Red, Jackson, Gen Y & Loyalty

My generation grew up in a world where employers have never shown loyalty to their employees. We're a (human) resource, as subject to the whims of management as any piece of machinery. You show us loyalty, real loyalty, and we'll show it back.

If you're paying us peanuts and make it up in stock options, we're going to cash them out when it suits us. If we have no guarantee of more than the minimum redundancy pay when you lay us off, you have no guarantee of more than the minimum notice when we quit. If you cut costs on furniture and equipment, we're going to cut corners when recording our hours.

A select few companies demonstrate loyalty and get it in return. I'd wager that Joel Spolsky has no trouble retaining employees. Plenty of Googlers seem to me like they'd take a bullet for Larry or Sergei.

I'm from an old industrial town - a town largely built by "The Corporation" that employed it's citizens. "The Corporation" mended the roads, ran the amenities and the social clubs, sent your wife flowers when your child was born and guaranteed your child work when they left school. If your pipes burst, "The Corporation" sent their own men to fix them. For over a century, they demonstrated absolute loyalty to their employees and got absolute loyalty in return. My generation missed the boat - "The Corporation" sold out to foreign owners and left town ten years before I was born.

It's the boomers that dismantled this apparatus, who broke up the trade unions, who coined 'downsizing', 'human resources', 'creative accounting' and any number of other vulgar euphemisms for stiffing the workers. Personally, I can live with all that. What I can't abide is the hypocrisy of expecting respect where none is due. You'll get from me what you have paid for, and not an ounce not more.

He claims to be "brutally honest", but that doesn't explain his immediate firing of someone who gave a perfectly reasonable 2 weeks notice, and telling him not to come back to the office, even though he had personal effects there. This is obviously just another jerk trying to spin his reputation since his jerk-ness has been made public.

The boomers were commies, "me generation" was greedy, gen-x were slackers and gen-y are entitled. How about instead, middle-aged bosses hate the fact that younger people learned to game their system, and are creating a new system. It's more or less how it always works -- to the point I'm fairly certain there is a genetic component to it.