Predatory Behaviors in Companies

I don’t know if “predatory” is the right adjective to describe behavior I see but it is what comes to mind. I seem to see more and more predatory behavior in companies every day. Are we going into an era of corruption?

We’ve always had corruption but maybe not at a level seen in recent decades.

First sign of predatory behaviors

Recently, I came across a post in LinkedIn about someone’s travails in working through the job postings. She was bemoaning the fact that large companies were asking for degreed candidates for extremely low pay, and oh, let’s add all of these other tasks on top.

A bunch of people chimed in with their reactions.

I could go on but there’s a lot of posts centered around this type of behavior.

I was going to stop here but then I saw this gem about lawyers’ pay:

“We are like family” predatory behavior

Ah, people are finally catching on to the “we are like family” ploy.

Businesses are not run like families. You still have to add value or make family for the business. And still, when the going gets tough, businesses still have to do layoffs to survive tight times.

“Letting go of the low performers”

Here’s a version that is coming out recently as a reason to perform layoffs: to get rid of the deadweight and low performers.

One problem with that: aren’t companies supposed to let go of employees that don’t perform up to the standards? And since layoffs are pretty frequent, don’t they already go to the low performers?

To add insult to that, I just recently read that the leading proponent of firing the low performers are actually going to increase the pay or bonus or something for the senior executives. Enriching yourselves by poverishing those further down the ladder.

Nasty piece of work, that.

Original source Business Insider: How to avoid being labeled an ‘underperformer,’ according to the ex-VP of HR at Microsoft

If behind paywall, here’s another link: How to avoid being labeled an ‘underperformer,’ according to the ex-VP of HR at Microso

AI Agents as employees

So, two things have come up in the news.

One is a startup creating job posts looking for AI agents to perform certain tasks. While this was a PR stunt, a “look at me” stunt, it did cause a form of backlash. Remember guys, we’re supposed to augmenting skills, not replacing people.

Read here for the callous PR stunt: Startup Adds Job Listing Specifically for AI Agents, With Horrible Salary

I don’t think we are very far from the time where companies actively look for ways to replace people. Shareholders will demand that.

As a matter of fact, Meta is hinting at that scenario in Futurism‘s article Zuckerberg Announces Plans to Automate Facebook Coding Jobs With AI. I’m sure I mentioned this article in a previous post, but it bears repeating again to emphasize the growing intent to deploy replacement strategies rather than augmentation strategies. Cost cutting is the main goal here!

Note: here’s my prior post – AI Replacing Employees: the Intent is Now Out in the Open – Veronique Frizzell

Ugliest predatory behavior: crushing wages to zero

Or as close to zero as possible within the law.

I know I have mentioned this before, but I do want to call it out again because it is such despicable behavior.

This is investor Marc Andreessen’s dream as profiled by Futurism‘s Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages. How lovely…or as the author puts it “What a noble vision”.

No wonder the tech honchos have bad reputation.

Tracking you with computer surveillance

They are tracking you!

Management wants to make sure you are fully focus on the job at hand and not doing something else, so they use emails, Team chats, clacking keys, and maybe camera to see if you are wandering off into something else.

But here’s the problem: what if you are thinking? Or trying to solve a problem? Clacking at your keys will not do that.

And sometimes, I’m trying to create something totally new that will help my end user (project manager/program manager) and so the keystrokes may not be understood as such. In my pondering mode, there are long periods when I’m not really doing anything but just cogitating.

And how about those that are managing people, doing the face-to-face thing, especially in the office? The surveillance may not capture that and instead note that time as “empty” or non-productive.

There is a lot of flaws with these surveillance tools.

Business Insiders’ article provide more details in Bosses are tracking employees’ computer use more than ever.

Maybe the biggest predatory behavior: slash and burn in the government

The way the layoffs are occurring has a feel of joyous cruelty at laying off employees, a lot of whom voted for the current president. The layoffs kind of has an “off with their heads” feel. No careful consideration of what the job entails, some fallacious comments about the wasteful spending, and of course, the gleeful up hoisting a chainsaw at a meeting. It comes across as “I don’t care”.

So, Musk and his young, unproven youths are acting like predators, on the prowl looking for easy victims to lay off or easy funding to cut off.

And remember, some of these affected people are diehard voters for the current president.

Closing paragraph

The world seems to get nastier and nastier every day. There is just so much thoughtless change going on. So much agony and misery on display. And we’re only a month and a half into 2025.