Comment by swatcoder
4 days ago
Keep in mind that the benefits of loyalty vary with the size of the organization and the number peers your name gets lost among in the org chart.
The larger the company, and the more they're ballooned out with abstract drones chomping on abstract work items, the more loyalty becomes a means for abuse. Turnover is rampant and their processes are built to optimally accommodate it. They're egregores, not people, and they don't experience loyalty or attachment. But they do benefit from yours, and so they'll milk it until you give up
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
It's not so much that there's "no place for loyalty in employer-employee relationships", it's just that the place for loyalty is different depending on what's inhabiting the employer role opposite you -- and the high-profile large employers of the modern age are incapable of reciprocating. But if loyalty comes naturally to you, and feels good to you when reciprocated, you have the option to look elsewhere instead of seething in resentment and disappointment.
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.
Small companies really magnify the extreems. Good ones are really great but bad ones are extra bad. Sadly, they are also nimble enough to switch between them, at least in one direction.
Not only the extremes, also the speed: good employers can turn into bad employers (has the opposite ever happened? I'd love to learn of an example!), but big companies at least have some inertia while it happens. There's probably even some "Sun" still left, all those years after the Oracle takeover. Compare this to what happened at Komoot.
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It's more that big companies spend a ton of money hiring HR and developing process to ensure they regress to the mean whereas small ones can't afford or don't yet need that overhead so they don't have that force acting upon them and can go whichever way.
The difference is that in a small company, it's the owner who is abusing you (or not). It's all down to the qualities of the person itself.
In a large company, it happens regardless of the qualities of the people involve, because it's baked into the processes. Good-natured people can mitigate it to some extent, but they cannot prevent it.
Often enough good natured people become the teflon coating for bad processes.
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The small and successful company (~100 people) my brother-in-law works at is currently self-destructing, specifically because the CEO is that exact kind of family-loyalty "father figure" wannabe.
Is it failing because he is being taken advantage of or is it failing because he is trying to take advantage of others?
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You cannot take a week off who will cover your responsibilities?! Lol, that kind of small company.
Often comes with 'unlimited PTO' advertised during the interview/offer process :)
That depends. A lot of them are. A lot of them have owners that actually treat you like family.
Differentiating between the two based on signals during hiring is almost impossible, though.
But I don't want to be treated like family. In particular, I am not ready to have the same level of obligations towards my employers, even if these were reciprocated faithfully. I have my own family to which I'm always going to have a stronger loyalty than to any employer.
A company as a group of close friends? Be my guest. A company that pretends that we have bonds of blood, or are married? Not for me (unless we're actually family, as in family business).
Differentiating between them is impossible until things go wrong. They can treat you as family 99% of the time, but when the options are: take a pay cut or fire some employees, in my experience everyone goes with the latter.
Yep. They forget there are all sorts of "families" and some are very dysfunctional.
My parents told me to be loyal to people, not companies.
People get me a job when I look for one.
Exactly what I always proclaim. I'm loyal to my team, to my coworkers, the living beings, not to the org chart that pulled them together.
(Another thing I keep repeating is "You are not your job".)
I agree. Tenures may be short but careers are long and tech is (surprisingly) small. Credibility builds trust and trust between people is ultimately what business run on. "Do right be people" is a good strategy.
Only in moderation. When employees start forming cells inside the org things quickly become toxic.
conversely you don't quit bad companies, you quit bad managers
Good advice. The company gets your loyalty as a side-effect
Exactly- and if they screw the people I'm loyal to, FAFO.
One of the most satisfying things that's ever happened to me in my career is when, after I turned in my notice to my last job, less than a week later my boss gave his.
>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.
> You're expected to give two weeks' notice, but they can let you go without any notice.
Luckily, this is not the case where I live. Both sides have the same amount of notice
Same here. And the usual amount is 2 months, not weeks. Of course it can be (and often is) shorter if both parties agree.
That said, the real safety is in accumulated money you can live on when all goes south. I'd personally take bigger salary over longer notice any day of the week.
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.
I applied to a job in the 'Who's Hiring' thread this month.
Had an interview. I'm a professional good at my craft, with tenure at hard positions.
I get hit with "we don't just want someone who checks in does work and leaves, 9 to 5". Like, are you wanting 60h/week and pay 40h/week? Or is this you're not wanting a slacker?
Or better yet, since you want skin in the game on my side, what's my equity as a partner?
My understanding is that I shop up and work well, and you pay me. And I'm in an at-will employment state, so it really is 1 day at a time.
Loyalty is bought at 1 day increments, since that is all the loyalty is afforded to me.
However, I will definitely lie, since no recruiter or HR wants to admit that their candidate is here because you pay. Its the verboten secret everyone dances around.
> "we don't just want someone who checks in does work and leaves, 9 to 5"
I do. I want people to work a normal day. The alternative is they run into a wall of fatigue at the worst times, and call out sick.
I can plan a project around five 8 hour days a week. I can't plan around 60+ hours one week, and (unknown) hours some future week.
That sounds disgusting. Thank you for sharing that. Why don't they just advertise "Over-time expected and over-time compensation provided"?
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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.
You might want to read Moby Dick all the way to the end.
Right. Well, that's how it goes. I mostly wanted to capture a shared pursuit. Take Elon, he's obsessed now. Love is not easy or perfect between captain and crew. Sometimes the crew needs to step in.
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.
> only family members, family friends, or family co-religionists are of value to the owners;
Every strength is also a weakness. Small groups like that can also very effective because their trust runs deeper than work. The real lie is that thousands of unrelated strangers trying to get paid will have each other’s interests at heart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are good and bad companies. How you are treated is how you gauge it, and good companies do deserve "working" loyality.
This is different from personal loyalty.
It's a little like politeness. Social grace. Don't demean yourself of course, but treating entities which treat you well reciprocally is valid and even moral.
A good or a bad company is really defined by people you work with - your team. Countless conversations in other forums where you'll see radically opposite opinions about the the "company" from different employees. It all boils down to the local working context. Companies are companies - maximizing profit is their primary goal (at least in the US). There may certainly be some exceptions. Entities don't treat a person in any way. It is the people in the entities that treat you well or not. Entities are impersonal.
If the CEO, who is 6 levels removed from me makes a decision to cut an entire department, it is hard to see how "company" loyalty makes sense. As far as I'm concerned, the CEO is an external force.
Social grace, treating people well who treat you well - I agree with all that. But that is not loyalty. It is simply transactional reciprocality. If you are calling that "working loyalty", fine, we are on the same page.