No, I'm dead serious. This reputation is long dead, but back in the last century, before Jack Welch came along in the Reagan years and skull-f*cked the corporate world, it was a totally different time.

In the post-war years, IBM was famous as a company where the workers were treated like actual family. That's not necessarily a great thing, it's kind of creepy and patriarchal. But if you got a job there and did your work, after a decade or two, they'd keep you around even if your job became expendable or they knew they could hire a younger person to do it for less. It was just part of the corporate culture. Once you'd put in your time, you became a plant grandpa, and who fires grandpa when he's just trying to finish building up his pension?A heartless monster, that's who.

Those days are long gone, though. But from what I've heard and read, that used to actually be how this worked.