2024 has seen two mass layoffs at Microsoft, with 1900 staff laid off in January, before a further 650 Xbox employees were shown the door in September.
Regardless, Microsoft’s shares are up and the company’s market value is now higher than $3tn, as it works to capitalise on the rise of AI.
When I entered the work force in 2005, it was with a company that had never had a layoff in its thirty-year history.
Then, in 2009, they had their first layoff, and I learned later our CEO had taken an 80% pay raise that year.
Taxes aren’t theft. Literally firing people and taking their salaries is theft.
Also that CEO has an eminently punchable face.
tautological
Taxes are theft the specific way they are designed in most countries.
Another example of theft is a hired administrator administrating by the criterion of their own pay.
I mean, it is understandable how this works - their pay is a counterweight to the incentive to “mismanage” the company if someone else pays a fitting price. The issue here is that these two incentives do not completely neutralize each other, in some dimension their components add up.
Why I had to say that taxes are still theft - because a CEO is equivalent to a state official in this issue. It’s the same problem.
Political ideologies divide these problems, because political ideologies are like hedge funds, they diversify investments, so that every political ideology could be usable in every landscape for every policy. They are the opposite of consistent, by design.
Taxes aren’t because they come from societal structure i.e agreement that we’re better off pooling resources
Is that your reading comprehension or my bad English?
It’s clearly you
OK.
The CEO is supposed to maximize the profits of investors or owners or whatever, not act like in this example.
Just like the government to which you pay taxes is supposed to use it for some public good.
Neither do what they are supposed to do, because that requires some kind of checks by a mechanism above both, and there’s no such.
Is that more clear, or have my bad English and bad explaining skills failed you again?
This is much better but your previous comment was awful. It read like a LLM alone wrote it.
That being said I can’t tell you why specifically it reads like that. I’m forwarding it to my friend who is a English professor to find out. If English is your second language then just keep at it and please don’t take the criticism here personally.
Inconsistency of style most likely.
Great reply. I’m not into escalation. Only read the “taxes is theft”
OK. I further made equivalence between that CEO and the government which you charge with making use of taxes.
You make zero sense and I feel dumber to have read your comment.
and I feel dumber to have read your comment
Then I have improved your self-consciousness. Thank you.
Sit down Billy.
In case you missed it, in our broken model of civilization a CEO’s only responsibility is to increase value for shareholders. Not to clients, not to employees, not to the biosphere.
Market cap increased, job’s done successfully.
A) 1971, Economist Milton Friedman explicitly told the world the “only social responsibility” for businesses is to increase shareholder value. The Business Roundtable heartily endorsed this view, setting the stage for the next half century of villains to gleefully enrich themselves without compunction.
B) 2019, Business Roundtable reversed their 50 year position to include that businesses should be beholden to all Stakeholders, not just shareholders.
But of course the damage has been done, and continues onward. To compound this, the FED’s open-purse monetary policy for 14 YEARS ushered in the worst inflation in 40 years, while wages have stagnated for 4 decades, kicking off around the time Baby Boomers were birthing the first Millennial children.
These are just some of the reasons Millennials lay the bulk of culpability at the feet of Baby Boomers, who of course respond with something like: “Well, I don’t remember that.”
Because of layoffs, not despite them.
That’s roughly 30k for every employee laid off
Sounds like an easy sell to the board, then. It it’s that much of a net positive in economics.
If they were software engineers, they saved $200,000+ per person laid off
That’s how he makes dem big bux, by telling other people to fuck off
So the CEO gets less than half their salary for the year?
Sounds like a great deal for the company. Until, you know, the whole thing collapses because they laid off the workers who kept the whole thing running
My math says roughly $12k
79,000,000 / 2,550 = 30,980
The increase is only 30 mill
Gotcha, sounds like we’re measuring two different things then
Yeah. He was already making 49, I was looking at how much of the redistribution went to him, not much, but I imagine it’ll go to stock buybacks or AI electricity
Yeah maybe to their three mile island project. What a weird sentence. Just a few years off from our Weyland Yutani future
That’s some real bald-headed behavior if you ask me.
I’m bald.
I think the author got confused, it’s not despite off it’s because of.
Trickle down economics - when the 1% tinkle on the remainder.
Trickle down was a rebrand.
It used to be called “Horse and Sparrow economics.”
Idea being: The horses eat buckets of whole grains. And the sparrows pick their meal from the horseshit.
Never heard that. Regardless, i love it.
He made $12000 off each fired employee.
Per year. And lets not talk about his stock options and other benefits… Fucking disgusting.
Headline confused “despite” and “due to”
yeah lol what do they think is happening here
When was the last time you got a 63% raise?
70% workload raise
Well his compensation is tied to the stock price so it’s not exactly a “raise.” My employer’s stock is near an all time high right now so I’m not complaining about how much I made from the shares I sold, but neither do I consider it a “raise” because it’s not guaranteed to be the same next year.
At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.
Yeah pretty much. Everything about it is a hedge. They can pay less if their numbers tell them to. They can lay you off and not give you anything. They can make more cash disappear if they have to. It’s the squirrelliest shit yet they cast it like a gift from god.
