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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I really hate this MBA, always go up curve, when it is physically impossible to have everyone go up.

What is so wrong with having a sustainable business with happy employees.

Nothing, it's just hard. The problem you trip over is retention of strong employees.

Many strong employees are ambitious and need the prospect of progression to be happy with their job. When growth slows below the employee ambition rate, not everyone can be sustainably paid more. Then you're faced with a choice of removing people to make space or employees being unhappy.

You can let this equillibrate naturally. The employees who are both ambitious and skilled enough to land other jobs will disproportionately be first out the door, leaving room for others. But this reduces the average talent level, and hurts company prospects, so many companies choose other paths. Some proactively fire the bottom 15% every year. Some heavily differentiate pay to make up for lack of promotions. Some constantly reorg and fail to find spots for employees in internal interviews. Offering a paid out for those who were thinking about it anyway seems a uniquely humane solution.

Agree. Early in my career I was in an org that had been fast growing but then sales went flat. I was effectively told that I could not be promoted because there were already too many people at level N+2 and N+1. I told my M2 that this to me meant we'd all just grow old together and the org would be static. He didn't disagree and I transferred to a new org which although it was also not growing, did have a leadership gap and a growth path for me.

Another thing that is kind of physically impossible, unless one lives in a region with pleotheora of choices.

In many regions, one needs to be happy to have a job at all, while others cannot accomodate everyone that wants to be there.

Nothing, they just don't make the headlines.

Also, if you were someone picking a stock, which is likely to go up higher? One where the stock demonstrably keeps going up and to the right, or one that doesn’t?

The issue is everyone’s own greed. Including the old ladies and pension fund managers.

Which provides many benefits - but also, when push comes to shove - exposes the ‘teeth’ more directly.

The stock market just allows more abstract and scalable access to that greed, that otherwise would be more randomly distributed.

> One where the stock demonstrably keeps going up and to the right, or one that doesn’t?

The one that doesn’t go to the right, because if they figured out how to stop or go back in time, they probably have some smart people working there.

They have a term for ‘doesn’t go to the right’ in business - liquidation. It has nothing to do with time travel, and investors really don’t like it most of the time.

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