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I'm surprised that this is controversial. I didn't think it was a hot take. Even at my first internship (at a large tech company), during the general onboarding, I was introduced to the concept of the Pareto principle, used to explain that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the employees.
Shorts on who?
I'm in much more agreement with "80% of work is done by 20% of employees" (although I think it's a larger share than 20%)
I disagreed strongly with "most office work is fake email jobs"
"Many employees don't work at full capacity" =/= "many employees have fake jobs"
The shorts would be against whatever companies you think are wasting large sums of money paying people to do nothing, as presumably they're very liable to be disrupted by companies with more competitive cost structures
That doesn't follow. There are colossal differences between:
Where 2) would be quite difficult for professional investors, much less regular individual investors. And even conditional on if one somehow were able to pull off 2), modern financial theory would suggest 3) is still highly unlikely. Since if you could pull off 2), so could others, and thus there leaves no opportunity for arbitrage.
Note that it’s unclear what the directionality of such an investment thesis should be. With or without arbitrage, one could argue that high-bullshit-email-job companies should have higher expected returns, since the market would perceive them as riskier in being more vulnerable to disruption.
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All mid-large companies do this, there's none to short, as it's built in.
No because it's not a solved problem, it's a scaling and coordination problem. You can't easily pick out which jobs are fake. and which parts of which jobs. It's baked into the growth curve.Smaller companies generally are scrappier, and often cheaper as a result, which is how they compete. As they grow, they become less able to run a tight ship.
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