> It's the whole goddam system that allows this.
It allows me and others the same things and yet we don't do them. This idea that you have to talk about everything at once first is just absolving individual doers of specific deeds, not to mention the idea that anyone would have stolen from a blind beggar, we need to heal blindness first etc.
It sounds more cultured when you talk about "incentives" and even "incentive structures", but sometimes it really isn't more than "why was she wearing a short skirt in the bad part of town?"
I think I expected a harder backlash than any of this, it does work surprisingly well with large companies. That must cause them to avoid overhiring or risk their entire reputation if they dare to consider mass layoffs, not a readily available option that they can play whenever they want.
And you're right, and of course scapegoating a guy isn't the solution, or a really great way forward. At first I wanted to add "it can't hurt", but it actually can, when it's really just projecting all the frustration that should be aimed at making bigger changes at the person we happen to know by name.
But it's of course hard to tell when that is the case, when the anger at an individual case takes away from the other, I mean. I don't think it can be generally assumed, maybe by really hating the guts of this particular person, a few people end up getting introduced to (more of) politics and economics in that otherwise wouldn't have? Different people have different learning styles ^^
This specific infamous mass-layoff-via-Zoom happened back in December 2021, and a lot of noise was made about it at the time.
For reference, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29460985 (453 comments) discusses the initial layoff, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29515050 (97 comments) discusses the CEO temporarily stepping back.