I see the moral point pretty much exclusively brought up against CEOs, managers etc, and virtually never against employees. Your (then ex-) boss might be angry that you've leaving because you've gotten a better offer, but barely anyone else will judge you (very rare cases exist, I'm sure, but they're rare).
Everyone is optimizing their personal outcome, be it the CEO firing people, people quitting their jobs to work elsewhere, people quitting their jobs to live off of benefits, people having children early, or having children late, it's what we all do: look out for what's best for us.
I find that totally okay, but I prefer to be honest about it, and don't pretend that it's not perfectly normal, or that people aren't doing it.
I think the general take is that the higher you are up the money/power hierarchy the more strictly you should be judged for your choices, because acting in a self-enriching way becomes less and less necessary. An almost incomprehensibly rich person like Musk should be given less leeway for acting in a grasping manner.
In a sense it's the inverse of the "it's moral to steal bread to feed your family" argument.
I agree. You have more options and fewer constraints the higher up you go, but I think that also applies to (most) Twitter/BigTech employees. A good chunk of those fired will be millionaires themselves, they're far from worrying about how to feed their families.
Nobody has to be there to survive, everyone is there willingly because they saw it as the most advantageous place to work, and they'd switch to a different company tomorrow if they got the right offer. Loyalty is a term from a different era.
Oh, yeah, there's definitely a scale to it. A twitter customer service employee is paid much less than a software engineer... though even the latter isn't going to have been at "will never need more money in their life" levels, particularly given the American social safety net or lack thereof.
That said, I do find that people are fairly loyal to a company that treats them well.
Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their personal outcome? The CEO or the average employee?
Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more? Where do you think this will end up if allowed to continue longterm?
> Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their personal outcome?
At Twitter? That's hard to say, lots of places are hiring, and getting good people is hard for all of them. Many of those that were fired will probably come out ahead financially. Twitter will probably continue to exist.
> Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more?
What do you think salary negotiations are? You go in, say you want even(!) more money, and if your value is high enough, you have the power to make them do it. Again, both Twitter and the employees are playing the same game, they're just on different sides of board, but neither of them is a charity.
Everyone is optimizing their personal outcome, be it the CEO firing people, people quitting their jobs to work elsewhere, people quitting their jobs to live off of benefits, people having children early, or having children late, it's what we all do: look out for what's best for us.
I find that totally okay, but I prefer to be honest about it, and don't pretend that it's not perfectly normal, or that people aren't doing it.