The young lad who blames capitalism has obviously never lived under socialism.
In an open market of ideas, critiques should always be welcome. Pigeonholing critiques of capitalism as automatic support for "socialism" is the opposite. Capitalism is basically a first step towards sanity, not some panacea.
For example, you go on to bemoan authoritarianism. But a corporation is an authoritarian structure, and your critique most certainly applies. The redeeming bits are that they're generally smaller scale than a country, and that there is often a higher level power structure that can moderate its worst incentives. But the same obtuse aloofness/politicking/groupthink do apply, as caricatured by the linked post.
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.
My productivity has been severely impacted, actually, without even going into the mental health / stress / morale effects. I've seen two rounds of layoffs at my current employer and today I am utterly and completely fucking swamped in work. New initiatives showing up in January, directly from corporate sponsors at the SVP and executive level, despite the Great Big Fucking Deal they made about us getting our 2024 "roa…
If you have a project/company that's already running well and you fire almost everybody except a skeleton crew, you'd be amused but things don't crumble down instantly. Technical debt piles up and everything goes to maintenance mode, when you need the insight of the good people who left is when you realise that going to the previous state will cost you a lot more time and money than you might possibly predict.
On a much smaller scale, six years ago I inherited a service which previously had two people working on it full time. I've spent about a day a month on doing the bare minimum to keep it working ever since. Clearly we were massively overinvesting in it previously, right? Recently it broke, and I have no clue how to get it working again. Fortunately it's just an internal thing so it's just disrupting work and not causi…
> We got away with coasting on our upfront investment for six years, but it didn't last forever.
The analogy I reach for is fitness. If you were super fit for years, you can probably take a year off from exercising and still do that all-day hike. You'll probably be slower, but you'll make it.
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 data is the problem here - no one knows what the truth is
Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future l…
Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems t…
Is there really a space for unbounded growth with these numbers? I mean, everybody who wanted Twitter account got one. Discounting bots and campaign accounts, where would growth come from? Would one expect literally every single internet user have active Twitter account? I don't think it's going to happen.
On the other hand, I love it now and hated it before. Guess it depends on what you're looking for. Me - I like little to no moderation and government interference and don't find much offensive and have no problem just ignoring anything I do find objectionable. All worth it to be able to speak honestly.
> I like little to no moderation and government interference My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.
True enough, but I'd rather take chances with the guy who proclaims he loves free speech, even if he turns out to be a hypocrite occasionally, than with the censorship regime whose only constant worry is they don't censor enough and need to find more ways to censor more.
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.
Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future l…
> the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy
Until it is not. I am regularly interviewing people with remarkable low skills who want salary of a full-fledged software engineers, and they even had that salary before. Lots of companies overhired low-quality workforce in the last five years, maybe it's time to fix that.
They would do terribly. They're completely and utterly different skill sets. It makes as much sense as taking an oboe player and asking them to conduct an orchestra, without any conducting experience. Do you know how to handle investor relations and different factions on the board? Managing sales and marketing strategies? Assessing the regulatory environment in Europe and the legal risks of expansion in China? Can yo…
I have yet to see evidence that what gets done in the C-suite of many (not all, possibly not most—but many) companies is making use of any skill set at all, besides self-aggrandizement and bullshitting. To be charitable, for some of these, what's happening is that rather than leveraging their skills , they're leveraging their relationships. And that can be valuable, sometimes, but it's not a substitute for actually k…
Then you're not paying attention. If that's what you think, you simply have zero actual experience with C-suite jobs.
You "have yet to see evidence" because you haven't actually tried to learn accurate information about it.
That’s one interpretation. Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day. Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.
This is an interesting thought experiment, because in that situation the company should cut another 10%, and so on, until they get some sort of message they can't cut anymore.
I think that’s what’s going on in some places. And the message that it can’t go on is that highly committed people who were willing to take on 10% or 20% more work just quit when it gets to 30% or 40%, leaving behind those who can’t find another job.
It takes a while for that to show up on income statements though, and the quarterly results look great in the meantime, so it is by definition good management (by Wall Street standards).
My productivity has been severely impacted, actually, without even going into the mental health / stress / morale effects. I've seen two rounds of layoffs at my current employer and today I am utterly and completely fucking swamped in work. New initiatives showing up in January, directly from corporate sponsors at the SVP and executive level, despite the Great Big Fucking Deal they made about us getting our 2024 "roa…
Time to look for a new job.
You're not wrong but the tech job market is a dumpster fire right now, too, and, on top of that, I've got 3 young kids (twins are 4, singleton is 2) and a partially disabled spouse. I make good money and have amazing benefits, some of the best in the entire tech industry. And I've been through shitty situations like this before, so I'm hanging on for now... At least until my personal life chills out a bit.