Family of MSFT employee who died warn tech companies not to overwork workers

Companies have no morals. They only respond to profit.

Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.

How about instead abolishing privately owned companies?

Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.

Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.

Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.

Managers should be assistants.

This has been attempted multiple times and the results were disastrous.

A dictator deciding that every village needs to produce X amount of steel instead of actually harvesting their crops and them millions of people dying is exactly the opposite of what I described.

RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.

This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...