HACKER Q&A
📣 nine_zeros

Companies that don't focus only on the next quarter


From the current wave of burnout and layoffs, it appears that most people are unhappy with the quarterly goals structure of companies.

Employees are unhappy because they are pushed to meet arbitrary deadlines, often at the expense of their personal life. Management harasses employees to meet those goals because they are incapable of doing the work themselves and because they will not get their own promotion if said goals are not met. Management implements backstabbing policies to force employees to compete instead of collaborate. See: All the negative ratings from Meta employees. Many employees seem to be unhappy.

Customers are also unhappy because the quarterly growth structure often comes at the expense of customers. See: Reddit saga where executives decided to abandon customers in order to meet their investor targets.

It looks like the quarterly growth model is exploitative - of resources, employees and customers.

This doesn't jive well with my values. What are some examples of companies that don't care about the next quarter as much? Perhaps they are happy with slow growth or just happy being a steady business.

E.g. Privately owned companies like Bloomberg appear to be less concerned about the next quarter but more concerned about building steadily for customers. Customers are happy enough that they would much rather pay high prices for Bloomberg data than go to a competitor that will likely backstab them later.

Are there any more such companies?


  👤 bombcar Accepted Answer ✓
There are many of them - but like "rich people who get enough [1]" you never hear about them because they usually stop growing before they're huge on the national scale. Sometimes you find them because they become well-known for good product.

[1] Early investors in companies who get to the $10m-100m net worth often just sell everything and retire; you rarely hear about them because they don't become the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. C.f., Bogle's Enough https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4798028