| What I love about this is the narrative around loyalty like we are some kind of samurai.
A company gets all the benefit to call itself "a family" and to push employees to be loyal to the company as there's a high cost in offboarding and onboarding people (knowledge, morale, the fact that new joiners aren't really contributing at their best capacity for the first 3/6 months at least depending on seniority etc). Even during resume screening there's always a lot of questions on why people "jump" from a place to another if they have changed jobs every two years. But a company makes mistakes (over hire, product line that don't work, market expansions that don't bring the expected results, overspending etc) and never talk about this openly (the responsibility is always on the market, the situation etc) and often they have obligations towards the investors or the market (if they are public). There's also a psychological burden in changing jobs (impostor syndrome, fear of something unknown, new domain etcetc) and companies use this to convince people to stay. Most of the job of a people manager is to convince people that they are in the best place they could be and focus them on new challenges so they don't have time to think. Don't be fooled by any company, if they think they have to fire you because some spreadsheet calculation told them it is the best thing to do, they will. tldr; Decide what's best for you (and your family if you have one) and never feel bad about it. Loyalty is not a thing in the workplace. ps i have personally witnessed and went through horrible situations where managers had to openly lie about people performance and fired a bunch because the company made bad predictions over their expected revenue and had to fire people to "prove they were doing something about it" and show some cost reduction to the investors.
Once a ceo literally cried on hangouts while communicating the decision to fire a whole department, and the day after (while those people were still part of the company) did a whole motivational speech about how that was going to be the best year for the company and we had a lot to look forward to. |