No, you don’t understand, that profit is for shareholders and executives. They were the ones that bravely cut lunch breaks and asked the staff to work harder, and they deserve the fruits of the staff’s labour.
All the employees did was produce 100% of the value, but that’s just their job. Can’t go setting any precedents by rewarding them.
That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn’t use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn’t use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).
During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come.
But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14+ hours a day and have become full netizens. If companies want to keep growing, they can’t rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.
We’ve removed critical functionality from the operating system because our boss didn’t want more than 6 buttons on screen at any time. Sorry the system is 100x more difficult to use!