In principle it's possible to have a company with no employees and all work done by vendors / contractors. But in practice this usually turns out to be less optimized than having at least some regular employees due to transaction costs. Organizational optimization is always a balancing act.
Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.
Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.
IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.
As usual, there is a level of disconnect given the complexity and anonymity of the financial system.
"Shareholders" are often people who invested in fonds which invested in fonds and they are thus several steps of separation from the final invested corporation. They only want their pensions to be stable, and de-facto own tiny slivers of hundreds of corporations, maybe not even exactly knowing which ones.
That detaches them mentally from those corporations, much like when you go to a restaurant and eat the food without being particularly bothered whether the cilantro in your soup, supplied by a large-scale supplier and imported from another country, didn't originate in conditions worse than typical for that developing country.
Modern civilization is so complex that if you wanted to check conditions of every vendor of everything you consume, you'd simply not have enough time and energy to do so.
I am typing this on a Dell laptop; should I be particularly interested in what happens in every Dell supplier which contributed to building of that laptop? Are you? I just bought it and started working on it; we may certainly call this "complete disregard".
I never said anything about obligation. Of course they’re not obliged to provide extra jobs, but it is a moral obligation to treat those whom you employ with dignity. I would love to understand what you actually define as a moral obligation considering your vacuous response.
Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2].
The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.
[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).
[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).
[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.
I like your take and ideas. Not sure about capped income because that seems like a reward for the capital owning class.
I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.
An alternative to a capped income, would be that every income gets "inflated" by as much as needed until it reaches parity with big-tech incomes, which would require a kind of transnational union, but would have the effect of reversing the direction of extraction. Also, printing that money to inflate the income, would also cause asset-inflation, which also benefits people who own a life-changing amount of capital/assets. But _if_ you could cap asset-prices, then the inflation strategy might work. Note that I have not modeled this particular scenario yet.