| Eh. Employers in the USA have very little incentive to worry about this, especially big employers. Even if they manage to piss off an employee, it might take said employee a couple of months to find a new job (assuming they're in a field like programming where there are any jobs at all). And the employee won't even start looking for a job after they've been unhappy for several months, because finding a new job is an exhausting, demoralizing timesink; it can be all but impossible to conduct an effective job search while handling other "real life" demands. Not to mention that it's "bad" to leave a job too soon. And the employee can't just quit because their access to healthcare is dependent on having a full-time job with benefits. Individual market healthcare plans are all but unaffordable. Not to mention that it's "bad" to have a gap in your resume. So even if the employee starts hating their job by month 2, if they aren't some kind of super-hot commodity in the job market, they won't leave until month 12 at the earliest. Heck, they might not ever leave at all. Adjusted for the probability that the employee might leave in any given year and amortized over the lifteime of the employee at the company, the costs of making an employee unhappy are trivial compared to the value that can be extracted from them before they quit. And that's all assuming that employees are somewhat non-fungible. For a job that doesn't require specific technical skills, employees are essentially fungible. This is kind of a good thing for society, because it means that there is a large number of educated, thoughtful, high-functioning people out there with good communication skills. But it's a bad thing if you are one of those people and you need to pay rent and go to the doctor. People on HN (and in tech generally) seem to forget that they are tremendously fortunate to have any seller power at all in the labor market. |