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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce. Many corporate CEOs took pride in taking care of everyone who worked at their corporate campuses. Business leaders loved to tell stories about someone working their way up from the mailroom to a C-suite office.
But this began to change in the 1980s. Wall Street investors demanded that companies focus more on maximizing returns for shareholders. An emerging corporate orthodoxy held that a company should focus on its "core competence"—the one or two functions that truly sets it apart from other companies—while contracting out other functions to third parties.
Often, companies found they could save money this way. Big companies often pay above the market rate for routine services like cleaning offices, answering phones, staffing a cafeteria, or working on an assembly line. Putting these services out for competitive bid helped the companies get these functions completed at rock-bottom rates, while avoiding the hassle of managing employees. It also saved them from having to pay the same generous benefits they offered to higher-skilled employees.
Of course, the very things that made the new arrangement attractive for big companies made it lousy for the affected workers. Not only were companies trying to spend less money on these services, but now there were companies in the middle taking a cut. Once a job got contracted out, it was much less likely to become a first step up the corporate ladder. It's hard to work your way up from the mailroom if the mailroom is run by a separate contracting firm.
[...] The existence of such a two-tier workplace is especially ironic in Silicon Valley, a region that takes pride in its egalitarian ethos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a remarkably candid assessment of the situation in 2012, in a statement quoted by author Chrystia Freeland.
"Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out," Schmidt said. "We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @02:14AM (1 child)
errr .... I meant to say
So it's hard for you to understand the problems many people have are a consequence of their own decisions *
People that make good decisions project those good decisions onto others. They assume that most people make good decisions and that their problems are a consequence of circumstances. There are legitimate situations where that's true. In those situations I have zero problems with the system helping those people out. But the reality is that in many situations that's not true.
and yes, there are many problems with the system. The system is gamed. That does need to be fixed. That doesn't change the fact that many people are in their situation because of the decisions they make.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 03 2020, @05:28PM
Everyone makes bad decisions when they come into a new environment. Every single person.
That said, some learn faster than others...but guess what, different people learn at different speeds in different situations, and learning rapidly in one situation doesn't guarantee that you'll do the same in another. Which is why I tend to be extremely conservative in the original meaning of the term. And if you think in stereotypes, there are LOTS of situations in which you'll make extremely stupid decisions. The benefit is that you'll make them rapidly, which is good if you *must* make a decision rapidly, and stupid otherwise.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.