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Man, you must have worked for some terrible companies. I have friends at everywhere I ever worked and we always tried to cooperate.

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So have I. I love the people I work with (usually). That doesn’t change the nature of the wage relationship. We workers produce value through our labor which companies pay for in wages. Capital (CEOs, founders, VCs) wants to maximize the ratio of value to cost, therefore they wish to pay us as little as possible while getting maximum efficiency. It has nothing to do with liking your coworkers.

Negotiation goes both ways, you want to be able to demonstrate your value and sometimes that comes by showing people that you can be paid more elsewhere. The game here is positive sum, not zero, you want to know and show what you add to the equation.

I've met everyone above me on the org chart. It's not that impressive because we're smaller, but we're also not doing layoffs and I can talk to people who make human decisions, rather than folks who are trying to cut 10% of expenses off of a spreadsheet by firing "resources."

So I don't think it's quite the same.

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