alt Hacker News>There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s.
As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.
Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.
I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.
No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.
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To be fair, the actual lesson of Fight Club is that maybe you do need a woman in your life. :D (That and don't delude yourself into believing the fascist inside of you.)
What really killed corporate loyalty for a lot of us was the lack of jobs that have lifetime pensions, if I understand it correctly. Why would I agree to work somewhere til retirement if I would be better jumping somewhere else to make more money now?
The problems GenX had to deal with was watching Boomers, who enjoyed all the benefits of post-WW2 expansion of infrastructure and social services, pull the rope ladder up behind them once they got well-paying jobs.
The 80's and 90's saw the beginning of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that pervades all but the most egalitarian societies. Reagan and Thatcher deregulated and privatized everything, and as a result a select few made a mountain of money and destroyed the middle class. "Shareholder value" and mass layoffs became the order of the day way before the dot com bubble burst. GenX knew we'd never have it as good as our parents - we just didn't know how fucked we were going to end up.