It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.
I ended up moving to New Zealand and working for a small civil engineering firm that has developers to write internal tools that are used by the engineering team to process their data. The technology I'm working with is a lot more dated, the development processes aren't sophisticated (there are 0 meetings and no attempt at project management) and I took a real pay cut, but I genuinely feel that the software I'm working with is beneficial and has a net positive impact on the world, no matter how small. There is also no on call and I work exactly 37.5 hours a week, on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
Where do we sign up?
on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
Not sure if I parsed it right, what did you mean? I am a Florida man, by choice but we'll see :)
People take a lot more vacation and leave, the office shuts entirely for 2 weeks around Christmas, and deliverable deadlines are more flexible.
We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something.
Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.
The problem is not wealth. The problem is not producing massive value and capturing a portion of it.
The problem is thinking that the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth rather than to produce it and distribute it. Of the men you listed, only Vanderbilt supports your argument.
But Capitalism isn't synonymous with the free market, or any other market configuration, and it's totally possible for the people who control the means of production and distribution to... not produce or distribute. In fact, that may be advantageous in their efforts to secure more capital.
Ultimately, "they" really always have been greedy villains. Shareholder supremacy just made it worse.
Isn't the distribution of shares among the population instead of just a few private investors a good thing? Democratizing in a sense, everybody can participate? (If only wealth was distributed more evenly. But that's a different problem it seems.)
He did an AMA here recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477135
Shareholder primacy took off after Milton Friedman advocated for it 1962. The philosophy that it supplanted (in the US) was "stakeholder capitalism" where businesses explicitly sought to be positive contributors to a much more comprehensive set of stakeholders: their shareholders, their managers, their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their communities (non-exhaustive).
The central conceit of capitalism is that you can co-opt the individual's greed and, properly constrained by laws and guided by markets, you can reward them for doing things of value for their community.
The question then is what philosophy do you build around that central greed-of-the-individual. Do you temper it with expectations of taking care of people other than oneself? Or do you fan it and unbridle it by saying, "actually, greed isn't the evil that we must co-opt to pro-social ends, greed is actually the pro-social end itself?"
It turns out that if you do the latter, business managers, shareholders, and regulators can collude to create extremely positive outcomes for each other at the expense of other stakeholders. You can save money by dumping your waste product into rivers, you can arbitrage labor away to infinitely far away lands, you can buy politicians, etc. etc.
How might regulators behave differently in a world where people believe a corporation ought to take care of its entire community, versus a world where the literal only purpose of a corporation is to enrich its shareholders? Quite different, probably!
Then all of this stacks on top of the natural "capital flows to capital" dynamic in capitalism which I'd argue is insufficiently mitigated, and you just get this ridiculous feedback loop that piles more resources and positive outcomes into a narrower set of people, while offloading more negative outcomes onto everyone else.
Obviously opting into a different business philosophy doesn't preclude negative outcomes, but I think that more budding business leaders could, should, and would essentially have their careers strangled earlier on if they exhibited antisocial traits if we had a business culture that didn't pretend like this was literally an asset.
Re your second question:
Assuming that shareholder primacy is the only philosophy we could pick from, then yes a market with many public shareholders is better than the alternative. But 1) not everyone is invested in public markets, 2) not all companies are available to purchase in public markets, 3) public markets are demonstrably not good at solving certain types of problems – especially problems that occur over extended time horizons or are easy to externalize off the balance sheet, and most importantly 4) costs-benefits are not zero-sum. You can't generally undo the harms of Company A by investing in its competitor Company B. It would be best if both companies' management felt they had an obligation not to harm their communities even if it could further enrich their shareholders to do so. It would be even better if investors in general felt both companies should have an obligation to take care of their communities or employees, and so companies lived in fear of divestment if they chose to violate their communities.
But in a culture that has opted into shareholder primacy, all feedback signals in this direction are removed. Regulators, investors, shareholders, employees, and the general public all pretty much believe that maximally externalizing harms and maximally capturing benefits is actually literally the way it's supposed to be.
Stakeholder Capitalism sounds like a much longer term success vector for most companies.
AFAIK the go-to book on this history is "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" about Jack Welch. I haven't read it though so can't sign my name to it!
A few other threads that might be worth pulling on:
* Dee Hock, founder of Visa, advocated for stuff in this realm. Worth reading some of his writing.
* W Edwards Deming, oddly enough an American who is one of the father's of Japan's incredible manufacturing philosophy, believed in this more expansive idea of wholeness in industry ("Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" is good)
* Progress & Poverty (the famous Land Value Tax book) oddly enough is what really made capitalism itself legible enough to me to realize the positive-sum nature of what well-designed capitalism can do
* Costco is probably the most obvious success case of a stakeholder-capitalist company succeeding in an ultra competitive market, even while being publicly traded. I'm sure there are phenomenal books on Costco but the Acquired podcast's episode is a fantastic primer.
* "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis is a snapshot of the precursor conditions that led to stakeholder capitalism. Basically industrialization threw huge numbers of people into conditions even more destitute than the perpetual battle with starvation that predated industrialization. Jacob Riis documented just how horrific this was and contributed to a wave of social, political, and philosophical reforms that culminated in the advent of stakeholder capitalism.
Your brother in law did not merely save and not over spend, he built a business and sold it for a large payout.
Now our spending is much higher but the growth of our investments over the last 10 years has been incredible and outpaced that by a large margin.
For a while I thought some startup stock I had was going to fund a lavish retirement but then AI largely destroyed the value of those shares so we're just planning on the boring index funds.
I said nothing of investments and growth.
It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!
Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.
If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..