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Comment by twh270 | Hacker News Reader

"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.

It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything.

As others have said, the employer-employee relationship is first and foremost a business relationship, i.e. transactional: you work and they pay you. When that relationship doesn't work any more for one side or the other, it ends.

It does often happen, of course, that professional friendships or even personal friendships develop. You are, after all, spending a lot of time with your co-workers. But don't think your good relationships or friendships will help if the business decides a layoff is necessary.

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>"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.

In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.

This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.

Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).

> This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use.

But that’s exactly the kind of relationship it is. Instead of maintaining some fantasy, you should call a duck, a duck.

I wouldn't say that people higher up can't be your friends, but when their office and them personally aren't the same thing.

I've seen family members fire other close family members, because a business is a business. Nothing special about it.

You can be friends with your colleagues, but when you understand that their role at a company is separate from your personal relationship - you may just get friends that transcend your employment.

My personal attitude towards employment - "I work for you while our goals align". Businesses most definitely treat any employee the same way.

This is good and realistic advice. Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders and ultimately they will do what this necessary to make that happen. Layoffs are just another (unfortunate) business transaction.

I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.

Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.

I wouldn't put "loyalty is dead" so starkly. But certainly lifetime employment from either side of the fence is absolutely not the norm. I've generally stayed at places a reasonably long time (arguably too long once or twice) but I still haven't made it much past a decade.

Loyalty is absolutely dead in the employer => employee direction. The second it becomes financially advantageous to have layoffs or to fire one person in particular, it will happen. Your direct manager, maybe even your skip, might fight for you to stay. But if someone 6 levels above you decides your time has come, that's the end of it. The test for whether loyalty exists in this direction is the answer to "you can keep this person at the cost of a negative financial impact for your organization - you will not make this money up in the medium term." What does your manager say? Your skip? The CEO?

There is absolutely still some loyalty in the other direction. Lots of people here would say it's misplaced. When it works out for you (cachet in the org, seniority, whatever) it can pay off, but for lots of people it only gets them burned when they get laid off with outdated skills in outdated tech because they were a "company man" for the last decade.

In Japan, there are stories of business men killing themselves because they have to lay off workers. The cultural norm there is that you’re employed for life - either your life or the companies, and both parties act to ensure that’s a long life. Maybe a little dramatic, but the cultural sentiment is there.

Google is cutting a few hundred R&D jobs out of their 180K employees, and countless ventures. These people could be repositioned, these people could be absorbed elsewhere. Google is wildly profitable, with record profits, which by definition means what they’re not falling on hard times.

Loyalty is dead.

> Loyalty is dead.

Something that has never existed cannot die.

But the myth, and the brainwashing, of "employee loyalty" is still very much alive. Some even buy that crap.

> He kept referring to employees as “resources”

The classic comeback for this is to refer to management as "overhead."

> Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders

Companies pay taxes, operate in a community, and employ people. Shareholders may not care about such trifles... until the race to rot is complete.

I don’t know why we keep repeating the “companies exist to make profit for shareholders” line.

It’s barely real, it’s hardly law, and the more we say it, the worse companies will act because we’ve all accepted fate.

Companies exist in our society. They don’t have a right to profits. Any profits is a result of patronage and goodwill of the population. We can change laws, and cultural norms, and worker and environmental protections. We don’t need to be victims of greed like it’s some inevitable consequence of capitalism.

A company is not your friend, or your enemy. It's a machine. See it as such, use it as such.

A particular person above you in the management chain may actually be your friend. It does not mean that that person would be able to protect you from a layoff; that could be a conflict of interest. That person might give you an earlier warning so that you could start looking around ahead of time. That person could give you a glowing review and references for prospective employers. That person might introduce you to someone who might be interested in hiring you. But that person operates the machine, and plays by the rules of the machine, to which you have agreed when you have signed your offer.

Build good relationships with coworkers; this can be helpful, and is just more pleasant. But don't try to build a relationship with a company; you can't.

