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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

I think the super-hot job market in tech from 2012ish to 2022ish has really led a lot of people to underrate having a good professional reputation. When you were competing with 10 other companies to try to get a candidate, you couldn't be too fussy about "hey, why do you have a string of short tenures," or "did you get a kinda lukewarm reference from so-and-so."

So now we've got people saying, "Hey, don't worry at all about making your employer mad," in an environment which favors employers over employees. It's shortsighted, unless we return to ultra-hot job market in a year and this is a one-time difficulty.

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The mass layoffs this year, almost universally executed on seemingly arbitrary criteria with little regard to performance or seniority, would seem to indicate that employers certainly don’t care about making employees mad. Any pretense of reciprocity has been destroyed this year.

Yes and no … Just because somebody does not care about making an employee mad, it does not mean they will get a job if they do.

You might think your employer is horrible, but it’s the ones that smile and stay how great the company is that will get hired.

When you NEED a job, people will go back to being company-pleasers.

There never was any pretense to begin with, people just happened to realize that lately. In tech that is.

That being said, your relationship is with your, former and current, co-workers. I am rather good in blowing bridges up if I think someone else put them on fire first. But even then, I took great care of who was on the other side, as much for my own sake as for the sake of my reputation and relationships with others.

Because even if you don't give a single f** about your employer, your co-workers will remember as would you. Especially if all of a sudden the job market is favouring employers again.

It's always been the case.

But now it happened in FAANG so it burst the bubble of the proportionally few who used to feel special.

It didn't even really happen in FAANG. FAANG employees are still doing extremely well. FAANG companies are still holding onto tons of unproductive headcount which they would prefer to let go were it not for the employee backlash that'd follow. There are lots of people making lots of money who would be cut in any other competitive industry. I know because they're honest about it during their lunch hour. People read these stories about companies going about layoffs in a ham-fisted and counterproductive way, and jump to the conclusion that managements are all mustache-twirling robber barons whose main dream in life is to feed their employees into meat-grinders. The more conservative and reasonable conclusion to draw from the poor layoff execution is that FAANG management teams aren't very competent people managers, and are especially incompetent when it comes to layoffs, since they don't do them often.

You say this like you're a big realist, but it's the opposite.

Like, let's say we're in a world in which everybody is just a hard-edged economic realist and no sentiment or loyalty ever gets involved in anywhere. That's the world where you don't want to piss off your employer.

It's the world where employees are super valuable and coddled where all this, "well, I'm just showing them what it feels like to be me" is a viable tactic. That's the world where they care about your reciprocity arguments.

The point of building a good professional reputation is not for the benefit of employers everywhere. It's for you. To the exact extent that you think that employers are faceless soulless monoliths that don't give a shit about you is the extent to which you should stack the deck most in your favor for getting hired. If reference calls are going to be like, "Hey, I think that Bob has a really good heart and a ton of potential," then okay, maybe your minor indiscretions are NBD. To the extent that reference calls are, "I would not hire Bob again," that's when you really want them to say, "I would happily hire Bob again."

You overlook that if you premise “employers are faceless soulless monoliths”, then they would care as little about good behavior as bad. As far as references in tech go, they seem usually an after the fact formality, than anything.

At any rate, all of this is trading in hypotheticals. I don’t actually favor quitting with no notice, but in such an extreme case, I would assume it was done with sufficient justification that one’s colleagues, perhaps even one’s direct manager, would be sympathetic to the quitter.

You act like coders are okies. People at Google were frequently getting 2-9 months of severance, with benefits for most of those. Stop pretending like tech employers generally are behaving with "no sense of reciprocity." It's embarrassing and no one in any other field of work is going to buy your sob story.

Not until they get rid of the indignity of open offices. A gilded cage is still a cage.

And FAANG is not all tech.

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