Readit News(The level number starting so high is I'd guess due to an homogenous pay structure, so some non-engineering, junior HR say, roles lower paid (<L59) than where engineering happens to start.)
I emailed every dealer within 220 miles of my location. Half never even replied and the rest tried every trick in the book to get me to the dealership before they'd give me a price.
My favorite story was an exchange with a salesman who quoted me $1,000 over MSRP. He said a year ago we were selling these at $10,000 over list price, I am saving you $9,000! I told him COVID is over and if he wanted the sale he'd have to get more competitive.
My goal had been to buy 10% under list and though I failed to achieve that I did all right. Don't think I'd buy another vehicle any other way although it took a very frustrating seven weeks.
would you be able to list those tricks? I'm currently car shopping myself. how did you get them to give you a price without showing up?
there's an opportunity cost for that expense. it reminds of this episode of Schitt's Creek - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg1Uk60rBsc.
then, with that ton of money, they could buy enough shares to influence the board to implement their agenda.
in theory, this would quantify the definition of "obvious".
When an individual engineer screws up, if the processes in place are working correctly, that screwup should only cost some time and possibly a bit of money—most likely within an order of magnitude of a few days and $100. This is why we have processes in place: because people are fallible, and it's not good to give any one person that much power.
When a CEO screws up, there's no one to catch that screwup. The buck stops there. So many of these companies are structured specifically to give the CEO some significant degree of autocratic power—the power to say "this is what we will be doing, because I say so", whether or not they have other justifications backing them up—and now that we're saying, "Hey, that kind of power is supposed to come with accountability," you try to tell us they shouldn't?
As for "companies can run fine without one," I'd say that's a very useful hypothesis to test. But your strawman of "give a bunch of money to people on fiverr" isn't the logical way to test it: it's "set up a system with democratic processes in place, create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for".
this sounds very similar to a government where politicians are elected (un)fairly. likely, this just presents another set of trade-offs.
This can also work with income taxes. For example if you set income tax at 100%, you'd get 0 revenue probably because no one would work. This effect happens at values below 100%
This seems to rest on the mistaken belief that a corollary of monopolies being bad is that more competition is always better than less competition. If everyone was a competitor in the restaurant food delivery market we'd all starve to death as no one would be growing food. An efficient economy wouldn't waste resources competing over less important things like restaurant food delivery over something more beneficial.