[jfim]

> Why should it go into the shareholder's pockets instead of the people who actually do the work and create the value?

Proponents of the shareholder value model would argue that the point of a business is to maximize that value, and that it's better to return that value to shareholders instead of giving it to employees.

In the case of the button pressing employee, if they can find someone that would press the same button for minimum wage instead of billions per year, with functionally equivalent output, then from that perspective it would make sense to replace that expensive employee with a cheaper one, as that would maximize shareholder value.

In practice, things aren't as simple, since value maximization can have all kinds of perverse effects (eg. in that model, dumping sewage into a lake is a great idea if the fine is smaller than the resulting shareholder value) and shareholder value is kind of detached nowadays with profitless companies and many companies not electing to pay dividends.

[simias]

Well the original example was obviously flawed because if all that's left for the employee to do is literally just press a button, then it would've been automated as well.

In a company like Google the argument that the workforce is effectively just a commodity that could be replaced easily and at will is obviously not applicable. Most of Google engineers are not button pushers.