1 billion in revenue is a fraction of the 300 billion in stock price opportunity.
Ask me how I know...
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
The best tech example is IBM. They descended from industry leader to desiccated husk, only sustained by legacy business and acquisitions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go. https://killedbygoogle.com The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly rents are a helluva drug.
I never understood the complaints about this. Why shouldn’t a company try and do new things?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm financially illiterate, but what does this mean? Companies have the revenue to pay their employees, but they choose to terminate them instead, because... why?
Hey, SWE who happens to have an MBA here. Theoretically, if a company has money to pay employees it keeps them if the present value of their project is positive, and terminate them if the present value of their projects is negative. Let's say an employee earns $100K this year. The project they're working on this year will generate 40K of revenue in 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years. Is the project worth doing? Let's assum…
Side thought I had: I've met a lot of software developers that will say "I'm trying to automate myself out of a job". It feels a lot different when you actually do lose your job. I know that isn't what's going on here, it's other economic trends, but this just made me think of that.
If you want to automate yourself and then stop working you need to be an owner.