Many employers want employees to act like cult members. But then when going gets tough, those are often the first laid off, and the least prepared for it.
Employers, you can't have it both ways. As an employee don't get fooled.
During the first ever layoff at $company in 2001, part of the dotcom implosion, one of my coworkers who got whacked complained that it didn’t make sense as he was one of the companies biggest boosters and believers.
It was supremely interesting to me that he thought the company cared about that at all. I couldn’t get my head around it. He was completely serious, he kept arguing that his loyalty was an asset. He was much more experienced than me (I was barely two years working).
In hindsight, I think it is true that companies value that in a way. I’ve come to appreciate people who just stick it out for awhile. I try and make sure their comp makes it worth their while. They are so much less annoying to deal with than the assholes who constantly bitch or moan about doing what they’re paid for.
But as a personal strategy, it’s a poor one. You should never love or be loyal to something that can’t love you back.
The one and ONLY way I've ever seen "company" loyalty rewarded in any way is if you have a DIRECT relationship with a top level senior manager (C-suite). They will specifically protect you if they truly believe you are on "their side" and you are at their beck and call.
Companies appreciate loyalty… as long as long as it doesn’t cost them anything. The moment you ask for more money or they need to reduce the workforce, all of that goes out the window.
I think loyalty has value to the company but not as much as people think. To simplify it, multiple things contribute to "value" and loyalty is just a small part of it.
100% agree. There is no reason for employees to be loyal to a company. LLM building is not some religious work. It’s machine learning on big data. Always do what is best for you because companies don’t act like loyal humans, they act like large organizations that aren’t always fair or rationale or logical in their decisions.
To a lot of tech leadership, it is. The belief in AGI as a savior figure is a driving motivator. Just listen to how Altman, Thiel or Musk talk about it.
That’s how they talk about it publicly. Internally I can attest that the companies for two of the three you list are not like that internally at all. It’s all marketing, outwardly focused.
"Tech founders" for whom the "technology" part is the thing always getting in the way of the "just the money and buzzwords" part.
Now they think they can automate it away.
25+ years in this industry and I still find it striking how different the perspective between the "money" side and the "engineering" side is... on the same products/companies/ideas.
> Just listen to how Altman, Thiel or Musk talk about it.
It’s surprising how little they seem to have thought it through. AGI is unlikely to appear in the next 25 years, but even if, as a mental exercise, you accept it might happen, it reveals it's paradox: If AGI is possible, it destroys its own value as a defensible business asset.
Like electricity, nuclear weapons, or space travel , once the blueprint exists, others will follow. And once multiple AGIs exist, each will be capable of rediscovering and accelerating every scientific and technological advancement.
The prevailing idea seems to be that the first company to achieve superintelligence will be able to leverage it into a permanent advantage via exponential self improvement, etc.
> able to leverage it into a permanent advantage via exponential self improvement
Their fantasies of dominating others, through some modern day Elysium, reveal far more about their substance intake than rational grasp of where they actually stand... :-)
Tech leadership always treats new ventures or fields that way, because being seen to treat it that way and selling the idea of treating it that way is how you attract people (employees, and if you are very lucky investors, too) that are willing to sacrifice their own rational material interests to advancing what they see as the shared religious goal (which is, in fact, the tech leader’s actual material interest.)
I mean, even on HN, which is clearly a startup-friendly forum, that tendency among startup leaders has been noted and mocked repeatedly.
Exactly. Though you can learn a lot about an employer by how it has conducted layoffs. Did they cut profits and management salaries and attempt to reassign people first? Did they provide generous payouts to laid off employees?
If the answer to any of these questions is no then they're not worth committing to.
Only place you can say if you are an employee and a missionary is well if you are a missionary or working in a charity/ NGO etc trying to help people/animals etc.
I think there's more to work than just taking home a salary. Not equally true among all professions and times in your life. But most jobs I took were for less money with questionable upside. I just wanted to work on something else or with different people.
The best thing about work is the focus on whatever you're doing. Maybe you're not saving the world but it's great to go in to have one goal that everyone goes towards. And you get excited when you see your contributions make a difference or you build great product. You can laugh and say I was part of a 'cult', but it sure beats working a misearble job for just a slightly higher paycheck.
Especially for an organization like OpenAI that completely twisted its original message in favor of commercialization. The entire missionary bit is BS trying to get people to stay out of a sense of what exactly?
I'm all for having loyalty to people and organizations that show the same. Eventually it can and will shift. I've seen management changed out from over me more times than I can count at this point. Don't get caught off guard.
It's even worse in the current dev/tech job market where wages are being pushed down around 2010 levels. I've been working two jobs just to keep up with expenses since I've been unable to match my more recent prior income. One ended recently, and looking for a new second job.
That’s because you don’t believe/realize in the mission of the product and its impact to society. When if work at Microsoft, you are just working to make MS money as they are like a giant machine.
That said it seems like every worker can be replaced. Lost stars replaced by new stars
Many employers want employees to act like cult members. But then when going gets tough, those are often the first laid off, and the least prepared for it.
Employers, you can't have it both ways. As an employee don't get fooled.