Comment by rckt

There is a special form of small company that's even worse. It's the kind where "we're a family". Those are worse than anything a big company bureaucracy / bean-counting could ever be.

My parents told me to be loyal to people, not companies.

People get me a job when I look for one.

>But in smaller groups and smaller communities, where you're actually working with people, loyalty and even affection can really make a difference in how satisfying your worklife is, how much security you can feel in your opportunities, etc

I've been in IT for over 20 years, mostly working in small to mid-sized companies. Small companies will let you go as soon as they feel a pinch. every company is the same, no matter their size.

You're expected to give two weeks' notice, but they can let you go without any notice.

Corporate loyalty is the dumbest trick employers ever pulled.

The term loyalty is dangerous for an employee.

Having seen companies of all sizes lay people off for the exact same reason - Returns did not match expectations - my personal perspective is to treat all employers the same.

No company with a balance sheet is loyal to employees. Keeping that idea in mind, and thus on an equal perspective, is healthy for both sides. "It's just business" is good advice and not just in movies.

The larger the company, and the more they're ballooned out with abstract drones chomping on abstract work items

I was actually thinking about this the other day. When an employer implements an "aloof" layer between the work done and the bottom line, the employer and employee don't get to bond. You and your company should be on the same page when it comes to generating business and on the same page when it comes to concerns. Shipmates, for real. With layers of management of all varieties (middle management, project management, developer management (this is tricky because the Dev Lead becomes your only connection to the bottom line)), the "aloofness" leads to unfulfilled lives. That's when the employee doesn't feel fulfilled or understands who they are on the ship. And it follows that the captain(s) of the ship (leadership) are unfulfilled because they are no longer in love with the crew (can easily fire, hire, layoff, disconnect from the employees lives). I haven't fully thought this thought out so I will probably expand on it as time goes on, but this is my line of thinking at the moment.

It's a love issue due to a lack of direct bonding (and no, company social gatherings and "fun" is not the bonding I am talking about. I am talking about taking on Moby Dick together). The love is indirectly routed through these other layers until it's been fully diluted and misunderstood, unfulfilling to all. Everyone must love the ship, the crew, the captain, the ocean, and the whale they are hunting.

I've worked at large companies (a Fortune 50 for ten years), and small (current employer is six people), and in my experience the small businesses treated employees the worst. At a large organization, there is a sense of orderliness and process that sometimes works in the employee's favor; your "loyalty" is on the record and categorizes you in a specific way. In a "family"-size company, it's often the case that only family members, family friends, or family co-religionists are of value to the owners; this truth then emerges at the worst time for you.

That loyalty and affection your are feeling is only going one way. I've worked for small and large places. Work is always transactional. The day the CFO at your 10 person startup that "feels like a family" gets some pressure from investors to cut costs, well, your loyalty does not factor into the decision making.

This difference is because smaller organizations are less of an entity in their own right, and more of an actual group of people doing things together (even if legally the company might still be a separate entity).

As organizations grow, they become more than a mere sum of its parts. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon driven by complexity - as humans interact, this very interaction creates something resembling an entity in its own right past a certain scale, with its own agenda (distinct from individual agendas of its constituent humans) and drive for self-preservation as a whole - the egregore that you mentioned. My pet theory is that this starts to happen when you scale beyond the Dunbar number, but the effect is only obvious at scales where most members of the organization are faceless strangers to each other.

Either way, this emergent entity is decidedly amoral.

I agree in parts. Loyalty and corresponding benefits are a local optima. But when the macro is controlled and influenced by external (to the local) forces, and these forces have power, loyalty means nothing in terms of security. But you will still have good relationships with people and new opportunities may surface as a benefit.

But loyalty to a company is complete, utter BS.

IME smaller communities make firing/layoffs different but not less likely. Startups will lay people off for money regardless of any level of loyalty regardless of size. In fact it is even more disappointing to work very very closely with people who would lay you off overnight if their investor decides they want heads to roll.

tbh that feels completely backwards. In large orgs, you are a number and transparently so. People come and go, processes are set up that assume attrition.

In a smaller shop, there's less flex overall for departures and more incentive to abuse the personal relationships built.

You are right that loyalty changes depending on org chart, but it's how senior you are. Senior execs have more vested in the company, both in their career and stock options.

Things don't deserve loyalty. Your company is a "thing".

People - people can absolutely deserve loyalty, and those people can be managers, coworkers, spouses, family, etc.

But don't mix the two up in your mind.

I think I agree with both perspectives. And it makes me realize that in the past when I've tried to draw hardcore no-loyalty / emotional attachment boundaries teammates / employers pick up in the vibe and it slowly becomes mildly but chronically toxic.

It's 100% an emergence scam behavior of corporate entities to trick their employees into developing loyalty and tricking managers / founders etc into thinking its not just a way of scamming lower-end employees imo... I never got the feeling that managers were consciously trying to trick us into developing loyalty, felt more like they were then ones drinking the most coolaid on it...

