[_8j50]

The work culture and environemnt is an important factor here. In my recent experiences for example, an environemnt where people are constantly pitted against each other and appearing weak/not-smart can have dire consequences (e.g.: seen colleagues fret over visa issues) results in an environment where there are a lot of people with a smile on their face while holding a sharp knife behind them, waiting to stab whomever they can in the back. Loyalties and betrayals, doing things for the sake of appearances,etc...

I have also seen environemnts where all that matters getting prominent people in prominent cliques to like you. When I had more manual work, meeting your metrics exactly, not less or more, showing up on time and being friendly/chatty mattered the most.

Everyone has their personalities and I will leave it to the psychoanalysts to asess people but since the subject is specific to work environments, my opinion is that sociopathy, egocentrism and machavellianism are esentially traits you are forced to develop to make ends meet or move up the corporate ladder. These horrible perosnalities are a problem only if you have a healthy top-down environemnt and culture to begin with.

For example: work environments where people like to argue about politics every single time have egomaniacs influencing cliques. But this is tolerated by management and rewards these people.

Humility being rewarded,a "no stupid questions" culture, firmly and strongly enforcing separation between personal and professional lives and being fair to everyone (really gets under my skin when people gossip/slander, managers use back channels to dig info about candidates and bullying people) is what I consider a good work environment.

It is good for workers and it is good for productivity and the bottom-line. But people are short sighted and care about ego stroking and sociopaths become managers all the time and the problem with these people to me is that they care about things other than money and people. At work, everyone is there to make money, help the company maximize profits and do so ina sustainable way (treat coworkers and subordinates right).

[nine_zeros]

The backstabbing culture you have described is encouraged by FAANG-like companies.

[tetromino_]

Can you give some examples? What was the job function and approximate level of the characters in your examples?

In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies. But I have zero insight into what happens at the managerial or director levels.

[FooBarBizBazz]

> In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies.

Strongly disagree. Yes, there are fairly good standards about how you communicate with other people. But competition between peers is higher in these companies, and you can see it. It's hard to form friendships in a SV company for this reason. Less-competitive industries are different. Most people don't really want to be in this kind of competition, and will be friendlier in other situations. But they'll endure these environments for the money.

One of my concerns is that, if this is the only kind of environment you experience as an adult, you're going to start to carry this kind of competitive behavior out into the larger world. And as this corporate culture starts to eat larger and larger parts of the economy, this increasingly will be the only thing people know. This seems deeply corrosive to society as a whole.

It's one of the reasons I like to get out of upper-middle-class professional milieus when I can. People act differently. They're friendlier.

[nine_zeros]

Stack ranking and Pip culture means every director needs to PIP a certain percentage of their reports. This leads to unhealthy competition among engineers and competition among managers.

The system is BS because a lot of projects work better when more than one engineer/team is involved. But by making it a zero sum game, most engineers (and their managers) spend more time backstabbing others to save themselves. Zero productive work gets done. It is all about backstabbing and BS optics to make themselves look good to the director.

[_8j50]

I have seen it more in regular companies. The commom denominator is a company with low profit margins using hostile environments to squeeze out productivity.