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This is not news. If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're

• JR1427 2y ago
  What annoys me, is when companies expect _you_ to be loyal, when they would get rid of you in a heartbeat. For the vast majority of employment situations, it is simply a transaction. There needn't be any talk of "loyalty", which in my mind is usually just manipulation.
  • suriya-ganesh 2y ago
    Employment are an adversarial relationship of convenience Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have.
    • Culonavirus 2y ago
      Yea doesn't sound dysfunctional at all... lol. Apply that for marriage for example: > Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have. Peachy.
      • rkachowski 2y ago
        The difference between employment relationships and marriage is rather large.
        • silverquiet 2y ago
          The divorce rate would suggest it isn't that large.
          • nkrisc 2y ago
            Historically, marriages often were almost transactional arrangements of convenience.
            • silverquiet 2y ago
              I'd say that also reflects my experience with dating.
        • ajot 2y ago
          You should be looking at employment as a contract, and marriage (and other personal relationships) as a covenant. If you apply tit-for-tat with your spouse, at least one of you will end dissatisfied and hurt.
      • _w1tm 2y ago
        Who would want to be married with their company? You are finding dysfunction where there is none. Imagine expecting the employee or company to have the other party for better or for worse, till death do them apart. Talk about dysfunction!
        • Culonavirus 2y ago
          But I am talking about loyalty. Marriage was just an example that points out the absurd nature of the "loyalty" the user described. You can't say "well, I am loyal as long as I don't have any other options"... that's not how loyalty works.
    • galdosdi 2y ago
      No, not at all. You have missed the mark completely here. This is totally culturally dependent. In a culture where this is expected, this is indeed what will happen. If you've only ever lived in such a culture then, yeah, you might get the mistaken idea this is an intrinsic human universal truth. But cultural norms are really powerful and can absolutely overcome natural game theory / self interest dynamics. If everyone you know would think less of you after you quit a job when it is known that employers are loyal, you won't do it. Same goes for the reverse.
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      An employment arrangement is a business deal, nothing more and nothing less. Whether or not it's adversarial depends on the nature of the deal and the entities involved. The most common error I see in employment is the employees not understanding this basic truth. That leads to situations such as people thinking that an employer is doing them a favor in some way by hiring them, which leads to people giving up some of their power. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
  • varjag 2y ago
    With change in leadership to GenXers and millennials I don't think it's an expectation really.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
      Can confirm. I myself am older and, admittedly, came into the job market as a very naive individual. But over the years I have watched the younger cohort and I am actually kinda impressed with the realistic ronin-like attitude. It is a lot more transactional for a reason; companies themselves have mostly destroyed it. If anything, it is a perverse expression of US 'fuck you, got mine' system.
      • kiviuq 2y ago
        There is too much morally infused overinterpretation of Capitalism going on. Owners and workers have diametrically opposite interests which no law or moral judgment could put aside. What one party perceives as a fair wage is nothing but profit dilution for the other side. Remember, the only purpose of a business is - given money - to make more money. If you can't help them with that, either by being dirt cheap or have some marketable skill, you're literally useless and part of the Capitalist overpopulation... a class people who serve no use in the accumulation process.
        • smeej 2y ago
          I think this is true of businesses that outgrow their local economies. And since that's what most people see in their feeds and interact with every day, that's how they expect every company to function. When every company that has any mind share is beholden to a bunch of external shareholders, it's no wonder "profit as much as possible" is the only reason for being anyone thinks of. But it didn't used to be this way and it doesn't have to be this way. It's still possible for people to do well by doing good, providing, for example, quality housing at non-exploitative prices, or reliable and safe plumbing to handle their neighbors' water and sewer needs. And it still is being done. Most of us just spend so much of our time online that we only ever hear about the companies with social media/marketing teams, so we get used to that way of thinking.
  • cheema33 2y ago
    > What annoys me, is when companies expect _you_ to be loyal, when they would get rid of you in a heartbeat. Reality is that neither has to be loyal. Employees leave all the time for better pay/perks etc. You are judging employers too harshly in this respect.
    • JR1427 2y ago
      Yes, I know that neither has to be loyal. But I know of examples where a manager has said things like "you need to decide if you are loyal to the company" etc. I really dislike this.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        People lie all the time. For marketing, to be polite, for worse reasons. It’s in everyone’s best interest to stay on their toes and evaluate others’ motivations before accepting words at face value.
      • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
        I would want to ask the manager how the company is going to be loyal to me. I’m curious what they would say.
        • cpach 2y ago
          Indeed. And how would the manager make a guarantee for it?
      • JohnFen 2y ago
        If a manager ever said that to me, I'd immediately start planning my exit. I don't want to work for anyone who engages in that level of emotional manipulation.
    • harimau777 2y ago
      A complicating factor is that it is much easier for corporations to punish employees for being disloyal than for employees to punish corporations for disloyalty. I.e. if your resume shows too much job hopping then that can hurt your ability to get a new job. However, a corporation is not nearly a badly hurt by repeatedly overhiring and laying off employees.
• louwrentius 2y ago
  It's never about the livelihood of those that remain. That's just a side effect. It's only about shareholder value, thus about growing growth. Which is so stupidly unsustainable, the inevitable crash always happens. And it's normal people who will foot the bill for this system.
• newswasboring 2y ago
  > An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain. That argument falls flat on its face as soon as you look at the balance sheet of these companies. They are exceeding expectations and still laying people off.
  • tsujamin 2y ago
    This reminds me of the argument GE made (from David Gelles book about Welch) that laying off staff is a kindness, as it lets them try and find a new job they’re “better suited for” sooner rather than later
    • pdimitar 2y ago
      Sounds like somebody who never had a mortgage payment overdue and the bank calling and threatening to confiscate the house / apartment, and with two pre-school kids constantly introducing unexpected expenses. But then again, I never expected the ruling class to be empathetic.
      • rty32 2y ago
        Exactly. Laying people off isn't necessarily a bad thing by itself if it "needs" to happen, but (at least in the US) what follows is loss of health insurance and income money needed for mortgage. Millionaires don't have that problem and can easily tell peasants to suck it up.
        • cpach 2y ago
          Regarding unemployment benefits: In many countries there are unemployment insurance funds set up so that one can maintain a somewhat reasonable level of income even in the event of unemployment. E.g. here’s what it looks like in my locale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_funds_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_funds_in_Sweden The upside of having a system like that is that the burden to ”care for” the employee’s economical safety is not put solely on their current employer, but not solely on the employee either. In order to be eligible for payouts the employee has to pay in to the fund every month (something like ~14 USD) – and all companies are mandated to contribute pay in to this system. Personally, I see few downsides with this system. It’s important for the general economy that companies can be flexible and change direction, e.g. when the economy cools off or in the face of competition. Therefore I believe layoffs are sometimes necessary for the company to survive. But it’s also important – both for ethical and economical reasons – that layoffs doesn’t wreak havoc with the personal finances of the people being let go. Regarding healthcare: To me it does not seem like a good idea to tie a person’s health insurance to their current employer. AFAICT this is a remnant of the US war economy during WW2. But that doesn’t mean that a system like UK’s NIH is superior. To me, the German model looks very reasonable where citizens are required to sign up for insurance but the benefits are not tied to the person’s employment. One can read more about it here: https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/health-in-germany-how-health-insurance-companies-work https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/health-in-germany-h... I think Singapore has a similar system.
• pydry 2y ago
  It's not news and I think it's fairly widely accepted, but there are plenty of corollaries that people still reject. I had a coworker who was actively hostile to the practice of writing documentation, for instance. He wasn't up front about it but he was plainly doing it to reduce his disposability. I think it probably worked because they kept him around longer than they clearly wanted to in spite of his very prickly personality. As a strategy I thought it actually made a decent amount of sense given his circumstances - lots of debt/outgoings, he couldn't hop jobs easily and the company treated employees as extra disposable. As the developer who came after him I was perplexed at the cries online people would make that "this practice only hurts the developer who comes after you" or "if the company does well you'll do well" (which I think is bullshit). It definitely made me a LOT slower, but I still got paid the same.
