I thought about this a lot over the years.
I saw something that piqued my interest last year though, and kind've helped connect the dots. I was on a cruise, and most of the ship was available to guests. One day, one room was cordoned off to an invite-only meeting. The windows weren't blocked, but on the screen was a presentation about AI investments, number of jobs saved (reduced), and etc.
I found one of the attendants later during the voyage and chatted her up. She was head of HR in some big company, and the meeting was supposed to be private. But it contained a lot more than just spreadsheets about AI investments. There was homework and whatnot, but the attendees weren't all from a single company. It was "direction setting". I don't think it was Intel (topic under discussion) but certainly some loosely related tech industry.
I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
So, back to your question:
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
Because they're told to.
Wonder if it’s “not illegal” if it’s done in international waters.
I didn't ask. As I understand it, it's less about legality and more about plausible deniability; on a "party boat" with plenty of other public people to make it cheaper than renting a whole boat, plus the week for the cruise and time to relax -- seems plausible that these people "just happened" to book the same boat at the same time at peak tourist season and decide to throw a "private party". I should have asked more questions, but there were plenty of other people to chat up.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...
Meanwhile, a lot of laborers in our profession have fallen for their propaganda of markets and so-called meritocracy, not realizing they have more in common with the fruit picker than their common exploiter.
Class warfare is real. It's time tech workers wake up to that fact and start fighting back instead of letting oligarchs walk over them.
Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
If you're a farmer in the market for a $200k combine harvester, sales guys will be happy to put you in a $200-a-night hotel so you can attend their invite-only presentation on how their latest models give you 10% more yield with 30% lower labour cost thanks to the new auto-steer mechanism and six-stage threshing mechanism. And they'll hand-hold you through all the calculations to write a business case.
It's all the more reason why labor needs to start being more aggressive and properly work together.
They all work with restructuring companies!! So, I hope that tells you how smart they are :-)
Doing more with less is warning sign like “curve ahead”.
And the agentic focus is not forward-thinking.
Our present is to a small degree agentic, and that will increase, but that won’t sustain because (1) latency and (2) technological evolution.
It’s more likely that everyone will have their own AI on-board which will have all of the data it needs in local storage that gets regular updates. Evolving to current agentic flows won’t help with that type of processing.
That is, it's true that they tried to do it and the software exists. But it doesn't matter, because nobody is actually motivated to join the cartel (defecting is more profitable) and they have no enforcement for it.
all the big tech companies used to have no-poach agreements to not hire from each other, such that they didnt have to compete on price
Labor categorization can be thought of in a more useful framework -- Category 1: Builders who don't know it yet. These people have the cognitive capability, work ethic, and problem-solving skills to create value independently, but they've been socialized to believe employment is the only viable path, or have yet to take the leap of starting "their own thing". They're retained and developed because they're essentially entrepreneurs who haven't discovered their own agency yet. Category 2: Consumers masquerading as producers. They extract more value than they create - through entitlement, minimal effort, or misaligned incentives. They're often the loudest about "worker rights" precisely because they have the most to lose from merit-based evaluation.
The pattern you're seeing (layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus) targets Category 2 while trying to retain Category 1. The economy can no longer subsidize low-value labor.
The interesting dynamic: Category 2 workers are often most vocal about collective action because individual performance evaluation threatens their position. Category 1 workers are more likely to focus on skill development and value creation, and frankly are the most to benefit from the evolution of AI tooling.
"Labor solidarity" messaging often fails to resonate with the most effective and productive workers.
That and if you don't rent out a property for long and leave it unused, it'll literally rot because nobody is there to notice squatters or water leaks or etc.
No conspiracy theories are needed. Boards are incestious, most board members aren’t all that bright or forward looking, they have a lot of imposter syndrome about it, they worry about getting important trends wrong, and so they follow the herd. CEOs follow the board, companies follow the CEO, voila, everybody does the same thing at the same time.
And yes, I think there is an opportunity to zig while everyone else is zagging.
Also: major institutional investors (such as VCs) demand a seat on the board and then send their B team to actually sit through the board meetings of their less key investments. Those board members follow the investor company’s line, spreading it to lots of companies at once.
Considering how much the sales division of many medium and large companies dictates the direction of the whole company, "sales meeting" and "business collusion" is often the same thing.
I've worked for FAR too many companies that have lost $60million in support and maintenance on a sub-par product that sales managed to sell for $30million gross... and then the sales division (and upper management) leave the company for something better. What a surprise.
The incentives to collude are powerful.
Every year we get wealthier and wealthier as a society, so that means we are capable of less and labor has to take the haircut while capital keeps on as is.
We could subsidize 10s of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people to do literally nothing and not be any worse off than we were 15 years ago
"When McKinsey Comes to Town" is an interesting read that covers a lot of this. It's worse than I thought.
> "Labor solidarity" messaging often fails to resonate with the most effective and productive workers.
That's what the rentier class wants you to think. It's convenient if everyone is a temporarily embarrassed CEO, makes them much happier to act against their own class interests.
> Because they're told to.
This is largely it.
Consultants rule the earth!
I’ve been involved on layoff planning. It can be very cloak and dagger. But you never involve competitors. Ever.
We then informed corporate of the numbers, and someone would quickly is how to price the gas that day.
I thought it was about keeping the price competitive. No, I was told, it’s the exact opposite.
We would gladly sell the gas at cost, if not less, because the real money came from coffee and other merch.
But the state had a minimum mark up law. We had to charge the customers more.
The idea was to protect small gas stations from corporate chains, but gas is a commodity. Everyone pays about the same.
I later found out that the reason I was reason I was recording the competitors prices was to make sure they were following the minimum markup laws, so we could sue them if they werent.
You can rest assured that bribery in that way is extremely common in the West.
More than half raised their hands immediately. It was a Philosophy 101 class.
Best example is the rental market and the landlords all using the same price setting "algorithm"
But yes, together, the Big 3 are the single largest shareholder in 88% of SP500 companies.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politic...
Meanwhile most people in "rich" countries will have to reach mid-career status to even reach $100k.
used to be a sales engineer at an ISP. one you've heard of. we had account execs straight up offer "referral agent fees" to the network managers we were selling to.
bandwith is mostly the same -- 10Gbps here is more or less 10Gbps elsewhere -- so you gotta set yourself apart. and it worked. constantly.
They made money by selling coffee, which costs less than a cent, for five bucks.
You must not have been renting apartments in any significant market during the 2010's
Low-performers extract value from high-performers at every organizational level. A developer carrying three mediocre teammates isn't being manipulated by "the rentier class" when they prefer merit-based evaluation.
Your argument requires believing that productive workers can't accurately assess their own interests.
What happens when they get their wish? Do they start getting paid something close to the combined salary of the team they were carrying? Or do they get an attaboy and a pizza, and a precedent for "merit-based" layoffs that will be turned against them soon enough? I know which way I've seen it play out.
> Your argument requires believing that productive workers can't accurately assess their own interests.
Is it so implausible that people skilled in a specific field might be bad at cooperating (perhaps because they're bad at communicating with each other, at least relative to another class) and politically naive? If you think workers have a good understanding of their own interests then why has the labour share of income kept dropping?
True. That's no reason to "leave money on the table" as they may have seen it, and being substantially cheaper than the alternative, when they could have been barely cheaper and attracting the same amount of people.