this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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why can't corporations just do things in a reasonable and rational way?
Why do they constantly make so many extreme changes all the time? When they need to hire more people, they hire way more than they need, when they need to downsize...or rather when they're tired of paying so many people, they fire way too many.
Graphs. Executives love graphs. Numbers also mean different things to them, and changes better invoke noticeable change, preferably monetarily and with some sort of proof. This is for those quarterly meetings. Larger layoffs are often done for investors. It's a clock's pendulum. Pull back payroll, show the numbers and talk about skimming the fat or whatever, yell "look at us!", profit. Hire a bunch of people, talk about a big product/project, yell "look at us!", profit.
It's the capitalist endgame. You, I, little Johnny, and the kitchen sink if it could talk and move, are all numbers on an excel sheet. Plenty of exceptions exist, this remains the rule, however.
Yup, and this is fundamentally down to the whole system being low-information. Workers, management, upper management and shareholders are all playing it close to the chest because they know they are pitted against one another. So much of corporate life is smoke & mirrors. It's incredibly wasteful of information, of resources, and of the dignity of the people within it.
EDIT: I didn't connect the dots between low-information and graphs: graphs are an attempt to make the unfathomable complexity of many humans working together legible to the managers & the owner class, when they know they can't trust those workers' word for anything. So people make graphs to try to filter information they don't care about - how is Marv from accounting feeling after his back surgery - from information they do care about like KPIs. It destroys most of the information and hence is easily gamed by everyone up & down the chain, which leads to this bizarre yo-yoing that makes the workers' lives and the company worse, but satisfies the graphs.
And it's all because the owning class wants to exploit us, so they have to dominate us. There's no getting around it, as long as this extractive system exists this is how it will inevitably be. No culture change is going to fix things. Only the workers being the owners will fix it.
Because it improves short term profits, so the stock goes up, so both shareholders and execs are happy with their big payouts. The rest is just collateral, they don’t care.
Last I checked the average tenure of a CEO was less than 2 years.
As long as the problems only properly start getting felt a couple of years later, all such "save a bit now, pay a lot later" strategies are ideal for CEOs as they optimize their bonuses.
As for other people, well, these types are usually far into the sociopath side of the spectrum so they don't feel the pain of others, don't worry about the harm for others, and have no shame whatsoever.
I know.
Because their bottom line is improved in the short term by firing people
Youre right. Because their bottom line is improved in the short term so that they can say "Look at how much revenue we made last year!"
"And now look at how many people employed to gain that revenue!"
"No, don't look over the whole year! Just look at right now!"
It's all about maximizing profit.
Yeah in the kind of was that a shitty gambler plays when the "table (market) is 'hot'" they feel overconfident and go all in, ignoring that the pieces they're playing with are people's lives
It's about maximizing the bonuses for the executives. A bigger bonus than what they got last year.
Why would they care, people are just tools to them.
Because it's easier that way. Rather than protracted recruiting processes that really dig deep into the current needs of the company after detailed evaluation of current projects and current manpower, just hire anyone who looks halfway decent and fire the ones that don't seem worth it whenever is convenient.
In the short term, easier. But for long term sustainability, no....But what does that matter when you get a bailout every time you fail?
What about the way we've seen markets operate makes you believe they care about the long-term? Long-term is someone else's problem.
capitalism.
Because the guy who makes the big risky splashy changes to his department gets the promotion. The one who makes small continous improvements without fucking things up along the way flies under the radar.
Quarterly bonuses. Some jackass sees that labor budget is going to go over and he won't get his bonus.