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Yahoo To Fire Another 15% As Mayer Attempts To Hang On (theguardian.com)
New submitter xxxJonBoyxxx writes: Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has announced plans to cut the company's workforce by 15% and close five foreign offices by the end of 2016 after announcing a $4.4bn loss. Yahoo shares have fallen 33% over the past year, including a 17% drop in the last three months. Its shares fell again in after-hours trading after Mayer announced her plan. Yahoo expects its workforce to be down to 9,000 and have fewer than 1,000 contractors by end of 2016. About a third of Yahoo's workforce has left either voluntarily or involuntarily over the last year. And the cuts may just be starting: one activist investor (SpringOwl) says the total number of employees should be closer to 3,000 for a company with its revenue.
... she'd fire herself.
She is not responsible for her actions. So she holds the laid off people responsible by laying them off.
Layoffs are always done by bad management who won't take responsibility for their actions.
But Twitter has 3600? Yahoo does a fuck lot more... I don't understand how these companies are valued.
But you don't have to be a sexist about it.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/yahoo-sued-over-employee-rankings-anti-male-discrimination/
It is hard to believe that Yahoo used to be one of the top search engines with a nice bright future. Now it has a bit less that 10% of Google's revenue, and it keeps dropping. I don't think this is a case of economies of scale... Google isn't the only online advertiser making money. But Yahoo somehow continues to lose money in this ever growing market.
Bottom line: Management at Yahoo sucks. The company should be sold in a fire sale as it has little prospects for turning things around.
The problem with a volunteering leaving of a company is a really bad thing, almost worse than layoffs. While it makes it easier for the managers to sleep at night knowing that they don't have to let a person go, which for most humans really hate doing.
But for the company the people who are smart enough to see the writing on the wall, know to jump ship early knowing that they can get a good or better job elsewhere. The ones who stick around are often the ones who lack the experience to see the warning signs, or just don't have the skills to get another job, and gamble on not being the one who gets canned. Thus populating the company with less experience or less than ideal employees. This creates a downward spiral of less quality and causing real layoffs (as we see here) which makes allowing for growth much harder.
But when you see voluntary leaving it is a bad sign.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why don't they just say they are a woman with a genetic defect called a penis?
Why would anyone think there's a constant proper relationship between revenue and the number of employees across all businesses? I mean, let's just skip right over that employees are paid different amounts, businesses take different amount of human effort to create the wealth, the market will support different prices for different services, and the business will have a different amounts necessary to pay their vendors and capital requirements.
Suppose I have a farm business. One year I decide to spin-off the part of the company that picks the tomatoes. The previous company suddenly has much more revenue per employee. Should it go out and hire more people? The tomato picking company has little revenue per employee. Should the tomato picking company fire a bunch of people. Of course not.
-Dave
She'll get all the credit she deserves for the failure. Maybe she could run for office after she's done sandbagging Yahoo.
Too bad Mayer has some 100m$ golden parachute in her future.
From what I can see, it's not so much that Mayer has made a bunch of bad decisions, but rather that she hasn't made any decisions at all. Well before she took over, everyone knew that Yahoo was in trouble and that their status quo wasn't tenable. So she was fully expected to come in and make sweeping and disruptive changes, hopefully thereby saving the company.
But what has she even attempted to change? From the outside at least, Yahoo as it exists in 2016 still seems fundamentally identical to Yahoo as it was in 2012, or for that matter, in 2006. The only plan I even heard about was that idea to split off the company into two pieces, let the unprofitable half (i.e. Yahoo) die off, and focus on the profitable half (i.e. partial ownership of Alibaba). And that's not really even a plan, that's just surrender.
Do something, at least. This wait-and-see stuff is no good. I'm pretty sure you won't like seeing what you waited for.
"Firing her and hiring a replacement won't change that."
Bullshit, she's crap, hire a competent person. Clinging to someone you know isn't competent helps nothing.
