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Comment by projectileboy | Hacker News Reader

The asymmetry between how employees agonize over their behavior towards their employers vs how employers think of their employees never ceases to amaze me. Never forget that your employer will gleefully lay off their most loyal employees if doing so is somehow in alignment with some executive’s comp. I’m not saying you should ever behave unethically, I’m just saying that if you’re on the field, you should be aware of what game you’re playing.

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> Never forget that your employer will gleefully lay off their most loyal employees if doing so is somehow in alignment with some executive’s comp.

I'm old enough to remember that people retired from the jobs they spent their whole lives working at... and wondered why those barely older than me were already struggling to find meaningful futures within their careers, nevermind within their company.

Reaganomics and the new business method of short term gains at all costs destroyed company loyalty and loyalty of the employee.

Many employers agonise over laying off employees, I would go so far as to say the vast majority do. Many employers try to keep on employees in situations where they really should be laid off, putting their own jobs at risk.

Don’t get into the the mindset that employers are all psychopaths - not only is it not true, but it will damage your career thinking this way.

I've been on the 'lucky' side of many layoffs. It is always good to remember that the responsibility of a corporation is to shareholders, not employees.

Yes, but it is not quite so clean. Employers are humans and in my experience they care far more about the people they know (employees) than abstract people (shareholders).

(This is just my opinion; and I have never been personally laid off -- the quotes in my first message are more about the fact that I actually might have been better off if I was...)

Your manager is likely to care (not always in my observations), but there can be various reasons for that (affected deliverables (compensation); bad experience of delivering the news, etc.). His manager may care. Next level manager is much less likely to care, and so on. And the decisions are usually made on the level where I doubt people care much. People on that level may not like that they have to lay off people and have some sympathy for those affected, but they will lay them off as soon as they think it is necessary for one reason or another. It's their job to keep _the company_ going, not to keep _you_ employed.

The company still does it.

This is how employees should treat their relationships with their employers as well. Do what's right for you and your family, and don't act on some misguided sense of loyalty to your employer.

Sometimes the company has no choice as the alternative is everyone loses their job.

I don’t think employees should think of the company as their family, but don’t get into the mindset that all employers treat their employees as disposable cogs.

Thank you for saying this. It’s frustrating to see all the hate against employers. It really depends on the company and people you work with, and that can be said for both the employee and employer.

Yes I'm in total agreement with this. I see many people here who get absurdly passionate about programming that they forget a lot that management is not as much. The business world is brutal so you gotta hedge the odds in your favor. Busting my ass for the potential to make a significant bonus isnt worth it. As is going above and beyond. Just game the system and wait for management to figure it out. And if your managers don't monitor you, exploit the hell out of that. This is why I consider the Gervais Principal one of the greatest reads of this modern world for office laborers.

The Gervais Principle changed my life. Not all for good, but it did open my eyes wider, and it also helped explain some things that I couldn’t understand beforehand. (For example: I never understood why I found LinkedIn to be so depressing, until I saw that it was dominated by what Rao calls “the clueless” engaging in what he terms “posturetalk”. Many, many useful mental models in that book.)

For me it was the realization of being a loser, but being the difference between being a loser that busts your ass (dwight) and a loser that "gets it" (stanley).

It opened my eyes and I stopped caring about getting fired at my low paid office job. And guess who never got fired even after slacking hardcore?

> Never forget that your employer will gleefully lay off their most loyal employees if doing so is somehow in alignment with some executive’s comp.

I work at a global mega corp run by private equity guy. This is definitely not the way our management works. From my manager up through our BU head, people are valued as a long term investment and are not casually discarded. Yes, if you are not productive, you can be dismissed. But valuable people are not taken for granted at any level of seniority in my experience.

Sure, but the existence of good management in one company run be a PE guy does not necessitate that this will always happen.

Additionally, management is an incredibly hard job to do well, and most people suck at it, so most management chains do incredibly short-sighted things.

I've made the opposite experience (in germany). No company will ever fire anyone. If they really need to, they give you a generous leaving package. The only exception is if the company going bankrupt, in which case the state might help (Kurzarbeit or bail out).

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