5 ms·

Management guru Tom Peters has claimed all you need to do is outsource; and the minimal corporation is a CEO with a computer & phone. This was in the 90s, tho.

andi999 6y ago
True. But services you need all the time are or at least should be much cheaper in house. I mean your inhouse lawyer probably costs 100/h, outsourced 400/h.
- internet_user 6y ago
  Where do you find such cheap in-house counsel? just 100/hr? Never seen them this cheap, maybe out of school, but experienced counsel for 100/hr?
  - andi999 6y ago
    Germany? So lets say 25/h is overhead (office space etc), 1680 workhours per year, so about 125k. Taking 80% to calculate the employees gross salary gives 100k annual. As far as I understand this is a very decent salary. How much do you pay inhouse councils in your country?
    - internet_user 6y ago
      varies a lot. 100k would be a newbie. probably from 150 to 250++?
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Total compensation for most attorneys even in high CoL cities at Big Tech firms doesn't eclipse $150/hr. That's hourizing an annual wage of $300k.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    According to BLS, median hourly earnings of a lawyer in the US is merely $59.11. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm
CydeWeys 6y ago
This clearly doesn't actually work though; how many Fortune 500 companies can you point to that use a mostly outsourced employee base, even for their core functions? The closest you can get is likely an Uber or similar, but all they've outsourced is drivers and janitors; they still employ many thousands of engineers, salespeople, etc. Also, the management chain still exists, it's just at a different company. But from the worker's perspective that's irrelevant; just as many people still have bosses.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Well that is a bit of a showing up to a luxury/sports car/truck discussion and saying 'my daily driver is a bicycle' philosophical difference/smartassery. It is clearly objectively worse in several ways (cargo capacity, max speed, environmental conditions) but better in ways that the others don't even try for (no emissions, gives exercise to the operator, negligible road wear). They fundamentally aren't even trying for a monolith but to become 'independent' as possible. Less charitably it could be called sophistry to self-justify their flaws and failings. A hypothetical 'outsource everything' company would be perfectly agile because everything else is fungible replaced with whoever is doing the outsourcing regardless of what is going on everywhere else. The downsides are not only that they are the reverse ofvertically intergrated in that they give up margins to everyone else in the chain and that they have no differentiator other than what they can provide as 'middleware' and outsourcing everything to stay that agile means that it is shrank by design. They would have to provide real value margin as a middleman in order to exist long term vs the clients 'just putting all of the pieces themselves'.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    The point is that large corporations have fundamentally moved society forward in many ways that small single-person companies simply cannot do. You don't get smartphones and automobiles and electricity without large corporations. People can talk all day about how people shouldn't have bosses, but they don't stop and consider what civilization would actually look like if that were true. It would look radically different from today.
sjy 6y ago
That’s not a firm, it’s just a person participating in the economy. There is a whole field of economics that asks: “having regard to the fact that if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organisation at all … why is there any organisation?” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

andi999 6y ago

True. But services you need all the time are or at least should be much cheaper in house. I mean your inhouse lawyer probably costs 100/h, outsourced 400/h.

internet_user 6y ago
Where do you find such cheap in-house counsel? just 100/hr? Never seen them this cheap, maybe out of school, but experienced counsel for 100/hr?
- andi999 6y ago
  Germany? So lets say 25/h is overhead (office space etc), 1680 workhours per year, so about 125k. Taking 80% to calculate the employees gross salary gives 100k annual. As far as I understand this is a very decent salary. How much do you pay inhouse councils in your country?
  - internet_user 6y ago
    varies a lot. 100k would be a newbie. probably from 150 to 250++?
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Total compensation for most attorneys even in high CoL cities at Big Tech firms doesn't eclipse $150/hr. That's hourizing an annual wage of $300k.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  According to BLS, median hourly earnings of a lawyer in the US is merely $59.11. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm

CydeWeys 6y ago

This clearly doesn't actually work though; how many Fortune 500 companies can you point to that use a mostly outsourced employee base, even for their core functions? The closest you can get is likely an Uber or similar, but all they've outsourced is drivers and janitors; they still employ many thousands of engineers, salespeople, etc. Also, the management chain still exists, it's just at a different company. But from the worker's perspective that's irrelevant; just as many people still have bosses.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Well that is a bit of a showing up to a luxury/sports car/truck discussion and saying 'my daily driver is a bicycle' philosophical difference/smartassery. It is clearly objectively worse in several ways (cargo capacity, max speed, environmental conditions) but better in ways that the others don't even try for (no emissions, gives exercise to the operator, negligible road wear). They fundamentally aren't even trying for a monolith but to become 'independent' as possible. Less charitably it could be called sophistry to self-justify their flaws and failings. A hypothetical 'outsource everything' company would be perfectly agile because everything else is fungible replaced with whoever is doing the outsourcing regardless of what is going on everywhere else. The downsides are not only that they are the reverse ofvertically intergrated in that they give up margins to everyone else in the chain and that they have no differentiator other than what they can provide as 'middleware' and outsourcing everything to stay that agile means that it is shrank by design. They would have to provide real value margin as a middleman in order to exist long term vs the clients 'just putting all of the pieces themselves'.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  The point is that large corporations have fundamentally moved society forward in many ways that small single-person companies simply cannot do. You don't get smartphones and automobiles and electricity without large corporations. People can talk all day about how people shouldn't have bosses, but they don't stop and consider what civilization would actually look like if that were true. It would look radically different from today.

sjy 6y ago

That’s not a firm, it’s just a person participating in the economy. There is a whole field of economics that asks: “having regard to the fact that if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organisation at all … why is there any organisation?” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm