[qwerpy]

I don't know. I've always worked at the big companies and they all had slightly different variants of the same nonsense. New companies may begin with mission-driven people but once it grows beyond a certain point, enough money/power-driven people join that the company irrevocably changes. Seems inescapable. Given that, and the fact that being mission-driven doesn't pay for my kid's piano lessons as well as FAANG did, I held my nose and compartmentalized work into the working hours as best as I could. There's less corporate backbiting in the less glamorous parts of a FAANG (test/QA, internal tools, etc.) but the pay is just as good, so that's where I always gravitated.