We know she's crap, time to move on from this mistake.
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Whereas the rest of us, just get thrown out by security, have a shitty reference and in this day and age, your career in tech is pretty much over.
Are the people who produced the horrid piece of trash they now call a web site part of the 15% being sent packing? What used to be a fairly easy way of getting stories in an easy-to-use format is now a jumbled mess of shitty colors and blocky outlines.
I, and many others I have heard, have stopped going to their site as a direct result of the change. If Mayer, or the morons in charge of web design, were hoping to get more eyeballs to their site, they have failed miserably.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is one thing to staff up disproportionately if you anticipate growth, like Amazon. That is not Yahoo's problem. It is entirely reasonable for investors to demand a revenue level (and profit margin) per employee consistent with the profit margin of their sector. As a shareholder, I demand it. Yahoo's excess labor is better deployed elsewhere in the economy.
I mean seriously haven't all of us been here at one point in time or another. I know about 6 years back I was working for a company that decided that everyone would get pay cuts, first 3.5 percent. Then an additional 10 percent two weeks before Christmas. They as far as the leadership teams went, they had to give up paid vacation time. Then the layoffs came. But why is it that the upper management didn't lose anything? It was just the little guys, the people that actually did the work and made money for the company gets screwed. It was shortly after that, that most of the talented people left. Shortly there after the company lost their contract with their main source. They company that pulled the contract cited you no longer have a skilled labor force to provide adequate support for our products. If the company would of restructured it upper management (which it did after it lost the contract) instead of just hitting the employees where it hurt. They might of been able to salvage their operation and kept the contract and it's employees.
Mayer made one big change: doing away with telecommuting.
Yahoo is just now finally getting to the point they wanted to be in the late 90s. Things like their email mostly works now. It will always be my junk mail honeypot, but it does work.
But everything they are trying to fix and improve, someone else beat them to it years ago. They are trying to pry into a market they failed in.
All Mayer will be able to do at this point is try to wind everything down, fold up the chairs, and shut the lights off. The people with any brains have moved on to greener pastures and there is no way they are coming back, so trying to innovate a new business model is not going to happen.
Yahoo is dead, dead, dead. Pack the golden parachutes and jump!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
with 50% of the staff fired now, they have removed the bottom 50% of performers. So those remaining must be deleriously happy to be working with such elite peers. their productivity must be skyrocketing now that all the deadwood and even mediocre but dilligent workers are gone.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Layoffs should always be a last resort in positions that require technical talent. This goes double if your staff are more experienced and able to see the writing on the wall. I've chosen companies carefully over the years and have had long tenures at places I've worked. But, when a talented person who can get a job somewhere else sees the layoff balloons going up, the immediate thought is whether or not they'll be next. This causes everyone good to head for the exits, and you're left with the low-talent people who are just hanging on hoping they don't get it in the next round. This has happened to me twice, and I've carefully considered my options both times, opting to leave before things got worse.
This is partially driven by the (irrational) preference to hire only employed people. I know a lot of talented people who've just been blindsided by a sudden layoff, capricious firing or even the business going bankrupt. The road back for these people is very hard and they often have to take lower-salary work or work for companies with less-than-ideal working conditions.
There was some speculation about Yahoo! picking up the streaming rights to NFL Thursday Night Football, but I notice that there is no more discussion of that.
There are a million different business issues and channel conflicts, but this would have been an interesting move for Yahoo!.
[Goes to check Yahoo's site] WTF do those ten thousand people do all day?
If you were to tell me that website had a staff of twenty, I would say "Those are pretty hard workers, and the PHBs are obviously not interfering too much," and I would admire Yahoo as a company.
A hundred? I'd say, "looks like a luxurious job. I bet there are a lot of coffee breaks."
A thousand? I'm just stunned that they'd find something for a thousand people to do, even part-time.
Ten thousand? You're pulling my leg.
