But employees are rewarded for showing quick wins and changing jobs rapidly, and employers are rewarded for getting rid of high earners (i.e. senior, long-term employees).
What I've learned from a decade in the industry is that talent is never fungible in low-demand areas. It's surprisingly hard to find people that "get it" and produce something worthwhile together.
People who can "reduce" a big system to build on a few simple concepts are few and far between. Most people just add more stuff instead.
- Rich Hickey
Loyalty will often not be rewarded, as most have seen companies purge decade long senior staff a year before going public.
It is very easy to become cynical about the mythology of silicon valley. =3
The same for MSFT or any other similar problem. Humans only care when the house is on fire — in the modern Capitalism it means the stock goes down 50%, and then they will have the will to make changes.
That’s also why reforms rarely succeeded, and the ones that succeeded usually follows a huge shitstorm when people begged for changes.
In corporate context it's because that's, in theory, an effective use of resources:
If 20 teams are constantly "there is a huge risk of fire", a lot of mental energy is wasted figuring out how to stack rank those 20 and how real of a fire risk there is. If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.
In practice, you've probably noticed that the most politics-playing & winning teams are the teams which are really effective at :
1) faking fires
2) exaggerating minor fires
3) moving fast & breaking things on purpose (or at least as a nice side effect) to create more fires in their area of ownership* , and get rewarded with more visibility & headcount to fix those fires.
* As long as they have firm grip of that area... If they don't, they risk having it re-orged to another team.
In this case, with Microsoft's really amazing revenue stream, a charismatic management team can distort reality for quite some time and convince the right people within the company that there is no fire.
If you treat people well and give them the means to survive without trying to wring every red cent you can out of them, they'll be more likely to stick around and keep providing value.