Hundred thousand real people get anxiety, constant stress, malnutrition, some probably die. All because assholes in suits are playing their game. Rest of society just accepts that “this is how the world works” and “capitalism is not flawless but it’s the best we’ve come up with”. Another year in paradise. Thank god for being alive.
Humana@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I use to work in HR for a medium sized, publicly traded company. Here’s how it works:
Wall Street banks set quarterly profit targets for companies. If the companies hit the target, stock goes up, if they don’t it goes down.
If stock goes down too much, C-suite is usually fired. This is what motivates them.
There is usually a few weeks between when the company calculates it’s quarterly numbers and when they are legally obligated to report them.
If the profits aren’t up to the Wall Street calculation, the C-suite panics and 95% of the time will go on a firing spree so when the numbers do become public they can claim they analyzed the company and magically found it was overstaffed, and already took care of the “problem”. This is an attempt to save their own jobs.
In truth they did the firings in such a hurry nothing was seriously looked at, no significant problems were discovered, and the employees let go were closer to random than carefully selected based on performance and need. This happens every quarter all across America.
riodoro1@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Botzo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The Jack Welch playbook!
Cruxifux@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No, it was doomed from the get go. Jack Welch is a symptom of a broken system, not the cause of it.
That being said, fuck that guy.
snek@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You know people get all sorts of existential dread thinking about an AI maximizing for paperclip production, but what scares me the most is jerks maximing for money and how they will not stop at anything. And they’re not even AIs yet. Mr. Burns embodied.
Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 year ago
Who do you think had a hand training the computer models on expected performance levels
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
The profit expectations the company itself sets also play a big part of it as well I think. When a company says they’ll be really profitable, but it’s only very profitable, everybody loses their shit.
2piradians@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is good insight, thank you.
It seems to me this is all a stalling tactic for unprofitable companies. Is that correct?
Humana@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not necessarily. I witnessed this firsthand at a company that was actually VERY profitable, just not as profitable as Wall Street had expected.
When a company underperforms, the first place C-suite looks to cut is headcount.