Comment by Octoth0rpe

>It's easy to overlook mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) when as many warm bodies are possible are needed to fulfill business objectives.

dismissing technical talent as "warm bodies" is exactly how the old guard of IBM/AT&T/Oracle fell to the new scrappy talent. I'm sure history will repeat itself again in due time.

> We'll be navigating an employment environment much like what the norm is in other technical professions with tougher standards and fiercer competition for good jobs.

if every other sector except healthcare wasn't experiencing the same thing, you may have a point. This clearly isn't a problem limited to tech, though.

The last social contract between companies and employees was during the New Deal era. It's been downhill ever since.

CEO’s also never face consequences for destroying companies. Zaslav has run WBD into the ground and it’s currently being surrounded by vultures, and he’s still making like half a billion a year.

While I definitely agree CEO pay is quite egregious, in theory, to mitigate short-sighted quarterly earnings hyperoptimization, couldn't a board simply tie equity incentives to performance targets and timeframes though?

Lip Bu Tan, for instance, has performance targets on a five year timeline, which are all negated if the stock falls below a certain threshhold in 3 years. [1]

Or, ever controversial Elon Musk, certainly has an (also egregious) $1 Trillion dollar pay package, but it has some pretty extreme goals over 10 years, such as shipping 1 million Optimus robots [2].

All in all, we can debate about the Goodharting of these metrics (as Musk is keen to do), but I feel boards of these public companies are trying to make more long-term plans, or at least moving away from tying goals to pure quarterly metrics. Perhaps we can argue about the execution of them.

Note: I own neither of these stocks and my only vested interest is buying the S&P.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/14/new-intel-ceo-lip-bu-tan-to-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo

It's more like "this product is underperforming, let go of the team". Regardless of the reasons the product is underperforming. Could be that it was still in development and money dried, could be that they want to pull out of a region and need a product as an excuse.

You can't outwork corporate greed, unless you're working for peanuts in a 3rd world country. Then you're truly irreplacable (and still broke).

> What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders.

You are not wrong, but the contract is/was metaphorical. For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off. That was the invisible "contract". Hell I went to university for things which seem like academic navel gazing, but I still got a good tech job on the other side. That's not the reality for a lot of graduates nowdays who take more practical degrees at masters and phd levels.

Again even if the literal statement is clearly false, it is the sentiment which matters, and this sentiment does not just apply to graduates. I think many just feel like working hard does not work anymore, especially in the face of housing, cost of living, job competition and social media flaunting the wealth of others.

I get the idea from my younger siblings, "Why try if you are already a looser."

Henry Ford for all his faults (and there were MANY) at least understood that you gotta have a customer base for your products, and that paying workers well helps everybody out.

It is not socialism to note that in the past, some companies have believed that their optimal relationship with their employees required recognizing their value and awarding them accordingly, thusly allowing them to attract/retain the best employees as well as maximizing the quality of the output from those employees. There has always been such a spectrum, that's not socialism. The trend to notice is that the spectrum is so strongly weighted towards the merciless, cutthroat end of things that may actually not be optimal for long term survivability of those companies whilst also as I noted, be breaking the social contract that workers have assumed for decades, which is also not socialism.

Socialism has a specific meaning, it's not just a label we get to put on behaviors that we - or rather, specifically you in this case - don't like.

Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_ industries.

A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding.

For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a social contract: there’s nothing legally requiring it, but there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be less positive) if you don’t follow it.

Everything that’s kind of in an employee’s favor is not socialism. You don’t have to like the idea of “work hard, help the company do well, get rewarded,” but that isn’t socialism. It’s just a thing you don’t like.

>Companies have always been for shareholders.

well we can trace that back to the 1920's, for one example.

>Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about?

Are you aware of what a "social contract" is? There's nothing wrong with seeking to fill in gaps of knowledge.

>This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism.

I'd be down for it, but this is almost orthogonal to the main point of the discussion. Social contracts exist in all forms of governing. Even rampant capitism has the bare bones social contract of "don't make your customers TOO angry so you can maximize extraction".

When billionaires own the media companies that influence public opinion and have legal avenues to essentially bribe elected officials, does the public have a meaningful avenue to vote anti-billionaire?