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Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

About 12 years ago I was working for a PC Magazine competitor when they cut the Managing Editor loose, a man who'd worked there 20+ years and was in his late 50s.

I ran into him in the bathroom, tears in his eyes, asking me what he was going to do now? That this is how they reward decades of loyalty?

Ironically that magazine, dedicated to predicting future technology trends, would go down the toilet some years later because they didn't see technology trends like Google and internet advertising coming.

Companies have no loyalty folks...neither should you.

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"Companies have no loyalty folks...neither should you."

That's a broad brush to paint with; companies are just a group of people, not some inhuman construct. People make the decisions and just like every other aspect of life, some people care don't put their impact on others first, or can't because of circumstances. Not every company discards employees like garbage, and it's a lousy narrative to propagate.

That may be true but then your boss's boss fires my boss and brings in someone new and doesn't know or care about you or your company gets bought just to shut down a competitor or any of a million other things.

>Not every company discards employees like garbage, and it's a lousy narrative to propagate.

Depending on which industry you are in or nations. But generally speaking there are less than 10% chance of this so call Good company, so I argue this is not a broad brush at all.

You didn't mention a single counterexample. Meanwhile:

IBM, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, you name it. All of those have done large cycles of layoffs.

And the coding industry is infamous for its Ageism.

I believe it is healthy to take at least some aspect of their mind-set on this.

Unless you have a contract with a golden parachute, anything could happen in a moments notice. Very few people outside of senior management have such parachutes, and even then not all of them negotiated for a good one.

If nothing else, keep your resume and linkedin up to date.

Usually when you have groups of people trying to maximise their own gains, selfishness and ruthlessness tend to dominate the group.

What you write is true but one can never know for sure if you are in a nice company. Even if you are in a nice company today you don’t it will remain nice. You don’t know what economic factors will occur that may turn the company culture toxic. The company may be bought out tomorrow and new management might suck.

Since you can’t know that these possibilities won’t occur it’s best to keep the mindset that the company is not your friend. They do not have loyalty to you in perpetuity. It’s a business and not a person. It’s run by people but the more people it is being run by the easier it is for them emotionally to treat everything in business terms.

Do not have loyalty to a company. It’s just business and not personal.

> That's a broad brush to paint with; companies are just a group of people, not some inhuman construct.

Companies are a group of people hired to make money for shareholders. They owe loyalty to shareholders, not their workers. It's actually the fiduciary duty of the board and the execs.

> Not every company discards employees like garbage, and it's a lousy narrative to propagate.

Of course not. But the point is they will if they have to.

Companies exist to generate value for shareholders. Not to be nice to their workers. When times are good, you have nothing to worry about. But when things get tough, all bets are off.

Thre's also the "faux friend" situation too. The people you work with have to get along with you but they are not your friends. If you're laid off you'll probably never heard from any of them ever again.

And HR isn't your friend either. Many young people misunderstand the role of HR and believe it is a shoulder to cry on. Think of HR as just another company product or tool.

Your relationship to your coworkers is entirely contextual, varies from person-to-person and company-to-company, and doesn't lend itself well to pithy broad brush statements.

Completely right about HR, though. Their mission is to push paper and ensure the company doesn't get sued.

HR is there to maximize the value and minimize the risk from your humans. Everything in a company is designed to maximize (short term) shareholder value. This isn't evil; the company needs shareholder value to survive.

"This isn't evil; the company needs shareholder value to survive."

Viruses need animal hosts in order to survive. That isn't evil either. But if you're the host it's bad for you.

Companies as embodied in capitalism are generally bad for most humans in the long term. They are an irrational and little understood mechanism receiving un-critical, near-religious adulation.

That is junk economics and libertarianism. Companies certainly can and are evil, unrestrained competition is basically drug cartel turf wars/slavery, and maximized shareholder value doesn't produce the most competitive products and long-term health of a company, it produces the most short-term money to investors.

Yeah, lots of people think HR is resources for humans, but it’s really for the management of resources that are humans.

I prefer the term Human Accounting myself.

Indeed, but you must be careful not to be hostile to HR. You need to work out what they need to hear. So for instance, I was open to HR about some issues I was having but I was very careful to limit my information in a non-obvious way and I couched my explanations in a positive manner, and worked out what they needed to hear.

Ironically I wasn’t actually being dishonest (I just can’t do that) but I was very careful in what I said, and I was very careful not to be overly negative. And I did this when I had no other choice... it’s not something I would have done if I could have avoided it!

> Indeed, but you must be careful not to be hostile to HR.

I agree, but don't confide in them like a life long friend either. Keep it neutral like a job interview be professional and unemotional. Only state what you did, you said.

And ask HR for a follow up e-mail of any conversation you have with them asap.

It's just business. Obedience to authority can make people do terrible things, as shown in the Milgram experiment, and in business you have a whole chain of authorities.

The Milgram experiment has been thoroughly discredited.

Source? The only item under validity on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity) is a book, rather than a journal, and it's far from thoroughly discrediting.

There are quite a few sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/famous-milgram-el...

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3489337.htm

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731691-000-the-shoc...

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...

In terms of a meta-analysis, try this one:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0098628316677644

Thanks for sharing that was quite interesting.

This one in particular argues: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12074 (1) willingness to perform unpleasant tasks is contingent upon identification with collective goals and (2) leaders cultivate identification with those goals by making them seem virtuous rather than vicious and thereby ameliorating the stress that achieving them entails.

Quite interesting perspective on leadership. I suspect it's a bit of both.

However, from your first link:

"But many psychologists argue that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up. "

Doesn't seem thoroughly discredited to me.

It's possible I over-egged the pudding. It would be more accurate to say that there are significant concerns with the experiment.

Fair enough, thanks again for sharing.

There's definitely far more to Milgram's than I knew. Many insights.

'You're loyal to your work, not company'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SO1F_u2_iE

How does it have anything to loyalty? A job doesn't last a lifetime. There aren't that many company that even live a full decade.

When an employer will happily use up your most productive years and let you go as soon as it isn't constantly profitable... A job might as well be for a lifetime.

It's not an uncommon story, true. But it's a pretty shitty one.

The firing happened because company ran out of money. That's what happened to most magazines lately.

I totally agree. Economics in the media industry (print or web) have been hellish for 10 years or more. Paywalls are unpopular, don't work and go against the 'free information' culture of the internet. However, the email he was sent firing him which he screenshotted to Twitter, was indeed so curt as to be rude, as he said. Its just that these editors and publishers are so behind the 8-ball to be desensitized to the types of cost-cutting that they do everyday. It must have never occurred to that editor that they were in this case firing someone who is a near-institution in the PC periodical literature.

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