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…
This sounds like someone saying that banning children from mines is a restrictions on the child's right to mine coal.
If society would be a better place than short term growth be damned.
The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.
Ahhh yes, the old "because the market didn't turn out the way I wanted it to once, it means the entirety of the capitalist system and the idea of free markets is fundamentally broken" retort. I call this the "Jr. developer fallacy." Start a job, encounter some bugs, suggest rewriting the entire codebase from scratch on [insert-trendy-framework].
That's just a couple examples I picked off the pile. You wanna do hyperconcentration of wealth crushing entire small business industries, collusion on pricing, ag services cartels driving farmers to commit suicide at record numbers, centralized manufacturing eliminating meaningful competition in consumer goods markets, or the last 15 years of bullshit where the term "innovation" was rolled out to describe some combination of fleecing dumb money and fucking over low wage workers let me know. Junior developer my ass, I been doing this shit for decades sonny.
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…
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…
>> optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better
Companies should not deliberately make workers lives bad. But, optimizing for the worker seems fundamentally unworkable as this would essentially mean financial independence at the time of hiring followed by bankruptcy.
What? We're into late stage capitalism and you're telling me the world was experimenting with making employees lives better? I must be living under a rock! Where are these so called experiments? I only see employee conditions getting progressively worse. If you go back long enough, we did get a few wins like weekends and some limits on hours after a lot of people died for it, but that's about it. The last change we h…
> We're into late stage capitalism and you're telling me the world was experimenting with making employees lives better? They're repeating propaganda about communism and socialism. It's tiresome, really, the degree to which Americans have bought the propaganda that countries like the Soviet Union themselves spread, that they were communist, when in fact they were authoritarian dictatorships with a few very-badly-thou…
I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being p…
CEO pay, like in the case of Boeing, is borne by shareholders, not the company itself. It's chronically repeated as if companies are robbing salary coffers to pay exorbitant CEO compensation. But that is not true. It's Boeing shareholders forking over $34M, not Boeing inc.
Which is precisely the point the article is making
If the CEO works for the shareholders because they are part of the investor class, they aren’t prioritizing workers or customers - and we all know at this point that improving service isn’t part of increasing profit
> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
How is it a wild statement? The whole point of a company is to make money. It's like asking why workers care about their salaries.
Profit is what remains when you subtract operating expenses from income. Payroll is an operating expense. Maximizing profit is not strictly necessary for a business to operate.
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…
> (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit, e.g. they won't sack underperforming divisions or expand in ways that dilute existing workers' stake.
Maybe this is the good way of running a business, and the gigantic corporations who grow like cancer and try to control governments are a bad thing?
> 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?
Lindy Fiorentina fucking up HP. Boeing all over. I'd hope to see employee-owners counteract short-termism
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…
> The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else I asked my Greek teacher what they biggest change she experienced moving to the US was, and she said that in Greece, her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money. I also asked her what the financial crisis was like in Greece, and she said that you couldn’t find an empty…
People who want to make money above all else are pursuing that because they think that will make them happy. It’s just their idea of the path that will get them to happiness. They see Mark Zuckerberg wakeboarding at his Lake Tahoe retreat and think, ‘That’s happiness — having billions of dollars, not having to worry about meeting basic needs, being able to do what you want.’
> just like how communism There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist. If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prose…
This criticism would carry more weight if this entire thread wasn't full of snippets of communist fanfic about using legal force to try to upend reality and ending the profit motive for companies and enforcing worker collectives.
> using legal force to try to upend reality
You mean like how we upended reality in 2008 to save corrupt institutions and/or incompetent institutions? And then again during COVID? And then again to save Silicon Valley Bank?
You pretend that current situation some kind of natural state of affairs, when in reality it is a result of ‘legal force for me but not for the’