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Comment by dauertewigkeit | Hacker News Reader

US corporations have become so large, they have started to function internally not unlike the fully fledged managed economies of the USSR. A bunch of MBAs acting as petty dictators hiring and firing at will, driven by nothing more than a few financial indicators and their intuition, i.e. they are making it up as they go, just like Stalin and Mao were doing back then.

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To support your point, this is quite literally a part of a move to decrease them from 120k to 100k employees. Who decided those arbitrary numbers, and that 100k (not 105, not 95) was the goal needed for the best interest of the company, while not even linking it to specific division within it ? Clearly not someone in touch with the day to day and nitty gritty. Not because that number is good (or not), I don't know Dell enough for that. but because that number is too round, too perfect, to be anything else than a spreadsheet result, though displayed in a "Business Intelligence" suite of course. I'm sure the guy even had a great tie.

I understand it makes sense financially and that once companies become that big they are essentially playing two game (what they do game, with the workers, and what they're worth game, with the investors), but this really doesn't help with the dissociation more and more people are feeling between the stock market / modern management of companies by mba on one side, and their "real" every day live on the other.

I'm very lucky to be well off enough to not have to worry about things like that anymore, but I can't imagine the rage you must feel when fired not because you made a mistake, or are bad, or your project failed, or your division is doing poorly, or your company is, but because someone decided the employee ticker must reach that number, and now if it's not done the market will decide it's a failure, so you won the inverse lottery.

> but because that number is too round, too perfect

Because it's an external estimate. From the article:

"That number has been guesstimated at around ten percent of the workforce – about 12,500 people – as part of an effort to get the overall workforce from 120,000 to below 100,000."

>while not even linking it to specific division within

there's no indication that they decided to cut 10% (or whatever) evenly across all divisions. The only thing we do know is that the overall reduction is 10%.

This comment matches my experience of two big tech corps. It almost feels exactly like the Soviet bureaucracy described in the book "Red Plenty". The amount of work being done is just far low compared to a small company and the gravy train is huge. The goal is to show activity not results. Nobody wants to talk about results but activity. Internal departments have de facto monopoly over their domains regardless of how shitty they are, and you need to do soviet style bartering to get what you need.

>US corporations have become so large, they have started to function internally not unlike the fully fledged managed economies of the USSR

The important difference you're missing is that unlike china or the USSR, there are competitors you can jump ship to (eg. Lenovo or HP), and Dell can't send you to the gulag for disagreeing with them.

But they can deny you severance payments if you say anything bad about them. Not all companies do this, but enough that it makes the analogy to China or the USSR more appropriate

How is "you're denied payments voluntarily made to you" anywhere close to "you get sent to the gulag"?

no. anti-disparagement clauses in severance agreements are illegal.

Thank you for pointing out my error.

"The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or the “Board”) held in a February 2023 decision, McLaren Macomb, 372 NLRB 58 (2023), that the “mere proffer” of a severance agreement which conditions receipt of benefits upon forfeiture of protected rights under the NLRA constitutes an unfair labor practice."

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/labor_law/publications/la...

While a nice meme, it doesn't at all take away from the point that many large companies operate like planned economies, ee for example Walmart: https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/636-the-people-s-r...)

You couldn't easily fire in USSR, not a good analogy.

US corps look more like feudal kingdoms of the middle ages with serfs.

I don't think they could fire serfs that easily either

Remember, in a capitalist democracy the only organization that is not democratic is the corporation.

This is one of those moments people tell you 'not to feed the trolls', but if you ignore them, they have a platform to spew nonsense.

Reddit is far worse than HN, and no one has time to correct all the anarchist teens.

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