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Comment by panta | Hacker News Reader

> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?

yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.

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Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.

It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.

> Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs.

I like this. I was trying to think of some way to allow layoffs for struggling companies but not reward layoffs for companies that are making a profit, who just want to make more. My idea was more around the executive team being unable to take a salary or having to fire the CEO or something, nothing which as I worked through in my head seemed workable.

The problem is there will always be country or states that won't follow such rule. And M$ will figure out how to hire people there...

In some places, if an employee is made redundant the employer is barred from filling the same position for a period of time.

Enforceability is a problem; it's always been trivial to re-write a job description.

Why amoral? If a an employee costs the company more than they make, it means the owner of the company is essentially donating his money to the employee. Is it amoral to not do that? What if the owner wants to donate the money to cancer research instead?

To expand on this, a company’s purpose should go beyond simply generating profit for its owners, imho; among other things, it should also include a duty of care toward its employees. Society instills a strong work ethic in us from childhood, teaching us that contributing to the greater good is our individual duty. Before the plague of neoliberalism, there was an expectation that companies would have a positive impact on society, too. Nothing, except greed, forbids to return to those values.

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