There's something particularly repugnant about corporations that babble about everyone being "family" and how "important" their "corporate values" are, because all these empty words are there merely to make the CEO feel better about walking off with a mammoth salary & bag of stock options s/he doesn't really deserve. HR is perhaps the most regrettable part of the whole system as it is filled with people who imagine they are there to "help everyone" when in reality it's mostly a non-function the sole purpose of which is to protect the corporation at all costs. Some companies are better than others - I've been fortunate to have consulted to a few - but in the end if you're living to the maximum degree your income allows, you're failing to prepare yourself for hard times. And when hard times come, executives protect themselves. If firing a few thousand lower-level people enables them to keep on enjoying those huge salaries & lovely perks then, hey, let's put together an email, run an Excel model, and downsize/rightsize to keep shareholders quiescent.