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Comment by shigawire | Hacker News Reader

Some companies operate differently too. Obviously they still watch the bottom line, but some aren't as reactionary and are willing to take more pain to keep employees because they understand the value of that goodwill. More commonly private companies with a strong-willed founder/leader.

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Agreed. I work for a privately held company and am a bit less jaded about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the company is my friend or anything… but I know how much the owner hates layoffs on an emotional level and have seen the company do things like shifting everybody to 4.5 day weeks temporarily to avoid the need for layoffs. So I respect that.

I don't even think "pain to keep employees" is the right word here - Amazon for instance is still highly profitable, it's just that the profits went down a bit (which is to be expected if the economy is worse). But they're still laying off people just to make the bottom line look even better...

Believe it or not, Amazon is not a charity. I don't know why you expect them to hold on to employees who are evidently a loss to their bottom line.

That's assuming the downturn is 100% explained by employees underperforming. It's more likely that market forces outside of these employees control caused the downturn.

The correct wording is “Amazon will do anything they deem necessary to make their shareholders happy, no matter if it’s profitable or not.”

I am convinced they have zero data indicating firing these people will be profitable on the long run, only that short term it is, and that’s all that shareholders are interested in.

I’m a big fan of any measure making stock exchange less volatile, like some form of tax on every transaction, to slow down the machine, make short term investments (speculation) less rewarding. This may help in reducing the appetite of shareholders for such short sighted measures.

Your argument is flawed. Reactionary firing tends to be inefficient, but makes shareholders happy on the short term.

Should a company prioritise shareholder happiness over efficiency is the real question here. Their losses don’t originate from these employees nor initiatives; it originates from market conditions.

> Some companies operate differently too.

Can you give some examples? Of big companies with more than a few thousand employees I mean.

Personally I'm doubtful that they exist.

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