It had been more than ten thousand?!? I can't wait to read about the secret rocket ship they have been building for their manned Mars mission.
Why doesn't Yahoo! acquire Facebook? Yes, they might need some financial support BUT it can be done!
technical talent get replaced by H1B's. There needs to be an “cool off” period for companies that have laid off an American worker before they can access the H-1B system.
and if this is like any other layoff I have seen then management probably had 24 hours or less to decide who to let go and who to keep. Without adequate time to do any real analysis then the brown-nosers, game players and golf buddies get to stay. The ratio of dead wood to productive employee then swings even further to the dead wood side.
Then the good employees that did manage to make the cut see the writing on the wall and start sending out resumes. The exodus continues.
By any measure, Mayer has done an absolutely terrible job during her tenure. Granted, she inherited some challenges but she knew this going in. If you are working for Yahoo my advice would be to get out as soon as you can. This ship is sinking fast.
Yahoo lost its way a long time ago. I see more spam ads and malware from folks using Yahoo (and CNET for that matter) than from downloading torrents.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Eliminate all the employees...problem solved, and think of the money they'd save!
Seriously, I've never seen a company circle the drain as long as Yahoo has, it's like they have some magic drain-circling power than no amount of swirling or flushing can overcome.
I swear, ten years from now we'll still be reading stories like this...."Yahoo Set To Fire Its Last 20 Employees, Mayer Predicts Huge Cost Savings".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If yahoo goes down I will have to re-register for many forums and websites that send out gobs of terrible spam.... Where will I send all the spam! Does Slashdot have an email service? Are you thinking of offering one?
Nobody outside of flyover country uses Yahoo anymore. It's not an aspiration brand anymore and the technology sucks. What exactly are those 9,000 employees doing?
She is not responsible for her actions. So she holds the laid off people responsible by laying them off.
Keeping her current job is probably not Marissa Mayer's primary motivation. She was worth $300 million before she started working at Yahoo. She could have retired, started her own company, became a full time VC, etc, but she chose to become a CEO of a huge Internet company. It is very likely this means she wants a career running large companies. So Mayer's primary motivation is probably doing a good enough job to be given other similar or even better opportunities in the future.
The more things stay the same at Yahoo, the less likely she will make a successful career as a big-shot CEO. That is how she is taking responsibility for her actions. Comparing firing Marissa Mayer with firing rank and file workers is useless. The impact of being fired on her life compared to the impact on her workers' lives are not comparable. Even if there were no golden parachutes. She was already in a position where financial penalties are not very significant before she started working at Yahoo.
Layoffs are always done by bad management who won't take responsibility for their actions.
While that is often true, it is not always true. For growth companies layoffs are often a sign of management admitting they are no longer growth companies. The layoffs can signal they realize becoming a stable profitable company is more realistic than becoming 10x larger in a few years. That IMHO is taking responsibility for their actions
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Bullshit hypothesizing nonsense. What if blah and blah, then competent person won't blah!
Mayers is crap, she's wasted a bucket load of money on her friends companies. She's made no positive changes at all, now she's reduced to sacking to cut costs as a consequence of her bad leadership,
You are simply trying to defend her with bullshit arguments that pretend she did the right things and somehow its all out of her control. But she's not competent, she made the bad choices, she shredded the company and she has to go, no fluffer like you can save her when the numbers speak volumes to shareholders!
"that IMHO is taking responsibility for their actions"
No, it is not.
Management taking responsibility for their actions means THEY take the brunt of the results of the actions, not the laid off employees.
Since the management have no skin in the game, they're not responsible.
OK, so they're not growing, and they admit it. Take the employees that are redundant and reassign them to other parts - so they can be redeployed in making the stable profitable company they are seeking to do.
It is easy to say "I'll collect the big paycheck and take the benefits of having the management job" but when the management job now entails "oops, you have to pay a price" they quickly say "the laid off employees will pay that, not me!" and the management are not responsible for their actions.
