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by ryandrake 427 days ago
Treating people with dignity is “business hostile”… welcome to Hacker News comment section.
2 comments

It's more like "welcome to US mindset" IMHO
This mindset is what moves us forward. Union of soft nations don’t add much these days.
Define "forward".
I work for a paycheck. I can’t exchange “dignity” for goods and services. The guy got paid nice compensation for his labor.
Therefore, let's throw everything non-monetary under the bus because work should be purely transactional?
What else should it be? Do you believe that your company is like “your family”? Your coworkers or especially your manager are “your friends”?

Why else do you go to work?

I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.

The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.

Was it indecent for Google to lay someone off, remove all access and give him 16 weeks of severance + two additional weeks for each year of service?
I didn't say anything about Google.
You're taking "Human resources" a bit too literally.
We are resources. The one Big Tech company I have worked for has 1.556 million employees. What else was I besides a “resource”?
It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.

In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.