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by Macha
1102 days ago
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This argument boils down to: Companies can't be criticised for using values for marketing with no intent to abide by them because it makes market sense to be ruthless The problems with this idea: 1. It misses that morals can be criticised not just legality, and as economically advantageous as it is, it is still unethical to decieve 2. Even in a totally cold economic sense, the criticism you get if you go back on them is itself a risk that these companies should have considered when they produced these marketing values. This blowback should be an economic disincentive against acting that way in the future if it decreases trust in the company. This may materialise in economic effects as less free overtime and higher wage demands from prospective employees who adopt a similar ruthless attitude. |
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> Companies aren't the kinds of things that can meaningfully have values, and 'criticism' along the lines of the OP takes for granted that they can and do, in a way that makes outcomes like this Hashicorp layoff meaningfully surprising. This gets in the way of the correct critique— and thereby in setting the correct expectations.
The moralistic tone makes the event described seem somehow exceptional, when the crucial lesson is that it is not at all. It also directs people towards a useless simulation of politics (yelling at people, or in this case companies, to scold them) in place of the real thing (fighting institutions by disrupting their basic functioning, exercising power to change incentive structures, etc.). The stress on the economics is about directing people to the information of strategic significance, not narrowing the bounds of acceptable critique per se.