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Comment by msdz | Hacker News Reader

Really? You guys have laws that mandate profit-maximization?

No we don’t. There’s an old case that everyone always takes out of context. Under modern american corporate law, directors and management have broad discretion to do what they think is in the best interests of the corporation, broadly defined.

A good while ago, I also read about a company [0] using a legal framework for the company structure/charter, the Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), specifically to ensure how they want “best interests” to be defined. Sounded very fitting for the purpose, and cool that such a system exists (at least in some states, I believe?).

[0] https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi#4

Yes. And you can also see how OpenAI has structured themselves. (Whether it's working is another question.)

Or see how Bosch is set up.

Huh? What does that have to do with anything?

When a company pays for training and education of an employee, they risk that the employee jumps ship and takes that investment with her. Contractually, you could use bonds or contract penalties to curb that kind of behaviour, but there are limitations on what contract terms are enforceable or even legal.

Back in the day, companies recognized that not all the value they created would come back to themselves directly, but that keeping the economy and the trade healthy still had indirect benefit. Because as much as there would be employees that used you for training and then bounced off to someone else, there would also be employees that trained elsewhere and then bounced to you. Everyone stands to benefit from the practice of training being normalized, yet nobody does it anymore because they're afraid to be the first.

After all, if there's no chance of employees being trained anywhere else because nobody else is doing it yet, why would you decide to start training employees? The exchange wouldn't be equivalent in any way, there's a real possibility that you would never benefit at all. You'd be the only source of training, so anyone who bounced off from you could never have been someone who bounced off to you.

Back in what day and where?

In the bad old days, Adam Smith already complained about how apprentices were treated.

Think about stuff like the Ford Trade School, around 1916 to the early 1950s. Job security was better back then, so workers were more likely to stay than nowadays, but there aren't nearly as many schools or programs like that anymore. I figure it's because companies are too afraid to train workers that might not stay with them, but unwilling to offer accordingly competitive pay or benefits. If they did, I figure they'd have the benefit of more workers they train staying with them, as well as the benefit of more workers trained elsewhere joining them. This also creates the problem (and fear) of being taken advantage of by the workforce if you offer training programs better than your competitors.

Ford stuck his noses into all your family business. I'm not sure anyone still wants that?

Btw, Ford famously raised wages to 5 USD a day, because he had crazy high turnover. Workers weren't all that likely to stay than nowadays.

I'm not quite sure what the latter half of your comment is arguing for or against. Are you saying that it is in the best self interest of individual companies to train workers? Or are you saying that training workers is something altruistic?

If it's a publicly traded company then literally yes, public companies are mandated to make as much money for their investors as possible. It's a very stupid law but there it is.

Where is this law? Public companies (or rather their management) have fiduciary duties to shareholders. And it is usually safe for management to mostly assume that means making money.

But eg no one has sued Google management for giving company resources to charity. And in general, companies can have all kinds of goals, as long as shareholders are ok with them.

Going on a tangent: it's usually safe to assume that investors want money, because you can further most goals you care about with money. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence for an AI flavoured take on the same topic.

That's a common misconception, but it's not true.

> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

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

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