Furthermore, the notion that there’s a touchy feely relationship is predicated on younger, inexperienced people thinking that the company actually has some emotional investment in the employee. I’m sorry, but even at clever startups, this investment simply does not exist, or if it does, it only persists when there’s money available. I’ve been laid-off more times than I can count, and I have no delusion of commitment on behalf of my employers.

Does that mean you just work for the paycheck? Absolutely not. At least, it doesn’t have to be that way. It does mean that you should be prepared for the “divorce” with your employer, because one way or another, it will probably come.

If work wasn’t so boring for most people, they wouldn’t spend hours watching horribly insipid and dreadful movies and (alleged) reality shows, playing games like Farmville and angry birds (not to mention spending money on them), and wasting hours updating and reading the endless streams of trivia and minutiae that comprise 98% of the content on sites like Facebook and twitter. They wouldn’t fantasize about retiring from their jobs so they could spend more time on mindless time sinks.

I think companies like Dell only appear to be stable. Nokia appeared stable up until a year or so ago, and now they are in danger of obsolescence. RIM is on their path, and I would be surprised if Dell isn’t just five years behind them. The formula-driven management and devotion to risk avoidance at companies like those is what dooms them, and ultimately makes working there miserable. Of course, maybe you’re on to something when you compare them to families, as for all we know what passes as a dysfunctional family may actually be the norm.

I think of my companies more like a village or a community than a family. Members of a community support each other and work together in a dynamic fashion but, and this is a very big but, in a community members need to pull their own weight or they’re ostracized.

Stacy, you’ve been spending too much time around incredibly well-funded web startups. Maybe they have the M.O. you describe, but the giant multinationals (and the smaller wannabe multinationals) run their businesses a lot different. They have compartmentalized every job as if all of the employees are robots, reducing them to boring, scripted existences that make people dream of retirement at 50. They are typically run by accountants that believe every decision (including the spec of a product) can be reduced to a formula, or sales people who cynically believe that the only thing that matters is their brand and channel. They talk a lot about the environment, the community, their employees, but they really don’t care about any of that – they say those things because it’s politically correct. They don’t like change, they abhor it, because it means their products or services will have to adapt, and their profits are not guaranteed. The people who run those companies do it not for the employees, shareholders, or customers, but for their own benefit, and don’t care about those other stakeholders.

Yes, people with specific skills that are in demand by bubble companies can make demands to meet their lifestyle needs, but for everybody else, it’s a buyers market, and they don’t have the same leverage. More companies will emulate Exxon and Wal-Mart than Facebook, and I have a hard time believing they give their employees as much freedom as the over-hyped, over-funded, and over-valued dot-coms give theirs.