When the storm hits, the good Captain says "all hands on deck" - NOT "let's throw the sailors overboard."
Employees are assets, not only expenses. Get rid of assets in a company, the company's value drops.
When will we see:
> Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
Management taking responsibility for their actions means THEY take the brunt of the results of the actions, not the laid off employees.
Since the management have no skin in the game, they're not responsible.
How do you propose to make C-level management take the brunt of the negative results of their failed policies? If the management is fired along with the employees, they are not taking the brunt of the negative results because they already had a significant net worth before taking these positions. If they required these managers to invest significant amounts of their own money in the company before taking the job, they wouldn't take the job in the first place because it would always be a horrible investment from a diversification standpoint.
You have to face facts that once you make a certain amount of money, you will never be "punished" in the same way as regular people unless your actions are criminal (and often not even then). There is no way for them to ever put as much "skin in the game" as rank and file employees ever again.
Employees are assets, not only expenses. Get rid of assets in a company, the company's value drops.
Employees are assets, but companies only rent those assets. They don't own them (that has been illegal since 1863 in the US). Once the return on investment of renting those assets becomes negative it is a very good decision to fire them. The company's value will drop even more if the company continues to pay for the use of assets when there is no plan to effectively use them in the future.
When the storm hits, the good Captain says "all hands on deck" - NOT "let's throw the sailors overboard."
They already did all hands on deck back in 2012. It didn't work. Now they will all drown, including upper management, although your analogy falls apart there because in this case "drowning" means different things for different workers. Some easily find new jobs, and some never recover. It depends on their individual value to society.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
A rather useless person, collecting a compensation worth millions of dollars per year, is going to sack a few thousands of people whose compensations are, at best, short of a hundred thousand a year, so she can keep her job. This woman does not have a conscience and is morally debased.
Yahoo may be failing, but at least they've achieved their diversity quota for the CEO position.
"I would argue that the core company isn't "worthless", it's just worth far less than it used to be. "
Bingo, it has lots of traffic and a loyal audience, yet it has a negative valuation (take out the Chinese assets and the remainder is worth less than zero). That's Mayer's value right there. As long as she's running the show it's worth less than zero.
"The bottom line is that there's still a business there, probably not any real growth potential. So the proper thing to do is downsize, concentrate on the core(s) that are profitable and be really good at those areas where you're known to be really good."
Doesn't this remind you of Carly Fiorina? She ran HP into the ground, halving its value, and sacking employees to try to cut costs to match the half size company. They finally sacked her and Mark Hurd made minor changes and turned it around.
This mindset is why you'll always be an employee. Sorry!
Think about it impartially without emotions clogging your judgement. It was a failed hail mary by Yahoo to hire all these people in an attempt to grow the company.
You don't retain your growth team when you're trying to tread water.
There are millions of people who, for whatever reason, are happy to use Yahoo services and there is no reason why the company can not keep them running well and earning salary for employees. The problem is logically impossible expectation of infinite growth placed on public companies. Sooner or later this drives every successful company into collapse after losing their pyramid scheme and investors flock to the latest overhyped startup to try to recoup their losses with more gambling.
Mind you, this is the company that owns Tumblr. Logic has no place in their world.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Your hypothetical sounds plausible in the generic, but Mayer came to Yahoo from Google.
QED: nobody is interested in preventing Mayer from using her knowledge of the Internet search and email businesses elsewhere in industry
No kidding. What service am I going to use now for my email accounts that I don't care if they get lots of spam?
"We're not not doing layoffs" remixes indeed. I'm sure the Department of Labor will completely agree with her new "not layoff" jargon.
But fear not good citizens, Mayer will probably get a severance package equal to the salaries of the people she fired.
