[SavageBeast]

I paused to think about OP's question and the results surprised me a bit. Looking back over my career in tech I can safely say that at every job I've ever had there has been at least one highly abusive person in some position of authority.

One of them was a CTO but most of them were high on the developer ladder and at most middle management. Most of the abusive folks Ive had experience with skewed toward the lower middle of the spectrum between Janitor->CxO.

From outright verbal abuse in meetings to quietly trying to sabotage my projects and in a few cases outright trying to get me fired for standing up to them (and failing each time I might add). I would later learn that one of these guys, my boss at the time, directly blocked me from a promotion that would have surely altered the course of my life at the time. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?

I think the modern term to describe these people in tech is "Brilliant Assholes" though they are seldom "brilliant". They have some skills usually but more or less they're just bullies by nature and taking advantage of a situation where they can get away with it.

I can say from my own experience, there is usually at least one person like this in every shop. You're likely to run into one of these if you work in software development.

[Aachen]

I've rarely had someone act abusively to any employee by any definition, as far as I noticed. Definitely not in my current job, and some other jobs I had as a student not either. I wonder if I got lucky or if "at least one such person in every job" is the norm.