Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".

I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.

I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team.

I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.

Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.

Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.

Oh, the irony...

I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is

1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.

And

2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.

Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.

"Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"

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