Questioning that feels a lil naive?
Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?
I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.
We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.
And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.
Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.
Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.
And hey, look, turns out the article was AI slop generated to make the front page of HN.
I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.
Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.
It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.
PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.