• psychoslave 2y ago
  > The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO. Starting any topic with kind/evil dichotomy is never a way to bring a rational perspective on the table, indeed. Over-hiring can happen through different situation. One is bad luck: market evolution removed the the ground under the feet of a sound projection assuming a reasonably stable context. An other possibility is incompetence: acting in reckless attitude with the business strategy as if it was a past time board game without considering it will have concrete impact on real people that will engage in its progression. Yet an other one is draining all skills in the market to gain dominance on its segment. Thus endowed, it will be easy to kill any possibility of fair concurrence. Then later, drop the monopolized workforce out of the train, that was known to be superfluous to achieve production goals. Of course, this drop should occur only once there is no credible chance these employees could find a decent job in this sector anymore. That is after they contributed to the hegemonic position of the organization. In short, over-hiring is not necessarily an error.
• lordnacho 2y ago
  I think we need to look at what we really mean when we say someone is loyal. What it means to be loyal is - this is related to the idea of a contract - that when you see a better opportunity, you do not leave your current relationship in favor of the new one. In other words, loyalty is what stops us from taking better opportunities that arise as circumstances change. Same as when you are taking your vows, if you later come across a hotter, younger chick with your exact set if kinks, you do not just drop your wife and go looking for a new gimp suit. Seen from this perspective, it is clear that businesses tend to have very little loyalty. The ethos of most of the business world at the moment is short term bean-counting optimization. If employees can be fired and replaced by cheaper foreign workers, they will be. The only rationale allowable is one that balances costs and benefits, in the bean-counting sense, and it is not an accounting that includes any weight for loyalty. You could imagine a spreadsheet where the company said "hey I'm gonna put a hurdle of $100k per employee on the 'stay in America' side, and I'll only move the factory if it's still in favor of moving abroad". But when has this ever happened? On the other hand, employees probably have more loyalty than zero. Almost everyone has a story about they were approached by a recruiter offering a higher salary, but they didn't take it. Part of this is explicable by risk, offsetting the higher salary with a chance of not settling at the new work, that kind of thing. But if you were to count the bean again, almost every knows a bunch of people who could have jumped ship for a higher salary but didn't, even when you count that risk.
• Akronymus 2y ago
  > If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're loyal -- and whether or not your employer is loyal to you in return. As someone who works at a 2 person company (my boss and me), it's the good relationship with him along with the relaxed work environment. Sure, we have to be profitable, but not exceedingly so. > I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain. > The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO. Those are mostly a problem at larger companies, IME. I was exceedingly lucky with most of my jobs so far, in the sense that I mostly got good work environments where employees are actually valued beyond mere numbers. I wish others would be as lucky as I was.
  • paulcole 2y ago
    > where employees are actually valued beyond mere numbers Isn’t this the point of the article? That even when you feel this way that you are still disposable?
    • Akronymus 2y ago
      I have personal experience of a company keeping me employed WAY beyond where it was profitable for them, as they simply didn't have the need for me due to not enough contracts. They provided me with a lot of learning resources. I went almost half a year in total without any real work for me to do. They were aware of that. They really tried hard to find a way to keep me on, so while I was disposable in the end, they truly did try to keep me on, and to me, that indicates them valuing me beyond the mere numbers.
      • paulcole 2y ago
        Why’d they keep you on? Are you just a really nice person? Are they just really nice people? Or did they think you’d be profitable to them in the future? Or some combination of all 3?
• iainctduncan 2y ago
  This, 1000 times this. I have said this and seen it so many times (I work in diligence looking at companies). The big sin in tech is over-hiring to look like success. This is the act I consider reprehensible - making people believe they have a career when they got hired at an unsustainable burn rate to make number go up on an investment slide deck - fully aware that post-transaction (sale to next investor) half of them get the headsman's axe.
  • JohnFen 2y ago
    When I'm evaluating whether or not I want to take a position at a company, once of the things I look for is that company's history of layoffs. Some companies have a habit of engaging in them, and I prefer to avoid them. In part out of self-defense and in part because I think it's indicative of a general business mindset that I wouldn't get along with.
• ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  > The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO. This is an underappreciated aspect of psychopathic corporate life and "Human resource" thinking, I think. It's hard to avoid the feeling that companies -- particularly big tech -- feel empowered to hire lots of people quickly precisely because firing people has become so easy. Such that when one big company has a round of layoffs, competitors genuinely feel some pressure to follow suit almost arbitrarily, because it's an expected part of a cycle; a numbers game, a way to appear "lean", etc.