Also agree with the base human need to feel at least some loyalty in any relationship to feel like it's healthy.

I think my hack has been to develop loyalty to people on my team laterally. Seems to work but sometimes leadership / management still seems like they catch a whiff that I dont have a deep emotional need to respond to their frantic 8pm or Sunday afternoon Teams messages...

But if they fire me for not being loyal who cares, the economies doing great right?

>You shouldn’t bet your life that a mega-corp has absolute and utter loyalty to you.

But your mega corp doesn't have loyalty to you. They have loyalty to their shareholders, and you are a means to that end. The shareholders are the spouse, and you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present. If a little flattery gets them a better price, then they flatter. If their spouse's interests change, you'll never see them again.

In addition to what others have said about loyalty to the people who happen to work at a company, which I agree with entirely:

I think it's good to have admiration for the company (or any organization) you work for. If you can't find anything you admire, it might be better to find another place to work where you can.

This implies having the privilege of having options. For me, it's probably the primary reason I try to direct my career toward having skills or connections that give me options.

Your soulful loyalty should be all for personal and family relationships like a spouse, zero for any corporation.

Employer employee relationships are completely financial. Almost legally required to be that way on the employer’s side.

This soullessness wasn't always the case. Prior to the cost-cutting minmaxing of Jack Welch's industries-influential tenure as CEO of General Electric, corporate America wasn't quite so brazen about layoffs, because they weren't viewed as a way to maximize shareholder returns- and shareholder value wasn't viewed as the only priority for corporate leaders. (He also introduced what would later become stack ranking at Microsoft and other tech companies.)

On the other side, certainly a fluid labor market such as tech was a couple of years ago would foster a lack of loyalty, as employees hop from employer to employer for rapid career growth.

None of this necessarily contradicts with your point. It's just labor relations don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes a lot needs to be done to earn trust in a low-trust cultural environment.

i think we can draw a distinction between loyalty to the company, either as an abstract entity or its concrete leadership, and human relationships with people who may also be employed there. there are two companies here, one has a stock ticker and the other is an organic collection of people. i dont owe either of them loyalty, but the second company might easily earn it.

Loyalty is worth it if you can reasonably assume it will be repaid in kind. Assuming you didn't make a huge mistake in partner selection, that assumption is valid for your spouse. It emphatically does NOT hold for your employer, who will drop you the instant you become a problem. Therefore, it makes no sense to be loyal to your employer beyond the bare minimum.

It's not about feelings. It's about making human life possible, as we are social animals. We develop through relationships.

Loyalty is a commitment to the objective good of the other, of skin in the game. Loyalty is hierarchical and the particular variety and its entailed commitments depends on the particular nature of the relationship.

In a hyperindividualist liberal society, the presumption is basically Hobbesian; life is taken to be intrinsically and thoroughly adversarial and exploitative, and relationships are taken to be basically instrumental and transactional. (This even informs scientific interpretation, as science is downstream of culture.) Society is taken to be intrinsically a matter of "contract" or a kind of Mexican standoff. Loyalty is a quaint and anachronistic notion, a passing emotion that expires the moment the landscape of opportunities shifts. Provisional and temporary.

Yes, all loyalty is a risk. But the expectation in interpersonal relationships is typically that if you are loyal to someone they are loyal to you. There are literal rituals for people to swear that to each other in front of witnesses. Most people also intuitively understand that an unilateral breach of loyalty is a legitimate reason for ending this agreement.

With hypercapitalist corporations loyalty is a one-way street. The employee is expected to be loyal, while corporations drop them casually if it benefits them. Loyalty is realized when one of the sides endure some downsides in thr expectations that these will be resolved in the long term. So if you dump someone the minute that downside appears, you aren't and never have been loyal.

I like the thought of this but how does it work in practice?

The company treats me well and preserves my job while I'm planning not to leave. Until they don't. Because once the transaction is more trouble than its worth - either financially, or politically, or interpersonally - I'm gone. But if I am planning to leave, the company doesn't know that and treats me the exact same way.

It’s definitely not a transaction. Every time I’ve seen push come to shove, companies prioritize the folks they see as critical to their company’s success with loyalty not even being a small factor. And if it’s a moderate to large sized company, many of the decisions will be made by a consulting firm with 0 context (or care) for loyalty.

> the company actively does its best to treat you well and preserve your job long-term

Like fuck they do. They make a cost-benefit guess about proactive moves to reduce attrition, and the amount they do is tied the cost of replacement for the role in question.

This is the trap I fall into. I have had so many amazing colleagues and I want to do right by them. Sometimes it’s been trench camaraderie, sometimes just really great working relationships, but I almost always feel like I owe it to my fellow employees to work hard, do well for the company, etc.

It’s taken me a long time to learn, but that form of loyalty doesn’t equate to employer loyalty.

Doesn't really matter how much your coworkers value you when your employer suddenly decides tomorrow that they've decided to change focus for the 5th time this month and it's your department getting cut this time.

That's experience, which has nothing to do with loyalty.