On my feed this appeared almost next to "10 rules of Zen programming" - What a contrast. If you feel anger and frustration after reading this, I'd definitely suggest you find and read that other article.
Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
261–270 of 333 posts
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#262I'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…
Instead of minimizing costs by performing massive workforce reductions and while not earning profit, corporate officers could just... earn some profit to keep the momentum going. And to go beyond, beyond initial starting conditions.
But that's asking for too much from the average corporate leadership. Efficiency and technology acquisition are too much for these agents of the entrenched hegemony. So, what we have right now is a form of nationalist socialist welfare that looks like our current financial-administrative system. There's some momentum and inertia, but it's all being wasted on keeping unproductive fat cats alive.
And that's okay. Because smart people will be leaving this oppressive Egypt under a stubborn Pharaoh. For much better lands and pasture. And while that happens, profit will start to look like a heinous crime to these welfare recipients. Who naturally will not be invited to the awesome parties that's coming in the future.
Something like Eloi and Morlocks, if you wanna get biological about it. Eloi and Morlocks, though, are just the starting point. H.G. Wells didn't have anime music videos to inspire him to think about the more accurate possibilities of a matrix of biological degradation and environmental niche adaptation.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#263If 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 global team I was in halved while I was at the bank, partly from cuts and partly from people deciding to take their various opportunities to leave and then not being replaced. By the time I departed with severe burnout, I had been consistently putting in 15-hour days for 19 months, and that as a fairly senior member of management (regarded by the business as an exec) just to keep our processes running. In Switzerland, that's not normal. But from the outside, yes, we just kept chugging along, so obviously we were finally the right size.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I think X is worth maybe 1b, not more.
It depends. Musk has a great ability of burning his employees out to make up for mistakes he has made: (Early automation efforts at Tesla in 2017/2018 where they repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s/80s, dumb mistakes in the early days of SpaceX when they tried to replicate what NASA had in the 50s/60s). In the end he succeeds powering through all the dumb decisions he makes and manages to pull ahead:(Tesla produ…
How horrible mismanaged have all other big companies have to be,
for someone like Elon Musk to easily overpower and overtake them?
It's not like overworking employees is a novel concept no other big corp has left untried.
I think attributing Musks success to "overworking employees" is either completely wrong or not sufficient to explain his success.
You can't say it's by chance, because it's not his first and last successful company either.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#265Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. And this is why smart companies avoid that game. I know one regional company who sells nationally/internationally which has done that for decades. Decades ago, the owner asked the local bank for a growth loan for some equipment and was turned down. The next week, he found out that one of his employees, who depends 100% on his company for income, went to the same bank for a motorcycle loan and was approved. the b…
They're not your friend, because they're in the business of making money. Unless that business was the only employer in the area, the owner was basically just having a tantrum over the idea that different kinds of loans for different amounts of money might have different decision-making processes behind them. When my credit union decided to give me a car loan, they didn't look into the solvency of my employer, they j…
Even if you see it that way, the result of his decision was excellent, and likely superior.
I've literally dealt with banks (US state/regional scale) as a technology business with a loan that was absolutely current and on-time every one of scores of months, and we were running profitably (small, but definitely positive). Yet, when the bank started having problems in their real-estate sector, they came and called in OUR loan. We had to seriously scramble to have it not put us out of business, cold. There were several other businesses in the area, also non-real-estate, that were caused to fail in this bank's BS moves and made the local papers.
It is not just that bank's business is making money. They have a whole bunch of internal incentives that make it perfectly OK in their eyes to fck over anyone for no reason other than to make their personal numbers this month look good. And they don't hesitate to do it.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#267I know it's comedy, but the essense relies on faulty reasoning of why you were employed. 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 profit…
Uber burned 250m a year for 10 years without making a profit; are you sure your logic still applies?
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for a company that does something that I guess is a bit unusual - they use the revenue from our customers to pay employee salaries. If you would have asked me, this would seem like the obvious way to do things, but I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, "I don't know how the economy works".
It's about percentages. If the CFO expects that the company can earn 10% on any capital, and they can borrow at 1%, then they will do that. In effect, this means that they will make 9% for free. Even more so, the CFO's bonus probably depends on the net income, so it's a great deal. It's all fun and games until the tide goes out. Then you suddenly might need to rollover the debt at new rates like 6% while the company…
IOW (as I've said before and been throughly downvoted for before): short-term profit comes before long-term sustainability.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#269Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But won't the projected value of the project go up with the discount rate? Why would the project still only make $40K on year 3, rather than now making $40K*1.10^3?
The other 2 replies seem accurate, but I'll also reply.
The future earnings should go up with inflation, but not the discount rate. The government adjusts their interest rate to maintain the rate of inflation around 2% or so. The government interest rate is often around 5%, but can vary from 0 to 20%. The discount rate (or technically the cost of capital) is the gov't interest rate plus 4% or so (the higher the better for investors).