LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to share the loot that much either.
I personally think the cutoff point is somewhere between 30-50 employees.
There's no easy way out. I'm sure the big guys are all run by sociopaths, but the few i talked to really struggled with it. It really boils down to, some people are out of a job today, or everyone is out of a job in 6 months.
This also includes the early detection of impending doom where everybody takes a 10% paycut - executives take a lot more (for a while anyway). So you can get away without a layoff. That guy felt the business would have been better if he let 10% go. The one time event can start healing immediately. That twice a month reminder of how much less you're making keeps the wound open a lot longer.
I've never met one who didn't (effectively) say "I failed and those folks paid the price"
Both Google and Bing link to your comment as the canonical source for that quote from Barksdale.
Some googling did drag up this interview, so presumably I did not dream it: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-17/business/fi-47920_1_n...
The fact that you can become a billionaire after founding two money losing enterprises is so confusing.
It's not money losing as far as Williams is concerned -- somebody paid him mucho dinero for it.
A corporation would never take a new grad, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of 1:1 time to teach and mentor them, put that person's name front and center on all the products they've worked on, and celebrate when that person moves up to another company.
I doubt academia is inherently any more humane than corporations - the drive is pride and recognition instead of money but they compete just like businesses do.
I think we both agree that academia and businesses compete, but by humane I mean that the people producing the work are invested in by the faculty and universities. That the graduate student's life-long success is the university's success, and that the output is the scholar as much as the work they produced.
My point is simply that a corporation doesn't care for a person besides the work they do for them, which is a different culture from academia.