Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

This is a difference from prior generations. You used to hear "the company is moving us to Seattle" but implicit in that is:

- people worked for "the company" for years if not their entire careers

- there was little to no fear that you'd get laid off after the move

- the company paid your relocation expenses, perhaps also bought your old house so you would not have to deal with selling it.

- your wife (probably) was a homemaker and did not have to worry about finding a new job.

- kids had to go to a new school and make new friends. Tough luck, kids didn't dictate what parents decided to do.

View on HN

My grandfather worked for GE his entire life after coming back from Korea in his early 20s, I was 6 in the early 90s when he finally retired at age 64/65 and the bosses came to his retirement dinner and gave him a gold watch. Can you imagine something like that happening today?

I've been at a couple companies 10+ years (and a third almost that long) and have colleagues who are 20+ years but, yeah, it's rare today--certainly in the tech industry, probably more common elsewhere.

Makes me wonder what changed. Was it a bad deal for employers? Employees? Or did we just collectively decide to stop doing that for no reason?

The whole corporate and government mindset changed, largely after Regan, focusing on funneling wealth upwards. Those decisions were never reversed so here we are.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp

That's all true to a significant degree. Of course, the reverse expectation was that you'd be a "company man" and spend your career (or at least a decade or two) at the company.

Which many people would be happy to do. Employers are the ones that made the first moves on breaking loyalty, not employees. The bulk of employees are not looking to make moves if they feel they are being treated fairly and compensated well.

Well, a lot of traditional unionized blue collar union jobs went overseas. So the employers didn't have a lot of control over that.

A lot of jobs also shifted to smaller companies in areas like tech and employees wanted to take advantage of higher salaries being offered by those firms.

I'm not sure it's a simple case of employers suddenly locking employees in. There were a lot of market forces that made staying at the same single employee forever less attractive from a salary perspective. Sort of a re-enforcing cycle. I'm sure economists have more data.

> Well, a lot of traditional unionized blue collar union jobs went overseas. So the employers didn't have a lot of control over that.

Who exactly was sending these blue collar jobs overseas if it was not the employers?

Losing business to overseas competition. Which was arguably their own fault but happened nonetheless.

How did employers not have control over hiring overseas workers?

I'm happy to send years at a company, if there's a point to doing so. But the only means to advancing one's career, from what I have seen, is changing jobs.

The flip side of the coin is that it's frustrating as a dev: nobody knows anything, when the entire employee base flips so often. Middle managers just don't get it, AFAICT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com