Senior accountant fired unceremoniously despite 6 years of dedicated service and the fact that she had endured a personal crisis 3 weeks earlier, company replaces her with junior staff member: 'They literally fired someone who had no performance issues'

Businesses constantly talk about efficiency and optimization. And we all hear those words so often that they start to seem harmless when that very same optimization can completely alter your life in a single meeting and send you scrambling for another job. A person can spend years becoming the dependable employee everyone leans on, only to discover that dependability has no emotional weight inside a spreadsheet. And with cutting out the bottom line becoming the hottest trend, it's becoming more and more common for companies to gut staffing costs in the name of short-term profits, you begin to wonder where the bottom line meets the other bottom line in the workplace: mutual trust and loyalty. 

Younger employees increasingly treat jobs as temporary arrangements instead of long-term commitments, seemingly more adjusted to the current state of affairs than the rest of us older workers. We who once believed in careers and loyalty and a long time spent with a single employer are becoming increasingly skeptical, but perhaps still too attached to the old ways. 

These fresh entries to the workforce now see employment less as a relationship and more as a transaction, and let's be honest, businesses have been behaving this way since before they entered the workforce, so they have likely known nothing else and adapted as necessary. And this is an inevitable adjustment by the workforce. When companies repeatedly show that loyalty can be replaced by efficiency calculations, workers eventually start protecting themselves the same way businesses do.

In a viral post on the topic, this employee shared how a senior accountant at their workplace was unceremoniously fired after 6 years of dedicated service despite being very good at their job and well-liked by everyone, with no performance issues. A newer junior accountant had impressed management by handling increasingly complex tasks; this had clearly got upper management wondering if they could get the same for cheaper, coming at a brutal time for the employee.