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Comment by mkohlmyr | Hacker News Reader

That's just silly though, if you see a bad trend, make adjustments to buck it? Just because you're "still making a profit" doesn't mean you're doing well or even that you aren't on the road to disaster. And unfortunately when you are a public company, your responsibility on this front is to your shareholders, not to your employees.

If it were a private company I'd agree to a certain extent, assuming that they could see an alternative way to stop this downward trend. However as a public company, constant growth is a must.

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"And unfortunately when you are a public company, your responsibility on this front is to your shareholders, not to your employees."

I don't think it's as clear cut as that.

Isn't blindly cutting costs just effectively destroying company infrastructure?

"However as a public company, constant growth is a must."

But just laying people off does not guarantee growth.

That said, I have no idea how the company is structured or operates. Sometimes laying people off is kinda necessary, i.e. a company with a factory that manufactures product X, suddenly there is no market for X , and the factory cannot be reconfigured to create profit - yeah, that's clear cut.

IMO, generic sweeping statements like "removing n percent of personnel is necessary to cut costs" is impossible to gauge in negative or positive light without detailed understanding of the business or it's operations.

There is no need to judge negatively or positively. It's the business' own business.

"There is no need to judge negatively or positively. It's the business' own business."

Free markets are nice - but there is a historically proven need for government control (pollution and child labour, etc). This means not all things are business' own business.

All actions have an ethical dimension into them. Financials are a very good indicator of the long term business prospects of an enterprise but they are not the only thing that matters when evaluating their impact in the greater human context.

Each business has a varying group of stakeholders who are impacted by the decisions made by the business - employees and shareholders are the obvious subgroups. The community where the business operations are situated is often a secondary stakeholder as well.

As an example before environment protection acts came along, companies polluted carelessly, thus causing a massive negative externality which impacted the surrounding communities. Flaming river? Not so nice.

The environmental effects were considered to be such a high impact problem that the companies were forced to modify their operations to seize pollution. Creating this legislation most assuredly required negative judging of the operations of a large number of business.

Like I said - I have no idea of this Lenovo business - but claiming all external judgement of third parties null by a blanket statement is not necessarily the best way to look at things.

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