You don't have to think of companies as evil. They are not inherently immoral, but they certainly are amoral. They will let you go the moment it is no longer profitable to keep you. Have you been through a layoff before? The executives wring their hands, talk about what a tough decision it was, uproot dozens to thousands of lives - and then get a nice fat bonus when the cost savings reports come in, and the stock value goes up.

Things like that teach me that corporate "good will" is an elaborate show. You are an expense to them, a necessary expense to achieve a certain output. You are paid your market value, not penny more. If they can pay you half your salary to get the same output, they will. If they can lay your team off and get significant cost benefits, they will. You are disposable. That doesn't mean they're bad people, they're just doing what any self-serving profit-seeking bureaucracy would do.

Thus the relationship between an employer and an employee is always transactional, and any feeling otherwise is an illusion. It's not evil - it just is.

The only asterisk to all of this is if you're at a more community-focused organization like a non profit. But the vast majority of companies that employ HN readers are not that.