I mean, there has to be justice for the woman, right?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
.... on the Democrat side. The GOP still has >10 candidates, while on the Dem side, you have a Socialist vs someone who's under the FBI microscope. Toss Meyer in - she could be their answer to Carly
Fire all the executives and save a whole lot more money plus cutting dead weight that does nothing at all for the company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're making excuses for the failed system we have and hiding behind alleged objectivity. That mindset is why you'll always be a wannabe business executive. Sorry.
Taking stupid risks, and that's what this was, with other people's lives and livelihoods needs to be punished and not rewarded. You can call that emotional if you want, but that's the world sane people want because we're tired of rewarding sociopaths.
The Neo Con shuffle 1. Use quid-pro quo with connections to get into the board or at least an executive gig at a tech company. 2. Outsource as much as possible to (incompetent) head shops. 3. Layoff everybody you can. 4. Reap the rewards!, pay yourself and other executives/board members huge bonuses! 5. As the company begins to sink see step 1.
That would be gender appropriation according to TERFs.
You raise a good point, but how can she become a VP candidate for the next election unless she exits Yahoo now?
back in 2013 and was able to see this from the inside. Everyone would spend most of their time playing Diplomacy and just like the board game, it was impossible to win without stabbing someone in the back. Even if you survive one round, to survive the next you'd need to betray someone new. I have no idea why anyone would think "Survivor" would be a good work atmosphere -- but that's probably why I don't have a multi-million dollar salary.
I was happy being a contractor because (a) free food was good (b) I had no job security -- but neither did they and (c) pleasing my manager by doing good work was easy enough.
The other problem, was of course, most of their products are completely worthless. As one investor put it, Y! has three businesses worth keeping: mail (most popular provider in the world), Finance (most popular free stocks site), and Sports (again, most popular free site -- more users than ESPN). All three teams could easily fit inside a single building with some room to spare for day-to-day operational stuff (server maintenance and the like).
So cutting divisions like Games (bingo...seriously?) totally makes sense.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Of course, whenever she loses her job (voluntarily or involuntarily), I'm sure there's a golden parachute that will deploy and she'll be set for life either way.
Even with Yahoo's stock tanking, Marissa Mayer doesn't need a golden parachute to be set for life.
If they required these managers to invest significant amounts of their own money in the company before taking the job, they wouldn't take the job in the first place because it would always be a horrible investment from a diversification standpoint.
The simple and easy solution to this is to completely eliminate the shielding that exists between investors' personal assets and the concrete results of corporate policies.
If an investor is personally responsible for everything his money helped cause, then extreme diversification becomes a severe liability. Did you invest in an investment fund that purchased shares in your name from a company that was found to subcontract to a company involved in child slavery? Now you are guilty of personally trading in child slavery, will all the legal and criminal implications involved in it, including the legal obligation to fully compensate your victims, no workarounds allowed, not even insurance shielding. Don't want risk ending bankrupt and in jail because you put your money where it shouldn't be? Don't invest in anything you don't know perfectly well, be always on top of things, and never allow it to lead to anything even remotely socially negative.
That alone would do wonders in making the entire world of big business turn from the greedy rapaciousness we came to expect of it into one in which every rich person takes extreme care about where they put their money, as putting their money anywhere, including in a bank account, now has consequences that go far beyond merely losing that amount.
Investment funds would still exist, but they'd be very different. Instead of just huge analytical schemes trying to find where's the highest ROI and switching what they according this one single parameter, they'd have troops of managers directly combing very finely every legal and moral aspect of whatever they were looking into putting their clients' money so as to be absolutely sure not only their clients, but they themselves, would not end up poor and in jail.
Do you know that old saying according which freedom requires responsibility? Modern capitalism has set things in such a way that the rich have tons of freedom and very little actual responsibility. Fixing that doesn't require toppling capitalism. Rebalancing things so that responsibility grows proportionally with freedom would to the trick.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Yahoo has been doomed ever since rejecting a MS offer of 44.6 Billion dollars. They were on the slide long before that, mostly because Google is so successful.
http://financesonline.com/top-...
