What a bleak view. This is not my experience at all and doesn't match that of most of my friends either. Many have been loyal to their employer for years, and it goes the other way around as well.
True. And it does happen. But I don't think it happens at the scale the post I replied to seems to suggest. I hear about it sometimes, but not so often that it would be an endemic thing that has to be assumed to be the default in 2023.
I wonder which jobs you are thinking about here. Quite a lot of people work in a retail or food service position and I can assure you this feeling of "nobody caring" is absolutely present at that level.
I assume people on this forum immediately picture high paying engineering jobs and not the average worker's job.
I'm assuming the kind of jobs where asking ChatGPT (which was the context) could be in any way relevant to the job at hand, and I don't think retail is a particularly practical fit here. Yes, I'm talking about engineering jobs and the like.
This is inherently not the same, though. Sure, companies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but a company's first and foremost interest is profit for the shareholder. For a person in a relationship, it's about finding a partner that makes them happy. In addition, you are expendable to a company, whereas people build a relationship and become more and more invested over time. Way more than a company becomes invested in an employee.
No, a company's first and foremost interest is not profit for the shareholder.
Corporations don't have interests. They're abstractions -- ways of organizing people to be productive members of society. Individuals within those corporations have interests.
If you look at a company as if it were a sentient human, you'll get to the wrong conclusions. There is no moral imperative for a company to survive. There's a moral imperative to make sure everyone has gainful, productive employment, healthy levels of stress, etc.
If you're at Google, and you can work on:
(1) an advertising user-profiling technology with no social benefit but contribution to Google's bottom line
(2) a civics-focused open-source project with no benefit to shareholder value, but significant value to society
Which would you pick?
If you're at Enron pre-scandal, and can either:
(1) successfully cover up evidence to prevent the scandal; or
(2) blow the whistle
Which do you pick? That's where the moral imperative sits. These things are much more complex with a partner. There's a moral imperative not to betray your partner, as well as one to not support immoral actions, and some balance. With corporations, there is no such moral imperative. If an unethically-organized corporation dies, and resources move into ethically-organized ones, the world is better off.
I think the key, in both cases, is to learn more about relationships, and in the later case, about the nature of corporations.
It's perfectly reasonable to make a commitment to "not be evil," and to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the founding mission of Google. That's very different from loyalty to a colorful logo, a set of incorporation documents, and an abstraction.