Yup, and this is fundamentally down to the whole system being low-information. Workers, management, upper management and shareholders are all playing it close to the chest because they know they are pitted against one another. So much of corporate life is smoke & mirrors. It's incredibly wasteful of information, of resources, and of the dignity of the people within it.

EDIT: I didn't connect the dots between low-information and graphs: graphs are an attempt to make the unfathomable complexity of many humans working together legible to the managers & the owner class, when they know they can't trust those workers' word for anything. So people make graphs to try to filter information they don't care about - how is Marv from accounting feeling after his back surgery - from information they do care about like KPIs. It destroys most of the information and hence is easily gamed by everyone up & down the chain, which leads to this bizarre yo-yoing that makes the workers' lives and the company worse, but satisfies the graphs.

And it's all because the owning class wants to exploit us, so they have to dominate us. There's no getting around it, as long as this extractive system exists this is how it will inevitably be. No culture change is going to fix things. Only the workers being the owners will fix it.

Last I checked the average tenure of a CEO was less than 2 years.

As long as the problems only properly start getting felt a couple of years later, all such "save a bit now, pay a lot later" strategies are ideal for CEOs as they optimize their bonuses.

As for other people, well, these types are usually far into the sociopath side of the spectrum so they don't feel the pain of others, don't worry about the harm for others, and have no shame whatsoever.

The rest is just collateral, they don’t care.

I know.

Youre right. Because their bottom line is improved in the short term so that they can say "Look at how much revenue we made last year!"

"And now look at how many people employed to gain that revenue!"

"No, don't look over the whole year! Just look at right now!"

Yeah in the kind of was that a shitty gambler plays when the "table (market) is 'hot'" they feel overconfident and go all in, ignoring that the pieces they're playing with are people's lives

It's about maximizing the bonuses for the executives. A bigger bonus than what they got last year.

Because it’s easier that way.

In the short term, easier. But for long term sustainability, no....But what does that matter when you get a bailout every time you fail?