It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.
Actually, it is. You have been blinded by capitalism to consider it ethical.
The tribes usually treat the members as a family. While kicking someone from a tribe can happen, it's considered to be a harsh punishment.
In a tribe, when hard times come, people usually redistribute. That's a normal, human way of dealing with that situation. Not a layoff.
The other aspect is the economic crises. When a central bank decides to increase interest rates, it decreases lending to new investments in favor of lower inflation. This can lead to layoffs, instead of having inflation inflicted on everyone (especially the rich with huge savings). So that decision is essentially some random guys get kicked out of economic (and societal) participation in order to prevent more redistribution of existing wealth.
If you think about it, yes layoffs are deeply immoral. But we can understand, why they happen in capitalism, as a sort of big tragedy of the commons.
My employer is not my “tribe”. That is crazy. We have a contract saying I do X units of work and they pay me Y in return. Either of us end it at any time.
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
What we have in the USA is not necessarily the final and best form of all interactions, as much as it pains me to say it.
Most people's reactions to large-scale movements like this seem to imply that we feel there should be something more than a simple "money duty" between employer and employee, and we seem to also have respect for companies that act that way (e.g, some Japanese companies perhaps, or baseball teams keeping a sick player on the payroll so they get healthcare even though they never play another game).
Attempting to realize that duty and at the same time abscond it to the state or the family may be an aspect of the failing.
No, that's another sort of misconception, also expressed in another comment by WalterBright, which conveniently ignores the reality of most jobs.
It glosses over the fact that employers exercise control over the social relations required for production (of anything larger that can be built by a self-employed person). This happens by virtue of owning all the crucial means of production involved. And that point, where you need to coordinate work of several people, it ceases to be a system of contractors who freely determine their working conditions, and becomes a collective that has a common goal.
So no, it's not case in the U.S., in no economy of the world is majority of production organized into everyone being a little independent contractor who brings (or rents) their own equipment. That would be horribly inefficient (not to mention that people don't want it either, by and large).
There is a clear rebut to this, how can employer own the social relations (required for production), like managerial relationships, when they ostensibly only own the factory equipment? Well, it's like when you own an appartment, you technically only own the four walls, but practically you also enjoy the privacy that comes with it. In a similar way, capitalists owning a factory don't just rent equipment to a bunch workers, but can dictate the whole social superstructure of production, including the redistribution of earnings.
And yet, employers love to use the "we're a family", "we're a team", and other such messaging, especially in the tech industry. They elide the transactional nature of the entire relationship.
Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
> Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Sure. Also the profitability of a company is just a number, and shareholders dividend is just fiduciary fictions, and company hierarchy is just arbitrary title attaching this or that person to this or that loosely defined role.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
Actually they kinda do, for example worker cooperatives. Not common, have some issues (different than those claimed by propaganda), but they do exist. (If we understand "marxist" as somewhat in favor of worker emancipation instead of alienation. Marx was an eclectic guy and can be interpreted in different ways.)
Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer. You really don’t see that an individual is not on equal footing with multibillion company? It is absolutely immoral. And I’m not even talking about charity, those people were hired and did actual job for the fucking trillion dollar company.
Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
> Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Don’t give me a sob story about mom and pop shop, we’re talking about a trillion dollar company.
> Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
> The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
So you’re confirming my point that billion dollar companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have disproportionately more power over individuals or what are you saying?
> It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
Workers don’t work at will. Last time I checked UBI is not there, so workers work to pay the bills and put food on the table.
> billion dollar companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have disproportionately more power over individuals or what are you saying?
They have zero power over individuals. They cannot make you work. They cannot prevent you from working for someone else. They cannot arrest you. They cannot confiscate things from you. They cannot tell you were to live. They cannot shoot your dog. They cannot evict you. They cannot fine you. They cannot tell you what to do after hours. You can quit at any time for any reason. Your rights are completely intact.
> Workers don’t work at will.
"at will" has a legal meaning, meaning they can work or quit or change jobs at any time. No law or company rule can prevent that.
Ah, there's your fallacy - you seem to think that when someone has a legal right to exercise some right, that also means they have a freedom (in the practical sense) to exercise that right.
I've known people who chained themselves to their desk by spending 110% of their income. They built a financial house of cards which could not withstand any interruption in their pay.
It was chains of their own making, the company was not even aware of it.
They weren't poor people, either. They had a McMansion, nice furniture, snazzy clothes and his&hers new cars.
A friend of mine, much lower on the pay scale, came to me once for some financial advice. He was married, and lived in a modest apartment. He could not pay the bills. The problem was he had his+hers new cars with stiff payments. I advised him to sell the cars, and buy ones he could afford. I was surprised that he followed my advice, and got his finances back on their feet.
A reasonable goal is to save/invest 20% of your income.
P.S. You can cut spending dramatically by getting a roommate. I had roommates for years.
> Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer.
Ironically, you (along with a significant number of others) deciding to buy from a competitor will eventually lead to financial trouble for Safeway and thus to layoffs and losses for their investors (pension funds among them).
So, do you find your decision to buy from Fred Meyer "absolutely immoral"?!
I don’t think there’s any point in having a conversation with you if you don’t see any difference between employment, community, civic duty and market. If you treat people as a market product, then we have even less to discuss.
It is unethical, if there was nothing wrong with their performance and the company never tried to find a replacement position within the company. Stop licking boots, I heard they don’t even taste that good.
When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic
There’s weirdly-weak evidence that the layoff-happy strategy is actually better for long term company health than trying to retain workers through down periods. Like, it’s kinda just something you do now because it’s “how things are done” but it wasn’t always that way, and it might not even be the right call for profit-maximizing.
Ironically, you picked two systems that are heavily interfered with by the government.
Back in the Great Depression, my great grandmother got sick and was hospitalized, and they took care of her until she passed. My grandfather did not have enough to pay the bill. The hospital told him not to worry, just pay what he could. It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
How? The government runs it, and/or heavily regulates it, and shifts costs.
> and they're better off for it
In the US, the cost of medical care rose in step with inflation until 1968. After that, it rose at a much steeper rate, and has not slowed down. 1968 was when the government got involved with health care.
Countries with a heavily-interfered health care system are poorer as a result.
My great grandmother's brother, Frank Taylor, fought in the Union Army. He later became a bodyguard for Buffalo Bill. And that's all I know about him, and the personal side of the Civil War.
Keep in mind that doctoring was pretty primitive in those days. A doctor could set your broken bones and sew up wounds, and that's about it. You got better or you died. Doctors were called "sawbones" in those days.
> How long was “a while” specifically?
If I recall correctly, it took him 3 years. I don't know much about his finances.
I do know that his first job was shoveling coal in a steamship, which is a filthy, rotten job.
ah yes, the high standard of living inlcuding checks notes world-leading medical bankruptcies, collapsing life expectancy despite insane healthcare spending, crippling student debt, unaffordable housing that requires a trust fund just to rent, and wages that stagnated decades ago while corporate profits and CEO pay skyrocketed.
i spent $57 on a regular size pack of paper towels and toilet paper in the bay area yesterday
Interestingly, you mentioned the trifecta of industries most interfered with by the government - healthcare, education, and housing.
The government puts its foot on the scale there.
In contrast, look at the software industry. No regulations, yet highly sophisticated software where the price went to zero. I just reinstalled Ubuntu on my (now fixed!) computer, and every bit of the software was 100% free. And I give away the software I write for it!
I get that this is exhausting, but the rank-and-file employee is just doing their job. This is like people attacking McDonalds employees because they were out of Szechuan Sauce [0].
The author _clearly_ had a way to accomplish their goal. Why could they not just say "ok that's inconvenient, but I'll just use this online service to send my existing PDF".
If you ran a business, would you rather your devs work on feature X that could bring in Y revenue, or spend that same time reducing CPU/RAM/storage utilization by Z% and gives the benefit of ???
You work on both. Sometimes you need to prioritize one, sometimes the other. And the benefit of the second option is "it makes our product higher quality, both because that is our work ethic but also because our customers will appreciate a quality product".
The business is only going to care about the bottom line. If it's not slow enough to cause business problems, they are not going to say "here's a week to make software faster"
Likewise engineers are only going to care about doing their job. If the business doesn't reward them from taking on optimization work, why would they do it?
This is not true of all engineers and all businesses. Some businesses really do 'get it' and will allow engineers to work on things that don't directly help stated goals. Some engineers are intrinsically motivated and will choose to work on things despite that work not helping their career.
What I'm really getting is, yes, engineers choose "slower" technologies (e.g. electron, React) because there are other benefits, e.g. being able to get work done faster. This is a completely rational choice even if it does lead to "waste" and poor performance.
I agree with this. What you focus on depends on the circumstances. I believe PaulG likes to say that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Early on, you’re trying to ship and get a functioning product out the door — if spending a bit of money on extra RAM at that time helps you, it’s worth it. Over time, as you are trying to optimize, it makes sense to think more about memory management, etc.
There is probably some low hanging fruit to be harvested in terms of memory optimizations, and it could be a selling point for the next while as the memory shortage persists
That is why we have slow, bloated software. The companies that create the software do not have to pay any of the operational costs to run it.
If you have to buy extra RAM or pay unnecessary electrical or cooling expenses because the code is bad; it's not their problem. There is no software equivalent to MPG measurements for cars where efficient engine designs are rewarded at the time of purchase.
Is there a 'sqlite equivalent' for RAG? e.g. something I could give Claude w/o a backend and say use command X to add a document, command Y to search, all in a flat file?
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