Comment by HEmanZ

Comment by HEmanZ 14 hours ago

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All loyalty is a risk. Even loyalty to your spouse is a risk. Just like how all love and human trust is a risk.

To feel human you have to take these emotional risks. You shouldn’t bet your life that a mega-corp has absolute and utter loyalty to you. You shouldn’t bet your entire life that your spouse has absolute loyalty to you (we have divorce, pre-nups, and post-nups for a reason). But it strikes me as a pretty soulless existence to have no loyalty to your place of work, in the same way it would be a pretty soulless existence to never form loyalty with the people in your life, even if it isn’t absolute loyalty.

horsawlarway 14 hours ago

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.

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  • simpaticoder 13 hours ago

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

    A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism". A sports-team or TV show or band is a thing, loyalty to it is called "fandom". Loyalty to an idea or philosophy is called "being principled" or "idealism". Do you believe that things don't deserve loyalty, such that all of these are errors? Or do these examples not capture the sense of your statement?

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    • ashoeafoot 13 hours ago

      Yes, all of these things do not deserve loyalty. There are values i hold dear, if a philosophy or state holds on to the same values, i support them. If they turn away from them, no reason to be loyal.

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      • simpaticoder 12 hours ago

        Strictly speaking, a philosophy can't turn away from values. A person can, but philosophy itself is, to a first order approximation, an immutable bundle of values.

        Of course this naive view quickly falls apart when interpretation comes into play, as it always must. In the extreme, one may assert that "philosophy" is encoded in the behavior of it's adherents, and these behaviors may have little or nothing to do with the "canonical" representation of the philosophy as immutable text. Or more precisely the behavior and words can be profoundly decoupled. Many examples of this decoupling occurs to your thought (and mine). So when you say that a philosophy can "turn away" from values, in this sense that is true.

        I prefer to think of philosophies as a kind of Platonic ideal, which are then subject to all the foibles of the humans who associate themselves to them. There are some subtle problems with this view, which I'd rather not confront.

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        • ashoeafoot 11 hours ago

          Strictly speaking you are right. But words change meanings and philosophies get hijacked, deformed and loaded with barely affiliated concepts or movements.

          So the idea as it was might be a value, but what the word means may decay into something frankenstein wouldn't recognise as his handy work .

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      • lo_zamoyski 13 hours ago

        Are you perhaps confusing loyalty to an incumbent regime with loyalty to a nation or people?

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    • senderista 13 hours ago

      "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country."

      --EM Forster, "What I Believe"

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      • lo_zamoyski 13 hours ago

        The problem here is that Forster is relativising the good.

        I am not betraying my country by refusing to follow laws or decrees that require that I engage in intrinsically evil deeds. I am not loyal to my friend if I do evil things he asks me to do.

        Our loyalty is to the objective good of our country and our friend. Otherwise, there is no such thing as loyalty.

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        • int_19h 11 hours ago

          There are situations when you genuinely must betray your country to protect your friend, or vice versa.

          For example, if your country is a multiethnic empire that is unsustainable as a single entity without compulsion and forced assimilation, and your friend happens to be an ethnic minority in it.

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    • dspillett 13 hours ago

      > A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism".

      That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself. People often see their “external tribes” as an extension of their self much likely they do family/friends, rather than them being part of it like a company. I am a Spillett. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English, I am UKian, I am European, I work for TL. Notice the difference in language in that last one.

      This is part of why some get so offended when you poke fun at their town/county/country: if they see it as an extension of their identity more than just somewhere they live then your disrespect is a personal attack. They would not likely defend their employer nearly as passionately.

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      • int_19h 11 hours ago

        > That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself.

        I would argue that this is a tit-for-tat, and as such, not really an example of loyalty per se. Loyalty would be protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you and yours in any tangible way. And it has all the same problems as corporate loyalty, really.

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        • bumby 9 hours ago

          >protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you

          Perhaps this needs some nuance. It seems like duty has some relevance here. Military service may not actually benefit someone directly, and it could easily be a detriment at the individual level. But societies struggle to operate effectively for very long when everyone takes an individualistic transactional mindset. At some point, it becomes a collective action problem that needs to find a balance between serving a sense of duty to society as a whole and society not taking advantage of such sentiments.

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      • nemomarx 12 hours ago

        notice the mirage version of this with some companies - one can be a "googler" or so on, and companies try to encourage this identification

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    • riehwvfbk 13 hours ago

      That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.

      Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.

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      • bumby 9 hours ago

        >Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more.

