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Why top firms fire good workers

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Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#141

Post by SanjayMehta »

renewiltord wrote: post #102
SanjayMehta wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. The real cause of our dysfunctional system is the debris of nehruvian socialism (he was a covert communist masking himself as a Fabian socialist). He didn't reform the British divide and control mechanisms but continued them and in fact made them worse. If you think your bureaucracy is bad, wait till you see ours. These are "one exam wonders." They clear one exam, and with zero life experience at the age…

The one great commonality I've noticed about California Democrats and Online Indians is that each region's problems seem exclusively the fault of some long dead fellow. Apparently this Nehru chap has been dead for 60 years. In fact, India has only been a country for 80 years so he's been dead for most of the time India has been around. Likewise with Ronald Reagan. Supposedly he's responsible for all the woes of Calif…

Believe whatever you wish. We live with this reality. At least you can move from CA to TX. We can't, it's the same clown show everywhere.

The fact is that for every policy the government introduces, the entrenched clerks find ways to sabotage it.

If you think you can handle it I invite you to come and apply for any government scheme of your choice.

True story: we once sent an NDA to a government ministry for review and it came back with one objection after 11 months. The objection was that the year was wrong in the document.

After that we no longer bid for any government work.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#142

Post by tasuki »

autoexec wrote: post #56

> The firm starts to underpay those better workers who kept their jobs, akin to making them pay for being “chosen.” Consequently, profits do not decline and may even increase. > “Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’” This is exactly…

> This is exactly what unions are for.

Unions are mostly extortion schemes to benefit the union leaders.

My read is that they're getting paid in prestige rather than money. The worker can turn that prestige into money further down the line by saying "I worked at so-and-so for five years" at their next interview.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#143

Post by tasuki »

anal_reactor wrote: post #131
kamaal wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Actually in most companies, no ones watching whats happening, no ones watching who performs, who slacks, or anything for that matter. Companies are basically a kind of a loosely assembled random crowd, where no one cares a thing about anything. In this kind of a set up both hardwork…

The problem is that as you go further up in hierarchy, people by definition have less specialized, and more general knowledge. This means that there are things that lower-level employee understands but their manager doesn't. This in turn means that it's impossible for the manager to tell whether the employee is doing a good or a bad job because the manager simply doesn't understand the details of the job. This is ope…

Cynical! (and probably true too)

I work for a small company (~10 people), solving reasonably interesting problems, earn peanuts, and am happier than I was at big tech.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#144

Post by franktankbank »

tasuki wrote: post #142
autoexec wrote: post #56

> The firm starts to underpay those better workers who kept their jobs, akin to making them pay for being “chosen.” Consequently, profits do not decline and may even increase. > “Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’” This is exactly…

> This is exactly what unions are for. Unions are mostly extortion schemes to benefit the union leaders. My read is that they're getting paid in prestige rather than money. The worker can turn that prestige into money further down the line by saying "I worked at so-and-so for five years" at their next interview.

> Unions are mostly extortion schemes to benefit the union leaders.

Did daddy teach you that?

> saying "I worked at so-and-so for five years" at their next interview.

Oh yea, I worked at Amazon I brought my own shiv want to see it?

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#145

Post by renewiltord »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #141
renewiltord wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one great commonality I've noticed about California Democrats and Online Indians is that each region's problems seem exclusively the fault of some long dead fellow. Apparently this Nehru chap has been dead for 60 years. In fact, India has only been a country for 80 years so he's been dead for most of the time India has been around. Likewise with Ronald Reagan. Supposedly he's responsible for all the woes of Calif…

Believe whatever you wish. We live with this reality. At least you can move from CA to TX. We can't, it's the same clown show everywhere. The fact is that for every policy the government introduces, the entrenched clerks find ways to sabotage it. If you think you can handle it I invite you to come and apply for any government scheme of your choice. True story: we once sent an NDA to a government ministry for review a…

Oh I have no doubt it's miserable, and your story is pretty funny haha. I just don't think that a guy who has been dead for 75% of a country's existence is why something is a certain way. It's been 60 years without the fellow. It's not like he's an immortal god commanding you still.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#146

Post by franktankbank »

gedy wrote: post #84
idiotsecant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason collective bargaining is wildly unpopular on HN, which is ironic because tech workers are exactly who should be organizing their labor.