March 2023
Eh, congrats! New Job?
I’m self employed.
Found out I’m depressed, decided to reduce work to 3 days a week.
Raised prices to reduce clients. Turns out I now make more, doing less work. It is what it is.
I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.
Dont mean to pry, but I’ll gladly do whatever you’re doing
He’s mainly dealing with depression.
Only 2 days a week for depression? Rookie numbers
Typical and most people in the US view CEO’s as heroes. US income distribution is on the same level as fucking Russia.
As someone from fucking Russia, people with biggest income in your country are usually first businessmen, second - something else, while in Russia those would be cockroaches from MFA, PA and other thieves, plus a few oligarchs who at some point were among those cockroaches.
So it may not be as bad yet, but frankly yes, you are giving out vibes of going in the same direction.
US is the OG oligarchy, but we cosplay “Democracy” to cope
I agree, but yours are real oligarchs, while those I’m talking about are a relatively new thing for you.
Russian-style ones are just blokes from one and the same corporation who chose they want to be celebrities. A façade. They used oligarchy as a scapegoat in the 90s, to avoid lustration while it still could be done.
I see your point. In US our oligarchs run the show. In russia, they submit to the “President” to obtain the position.
The board doesn’t care about the number of people employed. They care about the current profitability and future profitability.
Of course that’s their job; to look after shareholder interests. And the money would move to a better investment if they didn’t.
It’s the whole system you need to change, if you seek change, not moan about an individual CEO.
That’s why Mitbestimmungsgesetz can be goddamn fucking awesome.
That would literally change everything for the better.
I’ve never heard of that. That’s a cool idea.
That would be awesome, but would have limited results if there are still a few enormous companies with patent and IP laws preventing competition.
You can’t have that eternal fight between democratic egalitarian monopoly and competitive jungle. The whole point of civilization is to have both representation and competition.
I don’t see how paying him so much is actually increasing dividends though.
Pay him half as much or find someone else who will do it for half as much
Current profitability is up. Profit margins are also up from last year. But I could see investors looking at the lack of any path after the current Xbox and wondering why they employ so many there. I’m sure other areas have also seen some stagnation.
This is why every profession, blue or white collar, needs to unionize.
They should be paying 90% tax over 1 million.
The entire point of AI as it stands right now is to allow more of those layoffs. Anyone telling otherwise is a liar.
Also I hate how currently, AI is used to remove the fun parts of creating things at a computer. Take coding for example, I think I can speak for many people when I say that the fun part of their job, is not the planning or the meetings, it’s the actual coding and stumbling upon a hard problem to solve. Now with AI you the human will only keep the boring parts of the job!
Don’t overestimate LLMs, it can’t code and never will be. It can create templates convincingly enough and do boilerplate parts that are nonsense only sometimes, but those aren’t the fun parts of the coding process anyway. In my experience, LLM isn’t helping at all and I spend more time fixing it’s nonsense than I would do if I don’t use it at all, so I don’t
As someone without a computer science background and who started learning Python for data science shortly before LLMs became mainstream, I gotta say it’s been pretty useful for the learning process. I don’t mean I just use it to write scripts for me but rather it can be a useful sorta of guide the way a scripted advisor mihht be in a game. Seems to me that one of the good sides of LLMs is that they can make technically dofficult fields more accessible as long as you understand its limits and know what it can and cant do._ i would never use it for any sort of subjective issue but I find it great for logical tasks. And this is not to say that’s its perfect for that either but it has increased my efficiency for certain work tasks tremendously.
As someone with degrees and decades of experience, I urge you not use it for that. It’s a cleverly disguised randomness machine, it will give you incorrect information that will be indistinguishable from truth because “truth” is never the criteria that it can use, but be convincing is. It will seed those untruths into you and unlearning bad practices that you picked up at the beginning might take years and cost you a career. And since you’re just starting, you have no idea how to pick up bullshit from truth as long as the final result seem to work, and that’s the works way to hide the bullshit from you.
The field is already very accessible for everyone who wants to learn it, the amount of guides, examples, teaching courses, very useful youtube videos with thick Indian accent is already enormous, and most of them are at least trying to self-correct, while LLM actively doesn’t, in fact it’s trying to do the opposite.
Best case scenario you’re learning inefficiently, worst case scenario you aren’t learning at allThank you, I will take this into consideration. It sure is tempting to use LLMs but I will always trust experts in the field over LLMs.
Yeah, the scary thing about LLMs is that by their very nature they sound convincing and it’s very easy to fall into a trap, we as humans are hardwired to misconstrue the ability to talk smoothly for intelligence, and when computer started to speak with complete sentences and hold the immediate context of a conversation, we immediately started to think that we have a thinking machine and started believing it.
The worst thing is, there are legit uses for all the machine learning stuff and LLMs in particular, so we can’t just throw it all out of the window, we will have to collectively adapt to this very convincing randomness machine that is just here all the time
Exactly how I am feeling. AI took the fun part away of cracking a problem and the satisfaction of solving it is now gone.