        A less cynical take: there seems to be some research that following sports fosters greater social connectivity and well-being. It may just be that we're hardwired to be tribal. From that context, sports seems to be a relatively benign way to tap into that.

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      • lo_zamoyski 13 hours ago

        Your examples are bizarre (sports teams are a matter of petty entertainment, not proper objects of loyalty). Philosophy isn't an object of loyalty either.

        However, you should acquaint yourself with the principle of subsidiarity. Loyalty, duty, and love radiate outward from those who are owed the most diminishing to those who are owed the least (spouses, then children, then parents, etc., all the way through extended family and then community and nation and finally the human race). The loyalty is to the objective good. How that is expressed will be modified by contingent factors particular to a given person's situation.

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        • bee_rider 12 hours ago

          They didn’t come up with the sports team example, it comes from the comment they are responding to.

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    • Apocryphon 13 hours ago

      Perhaps it should be refined to say that "profit-oriented things" that view existence as purely transactions don't deserve loyalty.

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      • OpenDrapery 13 hours ago

        Sports franchises are the ultimate trick, in that they are profit-oriented, yet they somehow play on our tribal nature and fool us into forgetting about the profit part.

        I guess you could argue the same for a church.

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        • Apocryphon 13 hours ago

          Thanks to the financialization of everything, perhaps the same can be said of colleges and universities!

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    • moffkalast 13 hours ago

      Patriotism is mostly just propaganda to make people willing to kill and die for some old cynical geezers' delusions of grandeur. The guy said it right, countries don't deserve loyalty either. Lots of Russians are figuring this out firsthand these days.

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  • amelius 13 hours ago

    What about your boss, then.

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    • eitally 13 hours ago

      It depends. I posted why in more detail in a different reply to this thread.

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  • BOOSTERHIDROGEN 14 hours ago

    Unfortunately all managers focus on push rank, so why loyalty to them?

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    • 13hunteo 13 hours ago

      This is an overly broad generalisation - there are many cases of managers that do their best to primarily look after those under them, not just focus on getting higher up.

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pkdpic 13 hours ago

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?

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542354234235 12 hours ago

>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.

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  • robertlagrant 11 hours ago

    > you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present

    Equally, if you presenting yourself well and negotiating well gets you a better wage to make that birthday present, then you should do those things. It's a two-way street.

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sanderjd 13 hours ago

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.

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  • tart-lemonade 13 hours ago

    Being able to take pride in your work also helps a lot. In academia, my work may not be the most well compensated (it's perfectly reasonable for the area but I'm not going to be retiring early), but it is modern software that meaningfully helps others at my institution and doesn't actively make society worse.

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    • sanderjd 10 hours ago

      Yes. This is very closely tied into the ability to admire the organization, at least for me. It's very hard for me to take pride in my work for an organization I think is bad.

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jimbokun 6 hours ago

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.

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Apocryphon 13 hours ago

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.

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  • 542354234235 12 hours ago

    But also there were actual benefits to loyalty that don’t exist anymore. Labor union participation was huge in the post WWII, pre-Welch time frame. They used that leverage to negotiate benefits, many of which rewarded loyalty. Pension plans vs 401ks, significant pay raises based on seniority, clear paths to promotion, job security prioritizing senior workers, etc. Those things permeated through job markets and companies without unions as well, given the labor force competition. People were loyal because they had real tangible compensation and benefits for it.

    I think another shift around Welch was that companies used to focus more on long term value, which would result in stock price increases in the long term, even if not in any given short term. That if a company was healthy and valuable, one of the many benefits would be rising stocks. The shift to focus on short term stock increases as almost the only goal, means companies will pull the copper piping out the walls and destroy the house if it means a juicy bump in the Q3 earnings call.

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    • Apocryphon 10 hours ago

      Yeah, there's certainly been a steady erosion of labor benefits in the postwar. To dial back my own great man theory a bit, Welch was active in the '80s when Reagan and Thatcher were in power, and those "great men" were also operating in a milieu where the Chicago Boys were very influential, and they had the political mandate to institute management-favoring policies thanks to economic crises of the '70s.

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convolvatron 14 hours ago

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.

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bitwize 13 hours ago

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.

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lo_zamoyski 13 hours ago

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.

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  • kijin 12 hours ago

    Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.

    There's no point in asking first, whether employers should be loyal to their employers or vice versa. The important question is whether they are good to one another. If they are, you might also find loyalty among them, but that's not where the focus should be.

    Someone who gets obsessed with loyalty too much, I think, is likely to have sinister intentions. They probably want you to be loyal to them but don't plan on being good to you.

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atoav 13 hours ago

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.

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