Stay 10 years and you're 'dedicated.' But the people who job-hop every two years often out-earn you and get promoted faster. So is loyalty a virtue, or a trap they sell you?
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Add your commentStayed 12 years out of loyalty. Trained three managers who got promoted over me. Got 'restructured' at 51. Loyalty bought me nothing but a mug and a sad sheet cake. Don't be me.
Loyalty is a one-way street they paved and told you to be grateful for. The company will lay you off in a 9am Zoom call with a generic email and 'we're a family' still warm in your inbox. Protect yourself first.
Honestly this thread radicalized me more than my last performance review. Updating my resume tonight, thanks everyone.
boomers: 'no one wants to stay anywhere anymore' / also boomers: cut the pension, froze the wages, killed the raises. you reap what you sow lads
Loyalty to people, never to a logo. I'd walk through fire for my actual team. The corporation? It's a legal fiction that would replace me by Friday. Know the difference and you'll never feel betrayed.
The math is brutal and simple. Internal raise: 3%. New job: 20%. Do that twice and you've lapped the loyal coworker who's still waiting for HR to 'review the bands next quarter.'
The correct answer is: be loyal to your skills, your network, and your savings account. Those three never lay you off. Everything else is negotiable.
thats the secret nobody says out loud. the loyal people who WIN are the ones who quietly act like they might leave. the ones who lose are the ones who actually believed the family speech
I'm one of those 'boomers' and you're not wrong. My generation got the loyalty deal and then dismantled it for the next one. Don't blame young people for reading the new contract correctly.
hot take: 'loyalty' was never the deal. it was a fair exchange of work for money. the second people started calling a JOB a marriage is the second everyone got confused and started feeling betrayed
20 years, same firm, no regrets. But I negotiated hard every single year and walked into my boss's office with competing offers twice. Loyalty without leverage is just being taken for granted.
this. the company is not your friend. but greg in accounting who covered for you when your kid was sick? thats real. dont confuse the two
The people saying 'always hop' have clearly never been through three layoffs in a recession when nobody's hiring and suddenly that 'boring loyal job' looks like an ark. Cycles, people. Cycles.
as a hiring manager that 'red flag' thinking is exactly why good people leave. you penalize them for the raise you refused to give. the loyalty problem is a management problem
My dad worked 40 years at one place, got the gold watch, full pension, retired proud. That door is closed now and pretending it isn't is how you get hurt. Different era, different rules. Adapt.
everyone treating this like its purely financial. some of us have lives. i dont want to learn a new codebase, new politics, new commute every 18 months for 8 grand. stability has a price and ill pay it
loyalty isnt stupid, blind loyalty is. stay while it serves you, leave the moment it doesnt, and never feel guilty. its a transaction wearing a friendship costume
Counterpoint nobody wants: constant hopping means you never stay long enough to see your work mature, to build deep mastery, to become the person everyone trusts. Some things only grow in the same soil over years.
see and i read the same thread and thought 'wow im grateful for my decent stable job, ill stop taking it for granted.' same comments, opposite conclusion. wild how that works
Job hopping has a ceiling too though. I've interviewed people with 6 jobs in 8 years and it's a red flag. At some point it reads as 'can't commit or can't get along,' fair or not.
I've stayed at the same place 9 years and I love it. Great people, fair pay, I matter here. Reddit will tell me I'm a sucker but I go home happy and that's worth more than a 15% bump elsewhere.
Started my own thing after getting burned twice. Now I AM the company and you know what I learned? It's genuinely hard to pay people what they're worth and stay alive. Made me a little more forgiving. A little.
you found a unicorn and im genuinely happy for you. but you're describing a company that earned loyalty, which is different from loyalty as a default virtue. earn it and youll keep it
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