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garlicroastedpotato t1_j8gesjc wrote

Reply to comment by Darkstar_k in Meta's chief business officer is leaving after 13 years amid the company ramping up its focus on 'efficiency' by luxisa

I don't think this is correct. There's a lot you can do by shifting people around and tightening up efficiency... but ultimately you can have multiple jobs that could be combined into one. In large corporate culture a lot of people survive by hiding and acting as though they have more work than they actually do.

There's only so much efficiency you can purchase and it has a cost. If you can purchase a 30% efficiency by updating a software... it means you would need 30% less people to do the same job.

We're about to hit a lull in tech where it won't be expanding largely due to a lack of investable opportunities. A lot of these tech companies have been trying to recreate the wheel on a number of products and basically about a thousand of them are all market losers all at once. Tightening up their operations will mean shelving a lot of projects that are going nowhere.

Could you imagine how much money Google could have saved if they shelved Stadia right away? Or how much money Facebook would be ahead if they never engaged in the Metaverse? There's all sorts of large projects you can just shelf in these companies that have no real value. Those employees can be reassigned to other tasks... but more likely getting rid of them and making them reapply is simpler.

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yesbillyitsme t1_j8gr0cm wrote

Here’s the thing that gets me though, so many of these places have cash. Apple can’t just tell me they can’t eat salary for 2,000 employees for 5 years while weathering until the next cycle.

Like I respect your view, but realize you’re parroting corporate defined normalcy; “This is just how things work”.

But why. Apple has trillions in cash. Trillions. Payroll and OM costs for a decade of 2,000 employees isn’t going to make a dent into a trillion dollars.

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dantheman91 t1_j8grdej wrote

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cash-on-hand#:~:text=Apple%20cash%20on%20hand%20for,a%2022.89%25%20decline%20from%202021.

Apple doesn't have trillions

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yesbillyitsme t1_j8gthfb wrote

Microsoft’s had 10,000 layoffs

I did an intuit calc that was generous, and ended with a cost of $387k/employee as a hypothetical.

That’s $3.87 billion for a company with $99b in the bank, that just bought activistion for $70m.

So you can’t float $3.87b for a year or two, freeze hiring and move people around?

To put it into perspective, would you find it selfish if a local Small business had $1m in cash, and it cost them $40,000 to keep 10,000 people employed?

Yeah people would riot.

When you scale it to working class numbers, you can see it’s a slap in the face of corporate propaganda

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systemfrown t1_j8h4lf8 wrote

And it’s not like you don’t get something for that $3.87B (or whatever it is)…send them off to innovate or optimize existing products. Every one of these large companies has neglected technical or operational debt that they’re ignoring and need to catch up on.

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srram t1_j8h4ejm wrote

Think activision was 70B not 70M

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dantheman91 t1_j8gu1aj wrote

I was literally only pointing out that your numbers weren't accurate.

At the end of the day, the company has a duty to it's shareholders. If they could complete the same work with 90% of the workforce, shouldn't they?

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yesbillyitsme t1_j8gunrj wrote

It doesn’t have a duty to shareholders… shareholders choose the company and accept risk.

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cbr777 t1_j8hcbjb wrote

The shareholders own the company and the company has whatever duty its owners decide for it and I'm fairly sure none of them think being a charity for tech workers is one of them.

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dantheman91 t1_j8gw6ns wrote

>It doesn’t have a duty to shareholders

Legally it does

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yesbillyitsme t1_j8gxd2y wrote

#FALSE: There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

Emphasis because people need to wake the fuck up and learn the truth instead of perpetuating corporate propaganda

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dantheman91 t1_j8irzsb wrote

That is not what I said. I said they have a duty to their shareholders, to act in their best interest, not to maximize profits. You're incorrectly putting words in my mouth.

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KingRBPII t1_j8hu01p wrote

Combining multiple jobs into one may lead to burnout

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garlicroastedpotato t1_j8iotrq wrote

I'm not talking about combining a bunch of random jobs. I'm talking about combining like-jobs for people who have free time while working.

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