Wow, I love that web page / resume and that era of HTML authorship. Brings back memories.

You nailed it.

Lack of social solidarity and communal trust has got to be a kiss of death in wartime. Especially when fighting against an opponent who has it in spades. (US in Vietnam, Russia in early days of the war in Ukraine, etc.).

> the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers

This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics.

It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet.

We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get recognition for it.

Above a certain company size however I think what he’s describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person company you’ve very close to the company. In a > 10k person company there’s no way: there’s a lot of layers to the company and often can’t “touch” the customer as an employee. The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact: you can’t reduce that complexity out of it.

I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.

But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.

Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.

When I started in 2011 I was told "up or out" of L4 by 4 years.

That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.

I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion. L4 money was good enough.

The internal culture at Google outright fosters it. Everything from the interview process on.

My mental health is 5x better since leaving.

From the people I know who worked there, same crap in internal culture, too.

Netherlands is very friendly for tech worker immigration. I've known a person who did it, and heard quite a bit about it.

Or you could come here to Canada.

The problem is you're going to find the same attitudes outside of the US, just a few years behind.

The template these autocratic personalities follow is not to abolish elections, but to make them pointless exercises full of blatant corruption, coercion (violent or otherwise), and manipulation.

It's counterproductive to make claims like what you're claiming, because their supporters and people on the fence will turn around and point out how you're wrong in 4 years, or whatever.

There's still elections in Russia, Turkey, etc. And those leaders are very popular.

But they're not democracies. Opposition is not really permitted. Where legal repression isn't in place, mob violence and the like is employed.

That's the template you can expect to see followed.

They absolutely are here in Canada. Especially around climate change because Canada is an oil exporter. And they will be emboldened by what just happened in the US.

Alberta outright banned renewables development for 6 months and then slapped a huge set of restrictions on them after that "moratorium" was lifted. A tax on electric car owners added. The conservative parties nationally are on a constant drum beat about the national carbon tax and it's doomed. Weak emissions caps we have are also doomed. Any little things that have been done for the last 10 years will be undone.

At a recent party convention in Alberta, the ruling party passed a climate denial resolution as official party policy.

Amazingly lots of people on this forum trying to sanitize what these people are about.