[giantg2]

"Look if all companies are bad then everyone in the salaried class is living a miserable existence, which isn't true"

That's not how it works. I'd say 60-80% of the people at my company think it's a great place to work. In fact, we rate very highly on the Computer World survey every year. This is because the majority of the workers are given a good rating. If you are not given a good rating for political reasons, or you are held back from promotions for political reasons, that's where you will find the problem - in 10-20% of the people because that's who it has affected. There are people at work who I have shared my history with and they can't believe the company would do such things. The secrecy of performance management means the majority of people are happy because they don't see the negative side. Who cares if the company violates policies as long as they don't do it to you?

I have AWS certs. We don't get to use that knowledge on the job really. I won't get anything better due to the geographic restraints placed by my wife and the stiff competition for fully remote (I'm slow in code screens due to my language bouncing).