Is there some sort of bizarre political campaign on HN to try and redefine why companies exist?

Companies are legal constructs that were created to provide investors in business activities limited liability with respect to their investment in a mutual business activity. And that's it.

For their first several hundred years, companies were expected to provide benefits to their employees and the localities in which they operated in exchange for that limited liability. (And see what happened to Lloyd's of London's shareholders to understand why that is a more than fair exchange.)

If companies want to be all about "benefit for the shareholders" and to hell with everyone else, then its about time we take away the limited liability.

We’ve broken our society to think this. Shareholders should be third, after customers and employees. Or at the very least we need to ban the phrase “job creators” for the rest of time if employers are just supposed to stomp on their employees whenever possible.

Capitalism really breaks people's brains sometimes. It isn't about who owns the profit. An employer/employee relationship is a business agreement. That includes an implicit (and sometimes explicit) agreement to regularly reevaluate employee compensation based off a combination of employee and company performance. This decision severs that connection. Now there is no level of employee performance which can yield better compensation. There is also no reason to believe this will change in the future because this decision is not motivated by a lack of money. It is motivated by the desire to increase profits. That desire isn't going to go away in the future.

And if we must truly take the perspective of the shareholders, this is a stupid move because that link between performance and compensation is the primary motiving factor for many employees to put actual effort into their job. Why should any Microsoft employee put in anything but the minimal effort at this point? Is personal pride the best remaining reason?

Freezing salaries for all employees doesn't seem like a sustainable way to save money in the long run and the second order effects would probably destroy shareholder value not create it

Fiduciary duty was not always the end-all-be-all of corporate decision making. This has been a see-saw battle between employee wellness, customer satisfaction, and shareholder returns, and we are at the apex of shareholder dominance currently. But that does not mean this is set in stone. General Electric explicitly put employee wellness and customer satisfaction above shareholders in the their business documents as late as the 70s.

Unhappy employees have a way of making shareholders unhappy in the long-term.

Having said that, the decision probably involved more than the shareholders point of view.

i thought the answer was Jack welch philosophy of management: always overhire and then prune 10% of your workforce every year. the theorey goes that way, you keep the best and loose the rest. But, that assumes that employees are interchangable like cogs which isn't true. plus, most companies aren't necessarily able to determine who's best and worst and may even end up laying off those who are better.

> So overhiring in some light does look bad, on the other hand it gives some people the necessary experience for their next step in their carrers.

Not if they were let go before their first year, which has been the case at a lot of tech companies recently.

New hires, juniors especially, need a lot of time to onboard. Lessons in the first weeks and months of a new job will be more about company-specific tooling and minutiae, not engineering in the broader scope. Portable lessons come later, usually after you've found your legs.

> If they believe it will increase profits without longterm harm then layoffs/salary freezes are the right thing for them to do as a company even if they are wildly successful.

And that doesn't need to be the case. Many of these multi-national big tech companies have failed to move forward with layoffs in some countries because of laws that protect workers.

For example, in some countries, companies need to prove that they're struggling in order to lay people off.

If, say, Sundar was only offered a $100M package instead of a $226M package, where would he go that would pay him more than $100M? There's no other person out there who would do the job for $100M?

An issue would be that Sundar is plugged into Google and knows all the ins and outs and has the relationships that an outsider would take some time to learn/form, but on the same hand, Sundar going out into the wide world is then lacking those same things at his new company, meaning new companies might be as hesitant to hire him as Google would be to hire a new outsider CEO.