I can only speak for myself, but I think there is a naive idealist view of (modern, American) unions that gloss over the tradeoffs. I don't want another bureaucratic layer that tells me what to do, and run by yet more HR admin-types. We aren't working in the coal mines or steel mills here in the 1920s. Sorry I'm not interested in that for office jobs. I'm glad they still work in some countries and cultures.

I don't see the HR layer really existing in this alternative universe. Why would they? If they still existed it wouldn't be filled with lazy dim witted karens it would be lawyers with shark teeth.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#147

Post by imtringued »

komali2 wrote: post #45
inetknght wrote: post #6

How to tell that some "researchers" spent too much time in economics classes and not enough time in ethics classes: they publish stuff like this (source [0]). [0]: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20200169

Exactly. > In short, the “up-or-out” path of professional life may not just be a cultural phenomenon among top professional service firms but also an efficient response to how reputation is maintained and information flows. What looks like a ruthless system of constant turnover, the researchers argue, is in reality a finely tuned mechanism that helps the market discover and reward true talent. For people who are fans…

>For people who are fans of this system, I genuinely want to understand how one overcomes the common sense, humanitarian centric rejection of corpo speak like this. Is it about just drinking the koolaid?

Economists don't work in the real world economy so they have no clue or idea what these things even mean. They work for the Fed, a central bank or in academia. Sometimes and only sometimes do they work for banks or as quants, but then they usually make enough money to never have to question the system. Bankers usually have MBAs that specialize in banking and finance. They don't need to understand economics, they need to understand how the businesses they allocate capital towards function.

Economists are insulated from the real economy, because economists are redundant to the real economy and I'm not saying that to denigrate economists, it's what economists tell each other all day in their research.

Purely theoretically speaking, they say free markets are self regulating and stabilizing and efficient. You don't need economists to steward or study the economy according to economics itself.

Weirdly enough, economists aren't historians either. They don't teach how economies have been run in the past, they just presume some sort of proto-market economy and that market economies have existed since the dawn of time.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#148

Post by autoexec »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #74
idiotsecant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason collective bargaining is wildly unpopular on HN, which is ironic because tech workers are exactly who should be organizing their labor.

And when has a union ever stopped a multinational company from just closing shop and opening up overseas? If a company making physical things can do it, how hard do you think it would be for a software company?

It's not as if companies aren't shipping non-union jobs overseas or importing labor from overseas anyway. There's also a certain amount of irrational sentiment around silicon valley and the west coast generally. There's little doubt that companies could move shop to places in the US that aren't so insanely overpriced and without the high cost of living, especially with work from home being so popular, but for whatever reason (the weather, the "scene", the culture) companies are happy where they are and I don't expect that to change so quickly. It sure is nice having a lot of money and having a lot of nice options on where/how to spend it anyway, which might not always be the case in the overseas neighborhoods filled with unionless sweatshops.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#149

Post by autoexec »

Bombthecat wrote: post #136
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when has a union ever stopped a multinational company from just closing shop and opening up overseas? If a company making physical things can do it, how hard do you think it would be for a software company?

Or close the location and just reopen later on. Story time: Berlin in Germany is pretty left leaning. So there was / is a MC Donalds which regularly formed union for employees, MC Donalds just closed the restaurant and reopened later, several times lol

Ideally there'd be laws against this, and public backlash as well. Even non-unionized Workers in Germany will be better off than their American counterparts, but they still deserve strong protections for unions.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#150

Post by autoexec »

gedy wrote: post #84
idiotsecant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason collective bargaining is wildly unpopular on HN, which is ironic because tech workers are exactly who should be organizing their labor.

I can only speak for myself, but I think there is a naive idealist view of (modern, American) unions that gloss over the tradeoffs. I don't want another bureaucratic layer that tells me what to do, and run by yet more HR admin-types. We aren't working in the coal mines or steel mills here in the 1920s. Sorry I'm not interested in that for office jobs. I'm glad they still work in some countries and cultures.

> I don't want another bureaucratic layer that tells me what to do, and run by yet more HR admin-types.

That new bureaucratic layer would be designed to benefit you, and if it were to stop doing that and suddenly no longer served the interests of it's members you'd have the power to replace the leadership of that union or to leave it and start a new one. This is a huge improvement from the current bureaucratic layer of HR admin-types which you have zero say in how they operate and which is absolutely not looking out for your interests at all.

It's hard to understand the mindset of "I'd rather just be powerless in the job I have because that seems easier."

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