Comment by steveBK123
6 hours ago
There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s.
My dad worked as an engineer in the same firm for 30 years and retired. The company was founded before his father was born, and was publicly listed before he was born.
Substantially every company I have worked for didn't even exist 30 years before I joined, let alone before I or my father were born. Most won't be around in 30 years.
Several employers nearly went out of business, had substantial layoffs, or went thru mergers that materially impacted my department/team/job. The guys at the very top were always fine, because how could the guy in charge be responsible?
Even within the companies I stayed 5 years, I had multiple roles/bosses/teams.
>There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s.
As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.
Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.
I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.
No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.
The problems GenX had to deal with was watching Boomers, who enjoyed all the benefits of post-WW2 expansion of infrastructure and social services, pull the rope ladder up behind them once they got well-paying jobs.
The 80's and 90's saw the beginning of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that pervades all but the most egalitarian societies. Reagan and Thatcher deregulated and privatized everything, and as a result a select few made a mountain of money and destroyed the middle class. "Shareholder value" and mass layoffs became the order of the day way before the dot com bubble burst. GenX knew we'd never have it as good as our parents - we just didn't know how fucked we were going to end up.
>The problems GenX had to deal with was watching Boomers, who enjoyed all the benefits of post-WW2 expansion of infrastructure and social services, pull the rope ladder up behind them once they got well-paying jobs.
No, I agree. But pulling the ladder from under them is not the biggest issue per se since every generation after them did them same if they could get on the ladder, the big problem with boomers is their immense hypocrisy.
GenX and Millennials knew that the situation was every man for himself grab everything you can while the going is still good, but crucially IMHO they didn't try to gaslight the next generations that this system of gains is somehow fair or the result of hard work and self sacrifice.
But boomers indulged in the period of sexual liberation and drug use, while then preaching about conservative family values and war on drugs when they got older, they enjoyed crazy good housing market and unionized jobs while preaching you should pull yourself by your bootstraps for a job that treats you like a disposable cog and won't buy you a house, they vocally hate socialism while depending on a generous social security system they designed for themselves and costing the taxpayer a huge amount on socialized government healthcare programs paid by the younger generations, etc the examples could go on. You can't hate boomers enough for this. Granted, not all are this hypocritical, but enough for the dots to form a line on the graph.
To be fair, the actual lesson of Fight Club is that maybe you do need a woman in your life. :D (That and don't delude yourself into believing the fascist inside of you.)
What really killed corporate loyalty for a lot of us was the lack of jobs that have lifetime pensions, if I understand it correctly. Why would I agree to work somewhere til retirement if I would be better jumping somewhere else to make more money now?