Ironically, even in the attached URL Yahoo is broken!
Maybe they can go into SCO mode and just start suing everyone...
Something I've never figured out: CEO's primary job is increasing share value. So why aren't they all just paid minimum wage, plus a bonus proportional to how much they increase shareholder value buy? Stock goes down, they eat beans and wieners for dinner. Are all CEO too greedy to accept such a deal? Seems to me, if you had faith in your ability, you'd take the gamble.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The simple and easy solution to this is to completely eliminate the shielding that exists between investors' personal assets and the concrete results of corporate policies.
This is the exact type of simplistic and unreasonable logic that allows people to believe these are easily solvable problems if only the world wasn't corrupt.
No matter how good controls would be, there would be no way to stop some middle manager from trying to cut a corner and fudge an earnings report. Are you going to put thousands or even millions of people in jail because some manager committed fraud trying to hit his quarterly numbers? All he has to do is profit over $500 from the fraud for it to be a felony, and now all investors of that company just committed a felony because one guy committed one illegal act. It is simply silly.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The only way to get rid of her is to dissolve Yahoo.
But that is what Brin and Page wanted all along and still paying her cash.
Ha ha
You sleep with rabid wolves, you wake up with rabies.
Serves them right. Everything even loosely associated with Microsoft should just die in a fire, already.
sorry to see you go. And thanks for all the fish.
Y! hasn't been relevant since 1995, and even then they were out of date.
Taking stupid risks, and that's what this was, with other people's lives and livelihoods needs to be punished and not rewarded.
Everyone harmed by Yahoo's actions is immeasurably more responsible for their lives and livelihoods than Marissa Mayer or anyone on Yahoo's board of directors. Shareholders have not been harmed since the stock price has risen 88% since Marissa Mayer took over (it increased over 200% before dropping in late 2014). Any existing employees have had plenty of time to leave and all new employees knew what they were getting themselves into. Yahoo has been very open about its intent to take huge risks and try to turn itself into a growth company again. Owning Yahoo stock or working for them should have been considered a high risk investment for some time.
No one has been taken advantage of here.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
John Sculley. He can give her advice for her future career. Anyone know where he is?
Yahoo! kept dropping the ball on so many ideas. They had the chance to do Instagram before Instagram with Flickr, which they fixed after the fact. Then Flickr alienated users by selling photos and profiting behind the users' back. They had a great journalism idea with Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone and then dropped him after one year instead of running with his coverage ongoing. They had Geocities, which they could have morphed into a Godaddy or Squarespace, but dropped that. They had a cool e-mail plan, but their tech support dropped the ball. Doing business through Yahoo! became a drag because their customer support became harder to reach. Now they don't post ANY customer support number, which really helps with credibility. They have click bait ads on their main site and click bait news entries. Really classy. So many opportunities squandered...it as if the company is being sabotaged.
Sepaku!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I think it is important to remember the Peter Principle when it comes to evaluating CEOs -- "managers rise to the level of their incompetence." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
It is shocking that C-level positions in America are more like an aristocracy than a meritocracy. Once you are "titled", you can never go back to being a commoner again, regardless of your performance. That you are not fit for the job never even comes into question.
It is simply silly.
No, it isn't. Suppose you yourself were living in the scenario I described above and, yes, if an individual below you commits fraud you are responsible too. How would you act? How would you setup your company so as to avoid being sent to prison by effect of middle managers' greed?
I'm sure the simple fact I asked question has caused you to begin thinking on possible risk mitigation solutions, hasn't it?
Now think an entire world of entrepreneurs thinking over that exact same question. Don't you think they'd have developed and kept improving best practices? Practices that are so ingrained in such a world's entrepreneurial culture they are taught in universities, absorbed in trainee years, and all but became second nature to anyone who deals with any significant amount of money?
