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Why top firms fire good workers

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Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#101

Post by threatofrain »

idiotsecant wrote: post #65
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…

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 don't think it's wildly unpopular, I think that starting a union is wildly hard and paints a target on your back, but once someone does the hard work I think we'll see that there was sufficient support to make a play.

I also think if you do a text embedding on the recent years of HN post and you look for conversations on unions, you'll find a plurality of support.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#102

Post by renewiltord »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #36
cbdhdjdjd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definitely explains why India is so dysfunctional.

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 California since.

I've got to be honest. It's not that convincing.

It reminds me of those engineers who you hire and one month in they don't have anything to show because of "tech debt" and shit like that. It's always the fault of some guy who has long left. Then you hire other engineers and they just nail it. Such is life. There's blamers and doers and the two are not usually the same.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#103

Post by ljf »

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?

While they cannot stop something like that (a Union never gets to control the business), they can at least negotiate good terms for the departing employees, and help ensure everything is in order.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#104

Post by namlem »

idiotsecant wrote: post #65
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…

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

Unions often end up decreasing productivity due to added bureaucracy, leading to ultimately worse compensation in the long run.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#105

Post by vincnetas »

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?

sweden has unions and sweden has software companies. could it be that reasonable approach that benefits both parties can be achieved?

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#106

Post by vincnetas »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #96
palmotea wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech attracts the radical independent types. No. I think it's a combination of: 1) HN being associated with a startup incubator, and thus attracting a large contingent of people who see themselves as the boss doing this, not the workers affected; 2) tech attracts a certain kind of gullible person who's easily seduced by tidy little systems like the pop-capitalism of libertarian tracts; and 3) tech workers (until re…

Tech people would obviously be well served by being in the union. If you make a cartel with other people who can do the same job as you, and you don't profit from that, you're doing something terribly wrong. The reason I'm opposed to it isn't because it wouldn't be good for tech people. I'm opposed to it because in general I think it would be more bad for everyone else than it would be good for tech people. I expect…

why do you think maximising profit for company is ok and everyone is cheering about that, but when employee tries to maximise profit then "oh noes the society will collapse "

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#107

Post by kamaal »

mcoliver wrote: post #4

No. The reason top firms part ways with good workers is usually political. Either the manager doesn't like the person regardless of their work abilities, or the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Or they get caught up in the endlessly popular reorgs (again management failure). It's a failure of management. Nothing more. Not…

>>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 and laziness go unnoticed, which is why a persistent level of mediocrity is all pervasive. People do the bare minimum needed to keep lights on.

Getting rewards, or not getting punished in this kind of set up, largely depends on who you know, how they view you and what they are willing to do for you.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#108

Post by unmole »

jonahx wrote: post #81
unmole wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no. The white-collar workforce is almost entirely made up of people from the so called upper castes . The idea that caste has anything to do with the toxic behaviour in corporate India simply doesn't hold up.

India scores high on the Power Distance Index: https://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensio... Seems like that would influence the behavior we're talking about. Maybe it's culturally independent of the caste system, but it feels like it would be connected. I don't have much personal experience here so I may be wrong.

> Maybe it's culturally independent of the caste system

Is exactly my point.

There seems to be tendency among Western observers to treat the caste system as a catch-all explanation for social dynamics in India. That kind of reductionism doens't have a lot of explanatory value.

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#109

Post by snaily »

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?

If it is indeed easy to move operations wholesale, I think we would see far more and quicker cases (not just arbitraging differences in labor organization, but also e.g. tax and regulatory regimes). It certainly happens, mind you, but my read is that different forms of institutional inertia puts a damper on the willingness to "re-home".

Re: Why top firms fire good workers

#110

Post by ChadNauseam »

vincnetas wrote: post #106
ChadNauseam wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech people would obviously be well served by being in the union. If you make a cartel with other people who can do the same job as you, and you don't profit from that, you're doing something terribly wrong. The reason I'm opposed to it isn't because it wouldn't be good for tech people. I'm opposed to it because in general I think it would be more bad for everyone else than it would be good for tech people. I expect…

why do you think maximising profit for company is ok and everyone is cheering about that, but when employee tries to maximise profit then "oh noes the society will collapse "

I don't have an issue with an employee maximizing profit. I do have an issue with employees banding together and bargaining collectively. Exactly the same way I don't have an issue with a company maximizing profit, but I would have an issue with companies banding together and negotiating collectively.

A difference is that there's not necessarily an inherent size limit on companies while there is an inherent size limit on individuals because you can only be one person. One person can only be so economically valuable.

However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up. And that's exactly what we should do. And we definitely should prevent more mergers as well. What I would do differently w.r.t. antitrust is say that instead of only looking at harm to consumers (those who a company sells to), we should also look at harm to workers (aka those who a company buys from).

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