Hire people who give a shit

Loyalty isn't rewarded, at all, unless there's an additional reason for the reward that can be disguised under 'loyalty', where 'reward for loyalty' is pointed to as an internal marketing exercise to motivate the workforce.

As soon as the underlying reason(s) no longer exist, loyalty will be revealed to have evaporated.

I've seen it multiple times at multiple companies. A couple of which were employees of over twenty years with the respective companies. None of which were bad places to work, or in any way brutal with their employment policies or conditions.

That's just how it is.

The best thing to give a shit about is the quality of your own work. That will serve you well for now and the future.

I don't give a shit about your company, because it's your company. I don't actually have a say in what's going on. I can't refuse to do what I'm told because I disagree with the direction of the company's mission. I'd get fired.

I might give a shit about the mission, in as much as you can give a shit about the trite verbiage assigned to, in essense, the general thing that's supposed to increase shareholder dividends. But the mission is very frequently lost in the minutia of doing one's job. Does the mission relate to how I'm going to fill out this change management form? No; the change management process isn't based on the mission, it's based on its own thing. I give a shit about the change management process. If I only gave a shit about the mission, I might say, "screw change management!" And then I wouldn't be very good at my job.

And "giving a shit" based on who's interpretation? I can tell you that I give far too much of a shit about how my company works, and if I voiced this frequently, people would be absolutely sick of me. My manager sometimes reminds me - in the nicest terms - to calm the fuck down about the work. You don't want the whole company filled with people like me, because they'd drive each other bonkers. A few of us are nice for variety, and to pop up occasionally and say, "Hey, do we have a central place we can put all this documentation rather than a lot of independent places?" And then calm the fuck down and focus on just writing the damn docs.

You should want people to care, in a healthy way, both about the thing they're working on and the way in which they work on it. But you should never want them to be obsessed.

Obsession, n: Compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.

If you want this for your employees, you need to get a grip and re-evaluate life.

Culture add is better than culture fit anyway. what can this person add to the character of our team that we don't already have? Insight from a completely different career field in their past? Dry humor? Brilliantly timed Star Trek quotes? I've found advising my subordinate leaders to look for culture adds instead of fits takes a lot off their backs when interviewing for things other than checking off the list of familiar technologies.

I only have moral arguments for moral questions. Certainly the idea that humans, because they are human and for that reason alone, have inherent worth is not exactly new. It is seductively easy to start thinking you're above other people because of what you have, or what you know, or what you can do. It's not true, but a relatively dirty part of ourselves certainly wants it to be.

"The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person." [0]

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” [1]

[0] http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/do...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_Jugulum

Imagine a 20-something thinking he's seen or experienced enough of the world--any of it--to go on like this.

He essentially lucked into VC funding by exploiting sweatshop labor while riding a hyped ML/AI market. It's a testament to how messed up this industry is.