> That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.
FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.
In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.
Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.
But how? I can’t know if I’m buying xyz software if 3rd level manager Janet acted ethically, or not. There are many other people involved. Companies always claim to be ethical, in some way that might even be true.
That's the point/trick of the status quo. It's impossible as a "consumer" to make choices that can meaningfully impact anybody's behavior in a system like this.
The only way to achieve a change in behavior in corporations is to change the regulatory framework in which they operate.
In the narrow context of the OP, this doesn't even need to be very heavy handed (unlike say environmental devastation, which is a much bigger challenge). One option would be to pass legislation that makes it harder for megacorps like Cisco to eat smaller companies. Another would be to make layoffs relatively more expensive (require better severance, etc) or to limit them during the M&A phase that Splunk is currently in.
FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.
In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.
Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.
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