221–230 of 251 posts
I don't even blame the CEOs anymore, very few of them have the fortitude or the luxury of even being able to say: "Shut up stupid monkeys, I won't do layoffs to satisfy your urges this quarter, I don't want to fuck the long term value creation ability of this company just because you want a quick orgasm now".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why I said “many parts” and not “all.” I wouldn’t want to pick up a good number of their practices, but I think a company seeing layoffs as an embarrassing last resort is a positive trait. I also think that concepts like debt to GDP ratio are somewhat detached from corporate policies.
> I also think that concepts like debt to GDP ratio are somewhat detached from corporate policies. Corporate policies ultimately decide growth. More growth leads to higher profits and higher tax collected by the Government which in turn means they don't have to borrow more.
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ASML is over 30 years old. It also has a massive IP and financial moat that's impossible to replicate by start-ups competitors seeking to disrupt it. Labor laws don't matter at this point as that's not the limiting factor, it's IP and capital. But SW can be much more easily disrupted, and if you can move faster and stay leaner than your EU competitors due to laxer laws, then you will win. SW success is often about ti…
booking.com is in NL, and Spotify in SE. Both outcompeted quite some US competitors. I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.
Like wich? Does it count that a lot of their shareholders and managers are in the US? Does it count that Apple music can do the same thing as Spotify and that Booking has loads of competitors that do the same thing? They have no technical moat other than being first to the market. ASML does have a moat.
>I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.
Sure, but Hetzner is a dust spec compared to AWS, virtually irrelevant outside of EU/Germany. They also came to the market much later than AWS once building a hyperscaler became more of a commodity.
One one hand, lax labor laws means you can be first to market and capture most of it before the EU can wake up from their 3 month holiday and decide to pivot but can't because unions are blocking it. See VW.
On the other, Austria has very lax labor laws around firing people, similar to US and they have next to no big tech companies so that's not the entire formula. You also need the VC capital of Sequoia and AZ16 which doesn't exist in Austria, you need the scale which doesn't exist in Austria, the low tax caproate environment which doesn't exist in Austria, and a small government regulatory environment which doesn't exist in Austria.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why I said “many parts” and not “all.” I wouldn’t want to pick up a good number of their practices, but I think a company seeing layoffs as an embarrassing last resort is a positive trait. I also think that concepts like debt to GDP ratio are somewhat detached from corporate policies.
> but I think a company seeing layoffs as an embarrassing last resort is a positive trait. Don’t most companies think of layoffs as a last resort? I don’t think one ought to be embarrassed about correcting course when you have made a mistake. It takes courage.
Corporations in the US don’t have any negative impact when laying people off. They have minimal to zero financial obligations to employees and essentially zero meaningful regulations on the matter.
From the employee perspective the admission of a “mistake” in this regard is not “courage,” it’s an admission of cold-heartedness.
To the company, you are nothing but a purchase order, and your livelihood is meaningless.
Maybe someone would say “of course, it’s a business, that’s logical.” Maybe you would even say “easy to fire, therefore, easy to hire, more innovation.”
I say, we don’t have to run society that way, and it’s not a pleasant way to live. It was a choice.
I say this as someone with personal experience getting laid off twice in a row within the last decade. One time the layoff was in the same month I was hired. That was not fun.
These aren’t “mistakes,” these are companies who treat people like disposable lab rats. My whole team was hired as an experiment and quickly let go when it didn’t work out. The company doesn’t just “make a mistake” and find out they suddenly can’t pay the people they hired that quickly. They knew they were playing us.
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When Elon fired 80% of the company, I remember a lot of celebration on HN. Some of it was the perceived political bias within the employees and some of it was “The app works fine what were all those employees doing? They probably deserved it.” At the time I remember talking about this becoming a norm as CEOs follow the lead and getting downvoted heavily. Its unfortunate that we are here, but also not surprising, give…
It’s not that surprising there wasn’t much empathy when there was so much bragging about how much people were earning and that it would go on forever. For what it’s worth I was one of the people questioning why they needed so many people although I never said those let go deserved it.
Unfortunately that’s what managers, executives and investors are doing everywhere now. Everyone Should’ve been more careful with the reactions when the status quo was upended.
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Social contracts only work in high trust societies that are also ethnically and culturally homogenous so the only grumble citizens have is fighting over class and not race. But if you have a very diverse society that operates on tribalism, then you need a strong rule of law with strong checks and bounds to weed out tribalism, but this doesn't come for free as policing and lawyering the behavior of all members of soci…
Are you seriously suggesting that the reason it is cheaper to shift factory labor from the United States to Mexico or Vietnam is because Mexican/Vietnamese factories don't need to hire diversity consultants? I have to have misunderstood what you're arguing, because that's transparently ridiculous. Basic labor regulation around hiring/firing has nothing to do with diversity. It has everything to do with basic labor re…
I was talking about white collar labor, not factory work, but yes, that also applies there as well.
>Basic labor regulation around hiring/firing has nothing to do with diversity.
It does when some poor performers you want to fire are part of a minority protected group and can sue you even if you're not firing them because they're minorities but because they're bad at their job, it's gonna cost you extra to avoid fake discriminatory lawsuits. Then hiring abroad becomes a better idea.
>every other Western European economy can.
Because in places like central europe you don't need them so you save money on payroll, as there's no bitching over "diversity", every worker is the same so there's no chance of "i've been discriminated because of my skin color, I'm gonna sue you for millions"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Elon fired 80% of the company, I remember a lot of celebration on HN. Some of it was the perceived political bias within the employees and some of it was “The app works fine what were all those employees doing? They probably deserved it.” At the time I remember talking about this becoming a norm as CEOs follow the lead and getting downvoted heavily. Its unfortunate that we are here, but also not surprising, give…
When that happened, AI wasn’t even at today’s level. Elon clearly didn’t fire those people because AI would replace them. They were laid off because the company could run pretty well without them. And that’s exactly what happened.
This announcement spends remarkably few words talking about the what (7% of the company's workforce was laid off), and a great deal of words talking about how bright the future of the company is and how they're going to hire more people.
which is why most corporations should be classified as sociopaths, at a minimum.
The Corporation / 2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
Free to watch on YT, IIRC