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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing your company in detail, based on what you describe and general business practices, I'd be willing to bet that they'd fire you in no time if you ever stopped providing value for them. So why be loyal at all? 8 weeks is crumbs, and you even had to fight for that. I mean if you've been a solid employee for X years, briefly asking for a bit of time off for a life changing event should be absolutely fine, instead of the miserly response you describe. Just a bit of outsider's perspective, but I'd say you're hardly working with people who really respect you beyond their bottom line.

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>So why be loyal at all?

I got severely sick when I started working there... like 2 weeks in and I was hospitalized with a brain infection for a week + another couple weeks at home recuperating. They paid full wages during my absence.

When my father was dying from cancer they did the same thing as I helped move him to hospice and handle the estate.

There's been other things as well where they've gone above and beyond what an employer should do, and maybe "loyalty" isn't exactly how I should frame it, I do feel "safe" working there knowing I'm not about to be thrown out on my ass should something inconvenient happen.

It's a business relationship so I don't see why "they'd fire you in no time if you stopped providing value" is always thrown around as a negative. Of course that's the case. You'd stopped working in no time if they stopped providing value to you too. As it should be, from both sides.

You can have loyalty and still understand that there's a social/informal contract in place (and maybe a formal one in some places).

You'll think very differently the moment you get a disability and people think you are no longer providing sufficient value to society.

Great strawman/non sequitur but completely irrelevant.

I don't think it's a negative in absolute terms, it's just an argument against loyalty to a company. Loyalty is a two way street, and is defined by how people treat each other when times are tough.

It is common for companies to expect "loyalty" in the form of working extra hours when the company is in a tight spot or settling for meager raises rather than switching companies while at the same time laying people off at the first sign of trouble. In such an environment, an employee offering loyalty to a company when none is offered in return is setting themselves up to be taken advantage of.

Right, which is why you should never feel loyalty for a company. They're not people, they don't have brains, they don't have empathy or loyalty to you, they will drop you the moment it makes sense to.

Have loyalty for people who deserve it, but never for companies.

If you really wanted to treat it like a business relationship, any employee should constantly be looking for higher paying / better job and leave immediately when that job is offered, not even giving 2 weeks, because that's 2 weeks of additional income the employee wouldn't be getting. Are you in agreeable with that as well? Hard, cold business decisions work both ways.

a fully rational actor would do exactly that, unless he also puts utility value on hard to define 'relationships', but why would he if money in hand has clearly defined utility...?

just another hole in classical economics and theory of rational choice.

You're building up a ridiculous strawman. Why, in your farcical example, does "fully rational" mean by definition maximizing short-term economic gain? Even if it's hard to give an exact value to a relationship (are you quoting something or do you mean the word ironically?) certainly a good relationship is better than a bad one, and poisoning a relationship strictly for economic gain has some sort of opportunity cost.

One can treat an employment contract like a business relationship while also giving some preference to a company they like working for, and vice versa (always bearing in mind that all but very small personally run companies are likely brainless , soulless corporate entities regardless of any PR platitudes to the contrary). Agreed on that. However, in the OP above, the guy describes a situation in which despite being a well established employee, he had to basically claw for even a meager 8 weeks of paid leave for something as important as a newborn baby. Based on that description alone, I'd tentatively say that the employer hardly deserves much loyalty at all. As I already mentioned.

Sure, I was replying to this:

>I don't see why "they'd fire you in no time if you stopped providing value" is always thrown around as a negative.

It seems the whole loyalty thing is always sided heavily in favor of the employer. When both sides eschew loyalty and make cold, hard business decisions, my example is what the employee's might look like. Not very appealing I know, but neither is laying off 25% of your workforce because Zillow decided it wanted to be a real estate investor and failed miserably at it; an example of a cold, hard business decision.

I don't think this is true. I've been given resumes by bosses of people I've worked with before and told them not to interview based on previous interactions, whether they were good to work with or not, etc. You can burn every bridge as you cross it but eventually that will bite you. We software people like to pretend everything is a 1 or a 0 but that's not the case in the real world. Relationships matter.

> not even giving 2 weeks,

You give 2 weeks because of the people, not the company

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