> You give your 4-5 years to a company and the company dumps you at the first sight of hardship.

You got paid every month for those 4-5 years right? That's the settlement of what the company owes you for the time you gave them.

I've had this point of view for a long time. Every payday, you and your employer are even. If you feel that you are giving your employer more than they are giving you, you need to negotiate a raise, or start looking elsewhere for a better deal.

People tend to get emotionally attached to their workplaces and changing it is difficult sometimes. We know business is business. If companies act this way, they should also expect zero employee loyalty.

What you mean to say is "this is why there is zero employee loyalty". Employee loyalty is a concept from an era where it was commonplace, but it always had to be earned. So, here we are.

Does that mean you quit without notice and feel zero guilt about it, or are you a one-sided corporate simp?

To me the world is a better place when an employment relationship is not purely contractual, on both sides, and I'm glad I live in a country that supports that.

Its okay to quit without notice... It's polite to give 2 weeks, but I wouldn't consider anyone a bad person for not doing so.

> To me the world is a better place when an employment relationship is not purely contractual, on both sides...

Do you think that should not be the case? And people should be obligated to stay after putting in their resignation?

I think we should recognise that while these ways of acting (in both directions) are legal, they can still be antisocial and rude (which of course doesn't mean they're not occasionally warranted). While a company's only legal obligation may be to pay their employees, that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't socially call them out if they're too sharp-elbowed.

Except none of us are robots, or interchangeable parts of a machine. Being human is not a weakness.

I won’t pretend I know what the ideal solution is, but lowering salaries across the board doesn’t seem like a great choice. If someone is a high performing employee and then sees a cut to their paycheck, that’s an incentive for them to leave, and that’s also extra bad for the company because of course better performing employees will be more capable of finding another job. With layoffs, companies remove their “worst” employees instead, which theoretically improves productivity, assuming of course the rest of the company doesn’t think they’ll get laid off too.

Last statement is actually the gist of what I wanted to mean. The moment you make a mass layoff that sends a message to all employees.

Please be mindful of measly 3% decrease in your salary, you wouldn't even see the difference.

The more open the management is to their employees the more they become loyal. It's all about honestly sharing burden.

You can always layoff not performing employees, a company has all the right to do so. We are talking about a mass layoff.

Reducing salaries opens a whole new can of worms with legal and immigration involved. Basically, if you hire someone on a visa, it is going to be a hassle to reduce their salaries - and the knock on effects could include restarting the immigration process. It might end up costing more than the dollars saved, and employees will likely leave anyway.

Hypothetically speaking, assume you are to be laid off. Would you rather be laid off now with pay until March, or laid off in March with no notice and no further pay? They're being pretty generous here, relatively speaking.

Stripe made a bad choice _hiring_ people, early this year. They were very explicit about this in the email. They overextended and didn't foresee the economy contracting the way it did - and now they have to correct.

Cutting salaries for everybody has a number of disadvantages, chief of which is that it will encourage the best of people to leave. Firing can be done strategically, targeting the most recent hires and the underperformers.

I do feel like I have to remind that the first duty of the management is to the company - not because the company is "Mother and Father", in an old communist wooden language, but because the company needs to survive in order to pay all salaries, and hopefully expand enough so it can hire again even more people (assumingly in a more sustainable way this time).