[RealityNow]

"Too bad, but we need the space. They’re lucky they work here. If they leave at least they’ll have ‘name of our company’ on their resume."

It's not merely about the decision to relocate, it's the indifference towards the engineers and viewing them as dispensable minions who are lucky to have the privilege of working for this company, often without the equity and earnings potential of early employees. Treating your workers as disposable pawns is a sure-fire way to generate disillusionment and cause valuable engineers to leave.

[bastijn]

That has been there for years. Sure it is nice and people object when they hear it but I think in actual daily life people just ignore them as long as they don't manifest in daily work. The people left because of the relocation, not because of any other reason. The article doesn't explain the tradeoff the CEO had to make. So blaming the quotes is jumping to conclusions. So I say these quotes are overvalued in the article. Sure the popular thing is to fret about them and blame them for this it seams but in truth it had nothing to do with the people leaving in this article. They left because of travel times (most likely, I don't pretend I can look into their minds).

In a big company most people don't like all of their exec and HR statements yet they continue to work there because they know 90% of those statements is bullshit anyways and will not manifest. Very different from a small company mind you! Big companies change their bullshit slogans every 5-10 years. It's a pattern. Go through twice and you know the drill. So you smile when your department name changes and know the rest will stay the same no matter your objectives containing some new fancy words.

[sokoloff]

At some scale, when making facilities decisions, you have to treat your employees as replaceable (which is not exactly the same as disposable, but close).

Moving headquarters 5 miles in any given direction is going to help some people and hurt other people. We just went through this ~20 months ago and some people who were on the "hurt" side have indeed left because their commute got pushed over a pain threshold. But, if we'd moved 5 miles in the other direction, a different set of employees would have been negatively impacted.

It's a small scale trolley problem and unless you can expand in exactly the same place, someone's going to get run over. When the CEO realizes this, it's entirely rational to draw conclusions like 'For those who are harmed, well at least they had the experience and name of working at [growing, perceived successful] company X.'