I think maybe there are fundamentally different slots that employers fill in people’s perceptions. For myself, I will never imagine that a company cares about me even in some ephemerally meaningful way. No amount of perks or even pay will change that. There are individuals perhaps that care, but an organisation does not have the capacity for caring and overtures aping loyalty come off as disingenuous.

I value compensation and comforts as inducements to align my incentives to the needs of the organisation and as enablers, but I would never confuse incentive alignment with some kind of emotional or empathetic bond or contract.

I don’t feel any way about organisations because they don’t feel about me.

But I understand that some people do.

I do feel some way about goals, projects, people, even teams insofar as a group of people closely aligned can have its own emotional character, but at the level of an organisation that has goals that need not be aligned with my well being, I just don’t catch feelings of any kind.

By observation, though, I think many people seek parental, familial, or community surrogate relationships in work culture. It seems to me that with vanishingly rare exceptions this always leads to disappointment or something worse… it seems like wilful ignorance of the incentives at play, or maybe a misunderstanding of genuine social bonds.

People don’t bond because of how wonderful they are, they bond because they seem useful to each other in some way. If your value is as a producer, that’s a very transactional relationship that should not be confused with genuine interdependence of trust.