I don't want to sound too "communist" here, but isn't it impossible to run a shareholder corporation without some extent of employees acting like APIs ?
People with complex functions can easily jump to "hmh, I and my team could be doing this all on our own... why exactly are we giving other people a x0%" cut? This does not happen if jobs are swappable enough. Too many people would have to coordinate, and even if they did, you lose a 1-month severance package and are off to hire new ones.
Most professions that you mention (doctors, laws, accountants) seemed to do solo work until not long ago, and it seems like the recent increase in dissatisfaction correlates somewhat with a move towards corporations, which have other advantages that can compensate for sub-optimal work (e.g. is it more important for long-term success that a hospital has good outcomes or that it has good advertising and the ability to accept a lot of different insurances?)
However, a summary look at private vs public market value would contradict this, given that the former is increasing and is somewhat of a proxy for "workers owning their company" (as in, in most cases, it isn't, but it's more prevalent than in public companies)
Bank managers seem like an example that contradicts this though.
To some extent, yes. It's a continuum. However I don't think it's just the fact that people have duties which they're responsible for. It's also that in a large number of cases the duty itself has gotten (rightly or wrongly) curtailed. It's not about ownership per se, am not making a co-op argument here, but the dissatisfaction does seem to come from being divorced from doing work end to end and instead being just a simple API.
I'm not arguing non-API work can't be done in as a "worker" rather than a "shareholder". I'm saying it becomes too easy to just take over-profit if done so, and companies operating that way might not last are shareholder-driven entities. I can't think of any examples at a large scale, but at a small scale I've seen this happen with several cases I know of accounting or law firms, the 2 or 3 most influential employees left, took most of the contacts, and slowly poached the rest of the good employees.
Also, the situation in which it wouldn't happen is where the risk is not worth it since the pay is good and the upside is millions for everyone involved anyway, aka tech startups, where surprisingly enough people-as-APIs is not a common model.
Recently, I picked up some passport forms from the Post Office. I wonder whether anyone still knows why the forms are invalidated if one doesn't use a black biro...
That's a good piece, managed to scare me.
I don't want to sound too "communist" here, but isn't it impossible to run a shareholder corporation without some extent of employees acting like APIs ?
People with complex functions can easily jump to "hmh, I and my team could be doing this all on our own... why exactly are we giving other people a x0%" cut? This does not happen if jobs are swappable enough. Too many people would have to coordinate, and even if they did, you lose a 1-month severance package and are off to hire new ones.
Most professions that you mention (doctors, laws, accountants) seemed to do solo work until not long ago, and it seems like the recent increase in dissatisfaction correlates somewhat with a move towards corporations, which have other advantages that can compensate for sub-optimal work (e.g. is it more important for long-term success that a hospital has good outcomes or that it has good advertising and the ability to accept a lot of different insurances?)
However, a summary look at private vs public market value would contradict this, given that the former is increasing and is somewhat of a proxy for "workers owning their company" (as in, in most cases, it isn't, but it's more prevalent than in public companies)
Bank managers seem like an example that contradicts this though.
To some extent, yes. It's a continuum. However I don't think it's just the fact that people have duties which they're responsible for. It's also that in a large number of cases the duty itself has gotten (rightly or wrongly) curtailed. It's not about ownership per se, am not making a co-op argument here, but the dissatisfaction does seem to come from being divorced from doing work end to end and instead being just a simple API.
Just to be clear:
I'm not arguing non-API work can't be done in as a "worker" rather than a "shareholder". I'm saying it becomes too easy to just take over-profit if done so, and companies operating that way might not last are shareholder-driven entities. I can't think of any examples at a large scale, but at a small scale I've seen this happen with several cases I know of accounting or law firms, the 2 or 3 most influential employees left, took most of the contacts, and slowly poached the rest of the good employees.
Also, the situation in which it wouldn't happen is where the risk is not worth it since the pay is good and the upside is millions for everyone involved anyway, aka tech startups, where surprisingly enough people-as-APIs is not a common model.
There's a scale point here, as cos get larger specialisation becomes important, and as costs of using components drop (standardisation etc) things can devolve to this (eg https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/hierarchical-growth-trade-offs).
Recently, I picked up some passport forms from the Post Office. I wonder whether anyone still knows why the forms are invalidated if one doesn't use a black biro...