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The very idea of separating humanity from the system we live in will never sit right with me. Jobs are purely transactional on paper, sure, but in the end, we'r
by folkrav 4y ago
The very idea of separating humanity from the system we live in will never sit right with me. Jobs are purely transactional on paper, sure, but in the end, we're not _just_ dealing with jobs, but people and their livelihoods. We're simply lucky enough to be in a field where saving up and building a financial security cushion is doable.
In practice, accountability only seems to go up so far. I shortly did consulting for a company that did large layoffs in early COVID days. The board played the "we take responsibility" card, cut in their own salaries, but scratch a little bit under the fresh coat of paint and most of the board's income isn't that mostly symbolic salary. The ones effectively paying the price were the file and rank, as usual.
- chipgap98 4y agoI think it could be a bit easier to think of things this way if there were a stronger social safety net, especially in the USA. Also I think the scale of the company you work at has an impact on this. The larger the company, the less personal treatment I would expect.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- surement 4y agowhat about accountability to the people who took a risk investing in the company? maybe the CEO didn't predict the future however many months or years ago to get to a point where no layoffs would've been necessary, but maybe this would've been at the cost of less growth, possibly having worse consequences the idea of "humanity" is completely opaque, it's not that hard to look at the reality instead
- folkrav 4y ago"The reality" is jobs = people. We don't live in a vacuum. It's seriously not that hard either. Between the hundreds of thousands of regular people losing their livelihoods and some investors losing money ("don't invest what you can't afford to lose" something something), doesn't sound too complicated for me. Humanity is not opaque unless you make it so, like this particular system does. It's just people.
- surement 4y agoif you don't have money to pay employees then they're out of a job, and if you don't grow you don't get investors and don't hire people please explain how "humanity" solves this
- f6v 4y agoIt’s called “Japan”. Low performers are kept in corporations to do nothing all day while many of their peers work themselves to death.
- folkrav 4y agoAre you implying 100000+ people getting laid off in a handful of months merely is about weeding off "underperformers"?
- darkwater 4y agoHumanity solves this by having an entrepreneur that just wants to have a business up & running in a sustainable, bootstrapped way, that will give jobs to X people earning Y in salary, while the founder in the long run will earn 5-7Y salary. Instead of having founders that want to be billionaires with VC money in a 5 years time-frame. There is still risk, and a business might fail and jobs be lost, but the scale is different.
- folkrav 4y agoTherefore coming back to my initial comment: the very system we live in is based on this conception that we have to forego treating people like humans and have to consider them as mere "resources" just to make it work. Not pretending like I have a solution in the current context. It just will never sit right with me, that's all.