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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (369349)	2/1/2008 1:25:06 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 1578685

The 'goal' of a private company is not to reduce headcount just for the sake of reducing headcount. The goal is to increase profit. If adding an employee that cost $100K adds $200K in profits, they increase headcount. Of course, but pointing out instances where the plan (headcount reductions) is not a good one doesn't prove anything. Of course RVBD or some hot Chinese internet company should not reduce headcount since they can barely handle their growth. As I wrote, normal companies (that can handle their growth quite well) do reduce their headcount significantly every few years because it is natural for inefficiencies to develop. Humans with jobs that become meaningless don't quit, they wait to get fired. When two people are doing a task, and then they become more efficient such that one can do it alone, no one quits. They both work at half capacity doing the task, and collect both their checks, until Dr. Headcount comes in a eliminates one of them. Wow! That's ridiculous! Government policy makers don't privatize their operations. Of course they do. Look at Iraq. Again, don't look for one example to disprove the general thesis. I'm making a generalization, of course some instances are different. In general, policymakers make little effort to privatize their government operations, even if it makes great economic sense. Privatization, by definition, remove political power and gives it to some other entity (the management of the new private company). Almost nobody does that, anywhere. There is this constant mantra that government isn't efficient and isn't trying to be more efficient... ya hear it enough and you believe it. Sure, all departments should probably be looked at separately. But, due to bureacracy and lack of competition (we don't have numerous competing government agencies trying to maintain a single bridge, with the one that does it the best and cheapest getting reward and the others not), the likely assumption for me is inefficiency until proven otherwise. When you combine career employees, fixed pay scales, and no competition, it would be pretty amazing to expect otherwise.