[jedberg]

It sounds like he's really smart. There's a billion people. He can just keep burning them out and there will be more begging to be treated that way. The only way to solve this is with regulations -- this is where capitalism breaks down. With that many people, it won't matter if he burns through them.

[roenxi]

If you assume you have a huge reserve of capable people, then that will clamp down on wages, but as a manager you still want to optimise the productivity of the employees they have.

Extreme overtime doesn't sound like a good idea. May as well hire 2 shifts of people and pay them half as much; aim for higher per-hour performance. 9-9-6 isn't going to get you very much per hour of labour time, the employees will be zombies.

4 shifts of people will get you 24 hour 7-day coverage if you want continuous production if that is what the business needs. Just hold per-hour pay as constant as possible using the reserve of willing workers as leverage.

[jedberg]

I think you missed my point.

[decker]

In the short term it makes sense financially, but longer term the company will suffer from institutional knowledge churning over too rapidly.

[arvinsim]

It's a disgusting way to think. It's like treating people like disposable plastic.

Sooner or later, this mentality will bite back. Smart people cannot be manufactured en masse like plastic.

[khawkins]

Regulations from whom? The "Communist Party", a regime founded on anti-capitalist doctrine?

This is where communism breaks down. The only way to make it work in an economic sense is to turn it into a soulless corporate dystopia. Absent the incentive to work for personal gain, everyone must be motivated to work for the glory of the country through near constant propaganda.

Poor performance becomes a sign of anti-government sentiment. Thus, finding a new job after getting fired is extremely difficult, regardless of skill or desire to hire, because such governments go to great effort to blackball anyone who steps out of line, for fear of protest or dissent.

The USSR did indeed make great advances in technology and had a functioning economy, but at the despair and large-scale death of its people.

[baybal2]

Having spent my early childhood in Russia, I can say you are spot on on the whole sentiment, but work productivity in USSR was below the sea level.

Without objective measurement of work nobody gave a fuck about own productivity — a thing that Jiang Zemin's China stomped out.

China's tech industry is still waiting for the same happening to it. A lot of it still functions like a cargo cult.