On loyalty to your employer (2018)

Firing, job security, and health context

• Several describe being laid off remotely with immediate access cuts, highlighting how “bloodless” and fast modern terminations are.
• Others note big regional differences: stronger notice periods and “gardening leave” in the UK/EU vs US at‑will employment.
• US posters stress how layoffs are magnified by loss of employer health insurance and high COBRA costs, making sudden firing uniquely traumatic.

Work, meaning, and life balance

• Long subthread debates whether one should “work until death” vs prioritize travel, family, and non‑work experiences.
• Many argue for front‑loading life experiences into 20s–40s due to health limits and stories of people retiring too late to enjoy plans.
• Others push back: travel isn’t everyone’s dream; some genuinely derive meaning from work, volunteering, or creating, and that’s valid.
• Repeated theme: balance and timing matter more than a single life script.

What “loyalty” means (and to whom)

• Strong consensus that loyalty to a corporation is misplaced; employment is primarily transactional.
• Nuance: many differentiate loyalty to people (managers, teammates, mentors) from loyalty to the legal entity. Those relationships can be worth real extra effort.
• Some see “loyalty” rhetoric as a tool to extract unpaid overtime (“hustle”) and normalize overwork; others say going above and beyond under fair leadership can accelerate careers.
• Several define their stance as: be professional, do competent work, maintain boundaries; leave or downshift effort when the relationship stops being mutual.

Systemic incentives and history

• Multiple comments tie the erosion of mutual loyalty to broader shifts: shareholder‑value focus, short‑termism, mass layoffs, Jack‑Welch‑style management, disappearance of pensions.
• Comparison to “Mittelstand”–style or family businesses where mutual loyalty and long‑term thinking still exist, versus large public companies where spreadsheet logic dominates.

Long tenure, expertise, and risk

• Staying decades can bring deep domain knowledge and close relationships, but also career risk: skills may become niche, networks too concentrated, and undocumented “tribal knowledge” fragile.
• Some posters still report thriving in long tenures with employers who genuinely invest in them; others recount being discarded despite years of extra effort, which permanently changed their attitude.

Remote work, culture, and co‑ops

• Remote and off‑shore‑heavy teams are described as making it harder to feel community or loyalty: “a black box — I put work in, money comes out.”
• A few wonder why worker co‑ops or shared‑ownership models aren’t more common if everyone accepts pure transactionalism, but note financing and scale barriers.

Practical attitudes expressed

• Common personal policies:
  • Be loyal to your craft and reputation, not the logo.
  • Be generous where leadership and colleagues have earned trust; otherwise treat it as “work for money” only.
  • Save to buy flexibility (career breaks, saying no to abuse).
  • Remember that your strongest, most durable “loyalty network” is the people who will call you when they move on.