When companies abandon the values they proclaimed to have
Companies under pressure can become unregocnizable.
In February 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned all remote work. The move surprised everyone: Mayer was a new, young CEO, and Yahoo had a well-established remote work policy. The stated reason was collaboration and innovation, which Mayer thought was lacking.
The real context was much simpler: Yahoo was losing the competition with Google and Facebook, and Mayer needed to look like she was doing something. The RTO mandate was the “something.”
Fast-forward thirteen years. The mandate didn’t save Yahoo. Verizon acquired it for $4.5 billion in 2017, merged it with AOL, then wrote down the value by more than it paid. At the time of acquisition, Forbes reported, “The biggest story is how Yahoo squandered its massive head start and let each wave of new technology in search, social, and mobile pass it by. Yahoo remains largely the same company it was a decade ago.” Yahoo was sold again in 2021, and the Forbes sentiment remains true.
When companies are struggling, they change the rules workers operate under and call it “strategy.” But these moves are almost always a cover for a business problem leadership can’t figure out or won’t name. And, over and over, we’ve seen that the companies that abandon their core principles under pressure don’t save themselves. They just lose what made people want to work there in the first place.
When the company you joined stops existing
The company formerly known as Facebook (now Meta) debuted at number one on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2011 and held the top spot three times. By 2023, it had fallen off the top 100 list entirely.
In April 2026, Meta deployed what it calls the “Model Capability Initiative”: software that captures employee keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and periodic screenshots. CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed there is no opt-out. (European employees are exempt, because GDPR won’t allow it.) Employees have said that the initiative makes them really uncomfortable.
In June 2026, Meta laid off 8,000 employees, and several thousand more were reassigned to the Applied AI Engineering unit — and had no option to transfer elsewhere. Some have reportedly taken to calling themselves “draftees.”
The company that once topped every “best workplace” list is now tracking every keystroke in some type of nightmare dystopian workplace and telling thousands of employees they can either accept a role they didn’t sign up for or leave. The company still exists. But the company people joined? That’s long gone.
Starbucks has drifted from its own identity, too. For years, Starbucks built its brand on being the “third place” — a community space between home and work. But Starbucks has had an identity crisis over the years, amidst sagging performance. Should it optimize for mobile orders? But then that detracted from the “third place” vibe. Should it add more seating inside the stores? But then that made the stores more crowded. Employees have been dragged along for every iteration, and meanwhile, the company has taken a strong anti-union stance, trying to prevent workers from organizing to protect themselves.
The Starbucks experience changed, and so did the working conditions. What was once a company built around the idea of community became, for many of its workers, a volume operation that happened to sell coffee.
Nothing tells you more about how a company’s values than how it treats its employees when it is struggling. Webflow, once a company known as a great place to work, laid off employees in May 2026 by locking them out of their laptops at 7 am with no advance notice. Employees discovered they’d been impacted when their Slack and email access vanished — before any email from HR arrived.
And I’ve personally experienced this. I worked for a company that proclaimed to be “people-first.” The company began to struggle during my year there, leading to me losing my job unceremoniously. I was shocked by how it unfolded, since I had believed that this company cared about its employees — that’s what it had proclaimed, every step of the way.
Your values are the only constant in your career
Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, was recently on the podcast “Channels” with Peter Kafka. In 2020, the employees indicated that they wanted the company to focus more on diversity initiatives and sustainability. The global media conglomerate put together internal teams to address both. In the interview, Lynch said:
“It’s discouraging to see all these other companies dropping these initiatives, but it only says one thing: that it never was a core value, it was a convenience.”
“Companies have to adapt to survive — you can’t expect them to stay the same forever.” That might be the claim of Meta, Starbucks, or even my former employer. True. But there’s a difference between adapting your strategy and abandoning the principles that attracted your workforce. Yahoo opted for command and control of the office. Meta turned to surveillance.
You can’t get attached to a company’s stated principles. Unfortunately, there’s no way to predict which companies will abandon everything when the market gets rough or the industry changes. Companies may last decades and go through several iterations, and new leadership may usher in entirely new values (just look at Twitter, now X).
Every company will put itself first. The question is whether you’re building a career that depends on a company continuing to be the company you joined. Because if there’s one pattern that holds, it’s this: you can’t trust the company not to change in ways that you fundamentally disagree with.
The only thing you can truly depend on is what you build for yourself. That’s not saying you should quit when there’s company upheaval (that’s not realistic in the current job market). But it’s worth asking whether the stability you think you have is real, or whether it’s contingent on a company continuing to honor the values it used to recruit you. And it’s worth thinking about what you’re willing to tolerate to stay, even if the company has changed.
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