Comment by mhuffman
18 days ago
>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership
Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends on "them" for our livelihoods and the lives of people that depend on us, but "them" doesn't doesn't have any dependency on you that can't be swapped out rather quickly.
I am a capitalist, don't get me wrong, but it is a very one-sided relationship not even-footed or rooted in two-way respect. You describe "them" as "leadership" while "Them" describe you as a "human resource" roughly equivalent to the way toilet paper and plastics for widgets are described.
If you have found a place to work where people respect you as a person, you should really cherish that job, because most are not that way.
Yep maybe I've been lucky but in my 30-year career, I've worked at over a dozen companies (big and small), and I've always been well-treated and respected, and I've never felt the kind of dynamic you describe. But that isn't to say that I don't think it exists or happens. I'm sure it does.
It's everyone's personal choice to put their own lens on how they believe other people think - like your take on how "leadership" thinks of their employees.
I guess I choose to be more positive about it - having been in leadership positions myself, including having to oversee layoffs as part of an eventual company wind-down - but I readily acknowledge that my own biases come into this based on my personal career experiences.
Respect is something humans do. A large enough company is an entity in its own right, separate from the people that comprise it, and that entity is literally incapable of respecting you (more generally, it is incapable of empathy). One can be lucky enough to never end up in a position where it is felt personally, but make no mistake, it is there.
I'm lucky currently but have been unlucky in the past and very much understand where the person you are responding to is coming from. I think you've had an exceedingly long string of luck that is very rare if you've never had upper management that was misaligned with the long term goals of the employees and the company.