181–190 of 1001 posts
So I predict that this world will have very small, very profitable companies which have some secret sauce but hands off most of the work to big companies making much less money.
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Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
Yep! ..and when workers are owners, optimizing either ways works !
And no, we cannot just outlaw competition. Having an efficient economy is important and valuable because it allows us to have a higher standard of living while putting in less work.
Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…
> they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit That this a "con", says something worrying about the values that, as society, we have decided are more important
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Are you kidding?
If I earn 30 million a year, I have next to no risk and can retire anytime I want. Hell, I could retire after the first quarter.
He's getting a 30M paycheck today only because he built a trillion dollar company from nothing and sacrificed the job opportunities he could have had at other companies for three decades.
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> Interpreted charitably No need for your charity, thanks. I'm simply making the argument that you must live in a bubble if you think that enough people have the excess liquidity and market knowledge for this to be an applicable solution to the general population. > Unless you want to imply that people are too dumb and need to be protected from themselves Not being wise in the markets != being dumb. Protected from th…
Nudging people to own a substantial chunk of their net worth in one single company protects them from speculators and exploiters? OK..
Nothing prevents people from investing also in other companies if they feel like. Or are you implying they are "too dumb" to consider the possibility?
Shared ownership also protects employees from speculative decisions like mass layoffs made only to give more value to shareholders. It also prevents the alienation of working on something you don't own and gives a strong incentive for everyone to give their best.
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> If stocks were only a proxy for money and nothing else the example would be spot-on They are, in the modern startup world that HN is mostly in. That's why commenters here don't remember there are voting shares.
What are some corporate votes that you feel wider employee ownership would have improved?
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> Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being paid $34M in 2024. 26.6M of that was stock. In percentage terms it's just equity that he effectively handed out before as a founder and is getting back in return for growing the company even more. I don't see a problem with it, considering that the median employee takes almost zero risks and can leave whenever they want.
Investing your talent and time in a company is a potential risk.
If it were the case that employees need to put in capital into the business before being employees, then it would be a different story. In fact, those schemes exist - they're called MLM, or multi-level-marketing schemes, where you pay the company upfront to buy the product, and try to sell it at a profit (like herbalife), and try to recruit on behalf of the company!
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Hiring a Boeing CEO must be pretty hard right now because whoever takes the job is signing up for some miserable work (like testifying to a hostile congress and dealing with criminal liability on behalf of Boeing), and is likely to be blamed for decades of mismanagement coming to the surface now. Said another way: I’d demand a lot more in compensation to be CEO of Boeing than NVIDIA (or any other role for that matter…
boohoo. I'll take the role for a wildly discounted $20m. It would be hard to do much worse than the recent incompe .. uh, incumbents.
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> Your barista at Starbucks is not going to increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order But 400k barista all doing it well might.
This is not tenable. 400k people aren't going to all individually work extra hard for starbucks if their own work doesn't individually benefit them.
Soo... It's not like you're always inflating your share base with options. Just part of what people are paid is basically same as shareholders.
This isn't some "align with shareholders" bullshit, rather I wonder if it somewhat decreased the myopic perspective of an employee. They get paid off of the success of the whole company, they have an interest in prudent cost management, and so on. They get to vote on issues affecting the whole firm, too - collectively maybe they are 5-10% or whatnot, not lots but enough that they have a voice.
Otherwise, there is a prevalent, and sadly reasonable perspective of extreme cynicism towards an employer. The employer always says how we're all in it together, teamwork etc. but really, every employee is best served by entirely optimizing only their own utility. But surely this can't be optimal at the society level.