Comment by hermitcrab
11 hours ago
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
With the number of people that have been swept up in cults over history the entire idea that "people can just easily leave" doesn't seem to pan out well.
> I don't understand why anyone would put up with that
To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?"
"On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0
People with the skills to earn lots of money can generally also get well paid jobs at companies not run by sociopaths.
Finding those companies is hard, especially when there's an obvious winner. Hell, I'd have joined facebook (not in hindsight, though) in the early 2000s because the specific challenges they were facing would have been novel. That being said, I'd likely feel terrible for what FB became had I did.
I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.
Corporations are commonly run as cults, at least to some extent. It could be demands of loyalty ('we're a family'), personality cult, dress code, 'teambuilding exercises' and so on.
The alternatives usually involve a threat of more uncertainty or misery.