Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
Companies that work on loyalty do not have anything of the above, as their loyal employees won't be persuaded by a bigger TC number. Their TC is not high and they are not public too. It would be bizarre for somebody who went to Google or other such company because of the TC (likely applying to multiple jobs out of school or resigning from the previous job) to expect loyalty from the employer.
The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer?
Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG.
To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time.
Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
For an employee, it is an arms race to dystopia slowed down by mountains of government regulation. For your business, it will never benefit from any employee’s full potential.
Free market only works if people value good will, good faith, reputation. Embracing a lack of these values puts you on a road that one way or another leads to authoritarianism or oppression.
Layoffs are bad because they are deceptive and cruel to those laid off and further erode trust from those not yet laid off. They are deceptive because being hired as an employee traditionally carries with it implied permanence that being hired as a temp or contractor (like your plumber) does not. You have a job unless and until your performance provides cause to fire you. They are cruel because they take advantage of the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee. The employee may be here on a visa, or just moved their family across the country, or has debts and obligations where he requires employment. He is harmed if the company suddenly and unilaterally ends the relationship. The company on the other hand is not materially harmed if the employee unilaterally decides to leave.
You can argue that a company is legally allowed to act in bad faith, but “barely within the law” is not a high ethical bar.
And key here IMO is she is laid off without cause.
The analogy is flawed.
You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed.
Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place.
They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character.
Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions.
The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees.
I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such.
The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.
Yep, this is what the robber baron capitalists of the USA also used to believe - profit at the expense of human life. You are simply proving the point here that the only way to win is civil dis-obedience. Boycott, blockade, unionize and make these modern robber barons pay. Unless they feel the pinch they will not change.
Believing in profit at the expense of all other considerations only kick-starts a revolution.
How many people in HN do you think have moved out of gmail/google ? The answer is obvious - very few have. So, we have two theories:
* Either, most people don't think what you said is true.
* Alternately, people think what you think is true but don't care enough. This is like workers in china etc. This is just moral high standing. Expecting great character but not making a change oneself.
So, yeah, nothing will change. 100% sure.
The impact won't show up in a quarter, or maybe even 4, but the hollowing out & disenfranchisement of your workforce has real impact, is what makes you a lumbering husk, that might not be in visible decline, but it does make you weak & fragile & with muted senses, makes you less attuned. The cost of being a shit adds up.
