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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised. They're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary to operate in the shareholder's best interest not be some moral beacon of truth.

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Nothing prevents shareholders to pursue ethical goals or at least make an ethical decisions once in a while. Somehow you assume their best interest necessarily is in conflict with morals or truth but I don't see it. Decision to implement unjust ruling is unusual. It's not surprising for Facebook to do so, I agree. But it's not a rule for a publicly traded company by a virtue of fiduciary responsibilities.

If that were the case if being moral was profitable then more companies would be supporting the countless open source projects they use monetarily than just abiding by the literal reading of the GPL and not giving back. How is it moral to build a cloud provider on the backs of open source software and not supporting those devs and teams that make said software as their hobby as just one example.

>more companies would be supporting

Why would any company support free software to begin with? Sounds like shareholders got duped. One wise man once said "They're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary to operate in the shareholder's best interest not be some moral beacon of truth."

>How is it moral to build

Didn't hurt anyone. Built something new. Many people found it useful. More good in the world. Non-zero sum.

I hate that HN allows downvotes for disagreement rather than off-topic or non-sensical commenting. You make a good point. I'm reminded of the movie Avatar, "there’s one thing that shareholders hate more than bad press, and that’s a bad quarterly statement."

I'd imagine the downvotes are because it's a factually inaccurate statement (as I understand it). Duty to maximize profits is a myth, which I think I first heard about here on HN!

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Oh dang I stand corrected. My statement could remove the fiduciary part and replace it with human nature and remain correct I think. It’s a basis of economics that the firm seeks to maximize profits where feasible.

This hurts their engineer recruitment in the US - which isn't in the shareholders best interest.

I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making money?

> I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making money?

You don't see a connection between Facebook's recruitment of engineering talent and Facebook making money? It's almost as if you didn't read my comment.

I read your comment and I disagree. That's a tenuous connection between shareholders caring that a subset of potential FB engineers will not want to work there on moral grounds.

Likewise, there are probably few shareholders who have spent much time actively considering FBs role in Vietnam. Like it or not, FB has to deal with a tight labor market, and things harming their image mean that they have to pay more for the same level of talent. Tech companies are extremely aware of this dynamic, even if their shareholders are less so.

So shareholders are the problem. Gotcha.

That is pure fantasy. If engineers cared about fb doing shady things, fb had already done enough to tilt the scales.

Even if it's small, this will hurt hiring at the margin. I make job/offer selection choices based on considerations like these especially if the pay is comparable, although I have some tolerance for behavior I don't agree with. I'm sure at least some others are the same.

So shareholders are the problem. Let's abolish them and see what else interferes with good ethical choices and fix that and keep going. That's how things get better.

That's infeasible in our economy. Generation of wealth is something that is needed and beneficial to society. Abolishing shareholders is not the answer. Having better politicians (i.e. not corrupt) to reign in capitalist markets to enforce moral behavior would be a better choice.

Shareholding is not required to generate wealth, and it does encourage the disconnect between business activity and responsibility for results.

Politicians will generally follow what the money wants. Making those with a financial stake in the companies responsible is what will remove the gap.

Are you actually trying to say that limited liability is bad

I think I'm leaning toward limited liability enables amoral/unethical behavior. I really would be open to considering extending corporate liability not just to the officers but to shareholders as well.

E.g., if a company is found liable for illegal toxic waste dumping, the company should be fined, the officers that approved / failed to curtail it should be liable, and shareholders should also be penalized... calculating proportions of the cleanup and penalties to assign based on corporate valuation, officers' salaries, and shareholders' stock values.

No doubt the process could get messy but everyone in that chain deserves a share of the blame, for having polluted, and for incentivizing it.

I can see a future where shareholders take an active auditing role in corporate operations to ensure they're not getting hung out to dry.

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