Googler... ex-Googler

> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.

This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.

> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life

Hardly. This type of arrangement was short-lived and anomalous. It was roughly true in rich economies during a few decades of the post-war era. Never before, and not for most people around the world.

Relationships are worth cultivating any time, of course, but one shouldn't mistake a job for a life. The idea that a job is for life and your employer is your family was a mind hack that worked for a short while and is now unraveling.

For most of human history we were hunter-gatherers. Even assuming you mean post-industrial history this isn't true though.

Do people really have to make up stuff like that? If you said large parts of history, maybe.

"For entirety" definitely not. What you describe was a thing in some periods, typically periods where some group got too much power and they tended to end with huge disfunctions and breakdowns.

It used to be sort of true in the Soviet sphere. By sort of, it was more like an employer for life rather than the exact job. Unless rhe company went under which was rare.

> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life

Just looking at the Western world that breaks down during industrialization and falls apart if you go further back then that, journeymen (i.e. tradesmen who had completed their apprenticeship) would often literally travel from town to town for several years to work under different masters before submitting their work to a guild for evaluation and becoming masters themselves. I guess you could say serfs worked "for the same employer" because their feudal lords owned them as part of the territory but that seems like a stretch.

It's not so much that employees used to "keep working for the same employer for their entire lives", it's more that the people running and operating businesses used to be part of a local community and there used to be an understanding of a shared responsibility beyond private property claims.

This isn't something employees can change, either. Even employers aren't really able to change this because they too have to operate in the same economic system that contributes to this effect. It's probably more extreme in the US (and some places in the US more than others) but the economic system does not care for such sentimentalities and a business that does will put itself at an economic disadvantage, especially where the social fabric has already been sufficiently eroded to avoid bad optics (e.g. WalMart arguably failed in Germany because its attitude to employees felt extremely off-putting both to workers and consumers at the time but that resistance may have been eroded by the behavior of other companies since to the point where it would no longer make them stand out the same way if they tried to re-enter the market now - economic changes making this unfeasible notwithstanding).

> Never before, and not for most people around the world.

Please tell me more about the gig economy of medieval peasants.

Medieval peasants cannot be said to have had a job. They are mostly either tied to the land (and its ownders), or indeed gigging from season to season.

The english wikipedia is lacking on the historical side, but you can find out more with the French one : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalier

Google trad of a couple paragraphs :

> Most of the modest peasants, men or women, very often still small artisans, small weavers or textile workers, peddlers, boatmen or carriers in bad seasons, could become day laborers on nearby farms and estates, if they had the build and stamina, once their own work was done. Some were even regular day laborers, familiar to a domain steward or a village ploughman, present all year round or usually required for a certain number of tasks. Certain harvest tasks were sometimes carried out if possible part of the night, or continuously by successive teams[5].

> Day laborers, brewers or laborers, represented a significant part of the population and sometimes lived, in the absence of family support or a solidarity house, on the edge of begging[8]. In rural areas, they subsisted thanks to additional agricultural work with ploughmen or farm merchants but also thanks to wool spinning, crafts or transport. They also served as additional labor in construction, helped the lumberjacks, made bundles, etc. Women did laundry or took children in as wet nurses[9].

In the days of yore, didn't a decent chunk of people literally have their name come from a family profession? I.e. John Smith, Jan Schmidt, Carl Maria von Weber.

As in it wouldn't be just your worth tied to the profession, but N generations of your parents, etc.

> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life

This is... not true. It's so not true I don't even know where to start rebutting it. But for a start, most of human history you were either hunting and gathering for yourself, keeping a flock for yourself, or farming land for yourself. "Employment" even as a concept is a pretty new concept on the scale of human history.

The person you're replying to is correct in a technical sense I think? The hunter-gatherer phase would be considered prehistory since it pre-dates the development of writing, which is what enabled humans to record history.

Heck even farming is a tiny sliver of time. Vast majority has been pre-agriculture.