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Comment by jadar | Hacker News Reader

I tend to agree. But the devil's advocate in me says that then they'd be accused of not having empathy. That sort of thing might work in Europe — but for a US company, I think you have to pay some lip service to emotions.

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"Not having empathy" may have made sense 20-30 years ago when mass layoffs weren't as common as nowadays. Nowadays, everyone knows how it works and how much they really care about the employees. Nothing is worse than someone faking empathy especially CEOs (and I am a small time founder/ceo myself even though of an extremely small company).

Completely agree. That doesn't change the fact that people are fickle and want to have their cake even as they're eating it.

20 to 30 years ago was 1996 to 2006. Layoffs were very common, due to outsourcing to cheaper countries. It was common knowledge in my college years of the early 2000s to not expect a long tenure at any employer, and to always be applying to new positions.

Even big US companies today are full of "Is this good for the company?", "Our company values" and other cringe-inducing loyalty/ethics-related propaganda, about as much as 30 years ago. So they are keeping the charade, for better or worse, even though it is as much hypocrisy today as it was 30 years ago.

(Maybe 60 years ago it wasn't hypocrisy, but I lack personal evidence).

The media will spin whatever you do in whichever direction is maximally outrageous because that's what gets more clicks, eyeballs and ad bucks.

So just ignore them and do what's right.

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