A key thought as well, in my experience:

- never assume that just because it’s obvious to you (and your coworkers and boss) that it would be really stupid to lay you off or fire you, that they wouldn’t do it anyway.

A lot of what is going on IMO is burnout and disconnection from the on the ground reality at the executive layer.

That means short sighted, stupid, long term self harming decisions.

But just because what someone is doing is clearly stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. A hard lesson to learn sometimes.

Or, quite simply, the performance of an employee or division is not the only determination in layoffs. You could lay off half of teams and fill them in with ostensibly high performers in other teams, and then be worse off than before because the high performer was dependent on context and fit.

Or, you may have a division that is profitable, but it takes an outsized attention in the organization relative to its profitability and the loss of revenue is made up for focus in the rest of the organization. (Ideally, you would find a way to spin that off or sell it, but there are times where the tight integration makes this unfeasible.)

And yes, there is disconnection from the on-the-ground reality too. (and all sorts of things) - but this all goes to say that layoffs, when executed, often are not correlated with individual performance.

What you’re saying is the nice, rational way to describe a scenario.

There is that, and it does happen that way often.

There is also sometimes people just do stupid, self harming things. Either because they are not able to properly process/know/understand what the consequences will be, or because their short term incentives encourage them to at their long term detriment.

Or because the organizational incentives make it worthwhile for them to harm the actual organizations long term interests, and they will be rewarded for screwing over the organization this way.

It’s easy for engineers in particular to look at 2+2 and assume that everyone else knows 4 is the obvious answer, and hence will act appropriately. and they just need to be shown the truth if somehow they don’t understand this

But that isn’t how people often work, especially when dysregulated, stressed out, under outside pressure, etc.

Often, there are many people between the decision makers and the folks who know the actual truth and the inevitable consequences who have incentives that will make them actively hurt anyone trying to tell the decision makers the truth - often because the decision maker implicitly or explicitly wants it that way.

even engineers, though it’s often hard to ‘know’ that when you’re in the middle of it.

Many people will burn their lives to the ground until everyone agrees 5 is the correct answer. Or happily reassure their boss 5 is the answer while burning everyone else’s lives to the ground.

That can make many real life situations very surprising and frustrating for engineers in particular.

Because how could someone do that based on ‘wrong’ (usually just not the same) information? It’s stupid!

Because sometimes for many people, the individual/self interested ‘smart’ thing is to be as ‘stupid’ as possible. And that strategy is not something someone can just change on a dime. It’s inherent.

And sometimes people are just stupid. Even otherwise really smart people.

All that is also true. In both cases, it's not about the quality of the engineer or the work.

Also, sociopaths exist and they are often in management.

But in both cases, the key insight is that layoffs are often past the control of the engineer.

Yup, definitely. Often not only past the engineers control, but sometimes even past the control of the immediate management chain.

With the caveat that everyone responsible is also going to attempt to deny/deflect/reverse victim and offender, etc.

It’s amazing how ‘helpless’ some management/execs get when unpleasant decisions need to be made.

I read it as: do the Barr minimum to meet expectations and nothing more because if they want to fire you your transformative impact is worth nothing

That's a bad strategy unless your highest priority is to avoid work. If you want to make more money or have more stability, you will absolutely do better on average if you do more than the minimum. While high performance does not guarantee security, and management doesn't always make the best choices about who to let go, the "do the minimum" people do tend to be the first to go. You don't have to outrun the bear, you have to outrun the slowest guy running from the bear.

Ok, maybe it's excessive, but surely going the extra mile when the relationship do good work <--> job safety is broken is something, at least personally, I won't do.

The bear is hungry and laid off entire divisions.

I'm not saying it's guaranteed to protect you, I'm saying that on average you are going to come out ahead. I've been in the industry 30 years. I've seen all kinds of good and bad management, firings, layoffs, promotions, and attrition. When you excel at your work, the odds are very good that someone will notice. Even if your boss does not, your colleagues likely will. That turns into strong referrals, which helps you find better opportunities whether or not you get laid off.

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