IMO, too many people see their company as a family, but the company does treat them that way and knows the mistake that the employees are making.

I think it leads a lot of people to burnout by giving their all to the company while they just receive an average paycheck in return. Instead of putting that effort into their job, they could be enriching their own lives instead.

I do want to work for a business that cares though. They can show me how much they care by paying me well, treating me with respect, not intruding into my personal life, and by giving me a reasonable level of flexibility in how I organise my working hours and time on site.

The people who say their companies are like families generally fall into two camps in my experience. Those who have no idea what they’re doing and want to signal their supposed intentions (no matter how bad their execution is), and those who want to emotionally pressure their staff into doing more than they’re paid for. If I make friends with some colleagues, well that’s nice. But I don’t want my boss to think of me as family, I wouldn’t even want to be friends with my boss. People are usually aren’t good enough at compartmentalizing for that to work.

That attitude stays up right until the day they lay you off without warning.

It's great to work with great people that you enjoy being around, and we should treat each other all with human dignity and respect, and with a bit of fun. But your boss is not, and never will be, your friend.

This is a good point, but missing one of the big things that affect dynamics: there is typically a huge imbalance of power between an employee and employer, so most often if your interests diverge, the employee will lose. The worst case scenario for this can be terrible, even for an employee who has done nothing wrong.

If you are relying on a business to pay your living expenses indefinitely because you've been loyal or whatever other nonsense, that is lunacy. If you're not producing some kind of value then you are dragging your company down, and you should be let go. In my opinion businesses aren't proactive enough at firing non-contributors. Layoffs aren't great for anyone because they kill the culture, but to avoid that someone really has to pull on some pants, swallow their pride, admit to hiring mistakes and rectify them.

That's a fine view to take! But don't come rattling the cup around going "but poor founders, so lonely, nobody to talk to" when they've made that choice.

To elaborate on what the piece touches on but doesn't specifically say:

> You will need to make hard decisions for the sake of > the business. You can’t actually offer people anything > remotely close to lifelong loyalty or security, and it’s > dishonest to implicitly do so.

To be clear(er): You will have to fire people, and firing someone who thinks of themselves as a family member or who you think of as similar makes the whole thing much more painful. Further, it can make you, as a leader, hesitate when it's an action you really need to take ("but this person is like my brother - we'll make it work!").

At my most recent company, we took the opposite approach -- we all liked each other a lot, we worked well together, and we ate lunch together as a team, but at 6pm everyone went home to their own lives and families. The lines were clear, the understandings were there, and I think it was a much better way to run things.

Your CEO probably cares about you. It probably kills him when the company is running out of money and he has to let you go. But the company doesn't "care." It shows no loyalty to you, and you should feel no loyalty to it. That doesn't mean you can't work for a company and love the work, but it does mean you shouldn't get wrapped up in it to the point where you lose sight of your own interests.

I'm not trying to troll you, I'm trying to get you to take off your rose-colored glasses to save you from some real heart break down the road. Believe me.

>namely that personal relationships somehow "do not matter" or are purely exploitative at organizations.

Relationships can matter up to a point, but if your company took a hit in the market and has to shed 30% of its human resources your relationship is not going to matter. It can't, the company is trying to survive. And this goes double for a public company, it's basically illegal for them to value your friendship over their bottom line.

>First, I've found that one's work experience is dependent to a huge degree on the direct manager.

Fair enough.

>This simply hasn't happened - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple are all examples of places that by and large treat their employees fairly.

The question is vastly more complex than that. For one thing, the aggressiveness of a company is going to depend on the market their in. You'll have the worst experience in retail because they have such tight margins.

For another thing, how do you figure they treat their employees "fairly"? "Fair" is a difficult thing to pin down, but if we look at some knowns: Google makes billions in profit. Google pays under market rate for developers because "but you'll be working at Google! GOOGLE!". Now if you could provide some citation that shows that Google employees end up making more money at their next company on average because of this situation then I would find it less unfair/exploitative, but I doubt you can.

>a company that is not nice is not going to attract top talent.

Not to nit pick, but the last company I worked at thoroughly debunked this idea. The devs were very high end and the management was horrendously bad but it was a hedge fund paying nearly double market rate in total compensation (i.e. most of the money came in bonuses which could be as much as double your salary).

>On a personal level, it is always advantageous to be friendly, nice, respectful, and take everything in stride because it wins you friends and lets you do things like get other companies to hire you, a process which increases your market value as an employee.

Of course. I've liked most everyone I've ever worked with, and I think most people I've worked with have liked me. I form friendship, etc. I just know what my relationship with the company is. As long as I'm good value, they'll keep me around. I view them the same way. I like the people but if I find a better deal [1], well, it's nothing personal, just business.

>The start-up sector tends to attract and encourage a rather different breed, but the conditions are also completely different from a traditional corporate environment, so different personality characteristics will be adaptive.

This site gives the impression that the start up culture is much more greedy. Most people appear to create a startup to get rich. Fair enough, but they also seem to want employees who will pull insane hours and cost nearly nothing. All this for an idea that probably wont pan out and even if it did, what kind of equity would they get for so much effort? If the startup tanks it doesn't even look that good on a resume.

[1] And by better deal, I mean overall. Making twice as much money but doing boring monotonous and stressful work wouldn't be a good long term trade off for me. I currently make enough that I don't have to make those kinds of sacrifices.

And businesses are cutthroat capitalists when it benefits them.

All that family nonsense is just to talk employees out of looking after their own interests.

Your relationship with your employer is inherently antagonistic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you some BS. That doesn't mean you can't work well together, but sometimes your interests align with the company, and sometimes they don't.

But people who are wired the way I am don't stay employees. Or at least, we don't stay good employees. Employees seem to genuinely love the company. They have loyalty, and expect loyalty. Hearing someone say that about my company actually makes me feel a little uncomfortable. It's one thing to be engaging in mutually beneficial exchange of value; it's another entirely to manipulate someone into producing value for you because of how they feel about the company. (Of course, I'm not trying to manipulate anyone's emotions, and I don't imagine I'd have the skill to pull it off even if I was.)

Paradoxically, as far as I can tell, most employees like to feel that they are working out of a sense of duty or love towards the company; they can feel offended when I approach employment as the mutually beneficial exchange of value; like I'm accusing them of being greedy sellouts or something. It's foreign to me, because I always scoffed when the companies I worked for talked about loyalty. I felt like they were treating me like a child. The boss I thought respected me the most would give me my performance review and then say something like "But that's just talk. Your raise this year is X%" - meaning he understood, as I did, that while there were non-monetary aspects to our relationship, it was primarily about the money.

But yeah, If I'm going to continue managing other people, this is something I'm going to have to come to understand.

This is a good point. I have had bosses I liked and trusted and I trusted them, but not the "company" as such. If you replaced them, it wouldn't be the same. Maybe I'd be able to trust the new person or maybe I wouldn't, but that's what would matter.

That aside, the company culture and rules can influence whether it's more likely to hire good people or bad ones. There are some companies set up to do regular layoffs and compete strongly enough that people are sabotaging each other and that just seems miserable.

I work for a place now that's a quiet, enjoyable workplace where everyone is trying to help each other do better while getting good compensation. Maybe I could make a bit more somewhere else, but I'm not sure it'd be worth giving up what I have now. Most people who work here have really long tenures (10+ years) and that's a good thing.