Yes, it's workable. It might be unimaginable if you only spent one minute thinking about it. For a culture that spent (or were beginning to spend) tens of thousands of man-years thinking about it however, not so much. There, it's just how things are.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I'm sure the simple fact I asked question has caused you to begin thinking on possible risk mitigation solutions, hasn't it?
No, it hasn't. Because risk mitigation solutions can only limit risk or create backup plans, not eliminate risk. And when it comes to the possibility of going to prison, that is one risk I want as low as possible. There is no way I would ever invest in any company if I risked jail time for the behavior of all employees at that company. And I would never start a company where I would have to hire employees if I knew any one of them could potentially send me to jail if they broke the law.
Even if mitigation strategies could eliminate all risk, your proposal would mean all startups would need to have their first employees be a watchdog group to set up controls so every future employee could never commit a crime. Startups would immediately be nearly impossible to create, and certainly impossible to bootstrap. Small businesses would stop being formed all over the country. Starting a business is already incredibly high risk, and you are adding risks that are almost immeasurably more severe.
All this would do is make any country which enacts these policies noncompetitive to all other nations. The number of extra employees it would take to turn our companies into a police state capable of ensuring no person was ever even capable of breaking a law in their professional dealings would grind our economy to a halt. An elimination of 95% of our GDP would not be an exaggeration. It is a laughable scenario.
Immediately disregarding suggestions like this is not a sign of intellectual laziness. It is a waste of time on the level of comparing the pros and cons of playing Russian roulette to decide what to have for dinner tonight.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
No, it hasn't.
Yes, it has, because when you wrote "your proposal would mean all startups would need to have their first employees be a watchdog group to set up controls so every future employee could never commit a crime" that's exactly what you did. Proceed in this manner and in a matter of hours you'll have a full set of workable proposals. :-)
By the way:
I would ever invest in any company / I would never start a company
That's fine. You'd be an employee or, better yet, a small scale entrepreneur. A world of small scale entrepreneurs is a good outcome for me. And, to be sure, it's part of an already developed economic system: Distributism.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I'm surprised they haven't fired Marissa Mayer! A lot of longtime Yahoo customers left Yahoo after they changed their email interface getting rid of a lot of features customers enjoyed with their email application. The new application was also buggy and some people reported losing emails stored on their account. After one designer said that sometimes people need to be kicked in the groin to appreciate good software design, email customers realized Yahoo won't return to Yahoo's classic email or give them the option to stick with what works and left in droves. The interface of Yahoo news started to be disliked by customers because of it's endless scrollbar and people started only receiving fluf news stories supposedly based on their interests. Eventually customers left Yahoo news in droves which is probably why they were losing revenue from advertisements on Yahoo news. I was a longtime Yahoo user that started using Yahoo in the mid-1990s, after they changed their email interface I was one of the droves of customers who left especially when you couldn't even trust that any email someone sends to you or you send to them will get delivered. Half the time I would be scrolling through my emails and would get some numerical error number and get logged out. I have reason to believe there was a bug in their software that allowed hackers to steal passwords since I had my account broken into despite having a very difficult to guess password that would not easily be discovered by brute force attacks. It was a pain to get my account back since Yahoo had gotten rid of customer support and I couldn't find help. I finally gave up on yahoo a couple of years ago. You can read many customer complaint sites such as pissedcustomer.com where people are still indicating how they could not get into their email one day and had troubles getting help from yahoo. Some have said that numbers that use to work are now disconnected and if they are able to get through to Yahoo after waiting two or three hours, they get some rude person who has no idea how to help them with a thick accent that they cannot understand. I think Marissa Mayer got in over her head and wasn't willing to admit it and kept blaming others when things didn't go as planned as a lot of senior Yahoo officials have also left Yahoo along with employees who voluntarily left or were fired to save money. I've heard employee morale has been at an all time low at Yahoo ever since Marissa took over. I don't know if anyone else could have turned yahoo around but it was obvious after 2 years that Marissa was in over her head but she is still with Yahoo to this day.