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Comment by mamurphy | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: -Top employees use top large corporations as springboards to their careers rather than as 30-year destinations, a marked change from the past.

-Top large corporations reward interpersonal skills and getting along more than brilliance, causing top employees to seek employment elsewhere.

-The advent of the internet has heightened the communication gap between the generations, making it hard for "partners" and "new associates" to communicate.

The author didn't provide evidence for much of what she claimed, and did not build towards a conclusion. More, the above themes did not seem like new news to me. Also, the first two themes did not clearly related to the third. The article felt like meandering observations -- which is fine insofar as it goes, but, while I enjoyed the read, I wanted more to conclude it. Maybe I'll find that here in the comments?

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Your first point pretty much explains everything, because it is an effect, not a cause.

The reason why top employees don't treat large corporations as 30-year destinations is because it is clear they will downsize us at the drop of a quarterly revenue. It isn't "brilliant" employees who recognize this, but all employees, and workers have quite reasonably responded by withholding all loyalty from their employer and behaving as if they are autonomous agents in a free market, which in fact they are.

This works out well for people in tech who are even moderately competent because it gives us mobility, but pretty badly for everyone else. However, just as corporate management took the lead in losing money by treating long-term, highly knowledgeable, high-skill employees as disposable parts, they are going to have to take the lead by realizing that employee turnover is enormously expensive and it's only going to get worse as new generations enter the workforce with the express intent of exploiting their employers for all they're worth.

It would, after all, be positively immoral for a worker to do anything else in the modern corporate environment.

>It would, after all, be positively immoral for a worker to do anything else in the modern corporate environment.

This really struck a chord with me, with the rhetoric of the last few decades that it is a company's (and management/board) moral obligation to shareholders to do everything in their power that is not expressly against the word of the law to maximize their profits.

In a similar vein, a worker is morally obligated to his or her "shareholders" (him/herself, family, etc.) to maximize his or her financial (or other, personal) gain.

I learned quickly in a layoff how little a company actually cares about you - Sure they threw us a small severance package (attached to a nice "you won't do anything to harm the company's reputation" clause), but at the end of the day, you owe them nothing and they owe you nothing other than an exchange of services. Employment is so transactional nowadays.

Without pensions, there is not really a point in staying in one place too long anymore. Studies show that it's pretty common after two years in the same place you'll end up effectively losing money.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...

> just as corporate management took the lead in losing money by treating long-term, highly knowledgeable, high-skill employees as disposable parts, they are going to have to take the lead by realizing that employee turnover is enormously expensive

Maximize your short-term gains, but then you lose long-term - what a "big surprise".

I don't see how this will self-correct. Corporations are genetically predisposed to think short-term, and the tendency is only getting worse in the new reality.

I've seen this phenomenon myself, though I have no hard data either.

Personally I think a big reason is that the promotion is dead. There's a palpable sense in every large organization I've worked for is that working hard simply won't get you rewarded and that there's a hard glass ceiling on your ability to rise through merit.

I've found this to be true when I look at my own earnings as well. I have never experienced a significant jump in earnings or responsibility except by switching jobs. Never. I've worked very hard in some jobs, but I have never been rewarded for it except through an ability to cite my present work as a springboard to somewhere else.

I've seen it before, but they were usually catalyzed by an "unexpected" situation, like 2/3 of the core software team leaving in exodus, and management scrambling to golden handcuff the remaining key engineers, or when 1 of the 2 engineering leads left after 4 years of service, and management again moved to lock up the other remaining one.

I currently work at a company where this isn't the case, and I have experienced a significant jump in earnings and responsibility, and it's refreshing, but it's sort of the exception that proves the rule. Internal mobility and hiring/promoting from within is an explicit tenet of the company culture. I think if you don't explicitly set it up that way, a company will default to the dysfunctional situation you describe.

That seems to be the case for most people I know, switching jobs is the new promotion. I've had minor raises, entirely remittance, but the few major pay increases and job title changes always have been entirely attributed from leaving an organization for another.

I found it surprising when I worked for a company (more than number years ago) that was primarily a retailer preferred to hire externally for new store managers instead of hiring from its pool of mostly college educated sales staff.

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