This speaks more about you then me.
You added the extreme interpretation on your own, then mentally argued against that extreme interpretation.
I'm just telling you how your comments were received. Perhaps I'm not alone in feeling like you're being too dismissive? Anyway, now you have one datapoint to consider, for future reference.
For-profit companies exist to make money, publicly traded companies are required by law to look out for the best interests of the share holders.
Yes, and I think I acknowledged this aspect. It's fundamental, but also not the end of the story.
(and yes, I know how corporate governance works, but fair to explain as maybe not everyone does)
if the business unit's focus is enabling IPv6 communication on IoT Twinkie wrappers, they won't be keeping that job.
It's even more granular than that. Sometimes, projects are canceled and the entire team let go. Just before the pandemic, this happened at my job. There were a couple extremely solid contributors on that team. One woman, let's call her Jan, was somewhat reserved but well-liked, diligent, worked there for over a decade, knew the systems up & down, and you couldn't find anyone with anything less than praise-worthy to say about her. Rather than factor these folks elsewhere into the org (for instance, back into the product team they'd come from, months earlier), they were let go with the entire rest of the team.
good folk will have nothing to worry about as the job market for competent IT folks is really tight and companies are actively poaching the best from each other.
Some will, but not everyone is good at networking or marketing themselves. The interview game has also changed quite a bit, in the past decade or so, and seems to favor younger folks recently out of university. And at my company, we haven't been hiring in the US since last fall, even though they're having trouble finding competent people at sites in other countries. They have a new policy of hiring only in "best-cost" countries.
Again I can not stress this, you nor anyone else is "owed" a job.
This speaks more about you than me. I never said these people shouldn't have been cut. Just that we shouldn't speak as though none were doing their jobs or that they were all failing to pull their weight.
As for "companies", companies are just property that are owned by people. What you just said was that people don't have a right to own property and that property should be for the betterment of society.
Businesses are legal entities that we've created for the benefit of society. They're a legal fiction created for
pragmatic purposes. We lose sight of that, at our peril.
There are several failed States that had that philosophy.
There are also quite successful States that have more restrictive business laws than the US. It's not a black-or-white thing. As long as you don't have state ownership playing a major role in the economy and it still seems to be working, I think you probably haven't gone too far.
I'll go a step further and say that some of the restrictions on employers I've heard about in countries like France and Italy strike me as going too far. Still, I find it hard to believe the US has struck the optimal balance.
Speaking of other countries, something that puts the US at a disadvantage is requirements for employer-provided healthcare insurance. I doubt most companies really want to deal with it (much less
subsidize it), either.
Do you have any form of investment accounts? How about something like the simple 401K IRA that everyone gets?
You can't use that to justify everything and anything publicly-traded companies do. The beauty of capitalism is that if some business or industry gets hit with new regulations that affect their profitability (like, maybe because they were destroying the planet), capital just reroutes elsewhere. Sure, there might be some short-term hiccups, but also maybe you (or your investment fund manager) should be more wary of whom you're supporting.
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