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by bruu_ 3891 days ago
They exist to make life easier for their customers, which is usually directly proportional to the amount of effort being exerted by the company...
2 comments

This is simply not correct in the age of automation.

You are basically saying that your apartment does not get vacuumed because Roomba is doing the job.

And the amount of effort being exerted by the company is not the same thing as the amount of effort being exerted by the employees. All these companies have huge profit margins and owners can easily make their employees' lives more decent instead of treating them this way, like sociopaths they are.

This is a factory-work mentality and it's absolutely not correct. Employees are a huge asset, their expertise, talent, and wisdom is a competitive advantage. Companies that do well by their employees and strive to keep them happy will tend to keep the best employees longer, which means they suffer less losses due to retraining, losing talent, losing undocumented "tribal" knowledge, and so on. Unfortunately, most of these costs are not easily or rapidly felt.

Often what happens when a company becomes less inviting to its workers is that talent and experience start evaporating (since such folks tend to be the most sensitive to bad work environments and have the easiest times finding work elsewhere). And then it takes months or years for that loss to be felt in the form of increased difficulty executing on projects. But by then so much else will have changed that most people will find convenient other excuses to blame. Especially in a big company where you can't say "oh, yeah, we lost Jim, and it's been obvious ever since that we just aren't as good as an organization without him". Usually it's not so obvious, but it's also rather "politically" problematic for people to bring up such things. Imagine saying "yeah, our top management screwed up by fostering a horrid work environment, and that's why we lost Alice, Bob, and Charlie who have been replaced with substandard substitutes, this organization is a shadow of its former self". Anyone with the power and seniority to say such a thing probably won't, because that battle is a long and bloody one compared to the much simpler choice of just working somewhere else. Thus the evaporation of talent and expertise continues.

This alone is a big factor behind startups being so "disruptive", because at startups people feel their voice has more weight and they have more flexibility to do what they want. So startups often attract the talent that has evaporated out of big corporations.