> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
Questioning that feels a lil naive?
Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?
I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.
We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.
And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.
Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.
Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.
And hey, look, turns out the article was AI slop generated to make the front page of HN.
I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.
And as to the existence of exceptions, that is what makes humanities hard. Unlike physics, it is never all, it's always most, it's always shades and never direct. I use absolutist words in these discussions because it makes the points stick better, but I obviously do not mean them totally.
I think corporations maximizing profit is the default, and so writing an op-ed about how corporate greed caused something to happen seems pretty dumb to me.
Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.
It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.
PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
Yes, that's greedy.
What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.
* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
???
What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase.
>They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines.
That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism?
> It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification.
> Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things.
IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing.
It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.
I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
There. FTFY.
I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat).
That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA).
Appreciate the discussion!
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.