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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people; they don't have ethics and morals. All that matters is the balance sheet, the stock price, and the executive bonus.

You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jellyfish; the more you feed them, the larger they grow, the bigger impact they have on their environment. No real thoughts, just an urge to consume and expand.

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That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

> an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).

If behaving ethically didn't cost anything, everyone would do it.

> at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins

This is wildly oversimplifying. For example, it theoretically rules out principle-agent problems.

While true, you can somewhat assume that the principle could have already incentivized the agent to align by assigning rewards for increasing profits (aka, bonuses, stock grants based on performance targets etc).

> you can somewhat assume that the principle could have already incentivized the agent to align by assigning rewards for increasing profits

No, you can’t. This is the problem of corporate management. Management will tend to act to maximise profit margins or even the stock price is a bad explanatory model.

>at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins

Over what time frame?

You're absolutely right; shame on whoever made the decisions! In this case, it was certainly within their power to make a better choice, and they should have done.

However, if you want tech jobs to have a higher and guaranteed severance, national legislation might be more effective.

After all, many acquisitions and layoffs are at companies that are in dire financial straits, which limits discretionary spending.

I'm certainly a fan of legislation to require severance. That said I'm also all about shaming bad actors so that other workers are aware of what they can expect when engaging them.

There is no reason to involve businesses in the equation. If your goal is to ensure people have cash in the event they are terminated from their job, then have the government give them cash in the event they are terminated from their job.

Why should the taxpayers bear this cost instead of the business who is choosing to terminate the person, especially in situations like those discussed where it has nothing to do with the performance of the individual?

The government can collect taxes from the businesses, and call it something like unemployment insurance premiums in the US.

There is no reason to over complicate things and require businesses to directly pay, figure out how much cash to always have to be able to pay, hire auditors to make sure they have enough cash, then take them to court when they don’t have enough cash to pay, yadda yadda.

Business sells product or service. Employee sells labor to business. Government takes care of the safety nets.

> That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.

In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.

Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.

But how? I can’t know if I’m buying xyz software if 3rd level manager Janet acted ethically, or not. There are many other people involved. Companies always claim to be ethical, in some way that might even be true.

That's the point/trick of the status quo. It's impossible as a "consumer" to make choices that can meaningfully impact anybody's behavior in a system like this.

The only way to achieve a change in behavior in corporations is to change the regulatory framework in which they operate.

In the narrow context of the OP, this doesn't even need to be very heavy handed (unlike say environmental devastation, which is a much bigger challenge). One option would be to pass legislation that makes it harder for megacorps like Cisco to eat smaller companies. Another would be to make layoffs relatively more expensive (require better severance, etc) or to limit them during the M&A phase that Splunk is currently in.

> Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people.

What the USSC said was that voluntary associations of people don’t forfeit the rights of the individuals in the association.

Ethics an morals have financial upside, for people and groups of people (companies). For instance, do to their past behavior, and its publicity, Cisco is likely to lose many more competent employees during an acquisition than had they behaved otherwise.

I would say that a lack of ethics has more financial upside

There are probably several local maxima on the distribution curve. At some point having dogmatic, extreme ethics probably hampers getting everything down, and the worst, most cartoonishly evil company also is leaving money on the table. In the less extreme, I think you probably have three schelling points. 1) High-Integrity companies that promote and use the culture of ethics to attract customers and employees. It probably is industry specific if this works. 2) You have "ethics agnostic", but legal" companies that just do focus on near-term profit maximizations and while they may have individuals trying to make ethical choices, the organizational structure won't reward that outside of the whatever profit it generates. Non ethical behavior that gets bad press or crosses idealogical lines, gets dropped fast if not profitable and arbitrarily depending on leadership otherwise. 3) Then you have companies covering up illegal/fraudulent issues, where the incentives are to double-down and reinforce the behavior.

Depends the environment you're working in - there are several cultures within the US where I think your statement is quite true... but in general people find that working for a company that doesn't care for them is a detriment and will demand higher compensation due to the obvious risk. That all said - you should always be defensive as an employee about how much risk you accept on yourself since the employer/employee relationship can be terminated suddenly and without any real recourse in most circumstances.

Depends on the circumstances. If you are trying to make a valuable product, good ethics will probably serve you better than bad ones in a majority of cases. If you aren't concerned with generating real value and are fine with running your company and reputation into the ground, then sure.

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