I've worked at startups and universities and I never had to deal with:

> The people I had on my team, were extremely closed minded. Most of them with many years of experience working in a corporation, so even more closed minded, only caring about their manager’s approval.

> I actually cared about my role, I cared about the people we were doing the Connect event for more than for my career and no one seemed to understand that.

> I found a job fairly easily with a similar salary, where they didn’t expect me to work 24/7.

I've worked long hours at a startup, but not like she is describing. The startup wasn't part of my identity, I didn't need to play politics. All I did was dev dev dev and some more dev. The communication overhead was low. Compared to her story, I had a dream job. Except that I didn't, it had good parts, and it had frustrating parts. Teaching at a coding school is more like a dream job since it doesn't feel like work and people pay you for it, except that it stifles career growth.

Seems? She worked out of the Warsaw office. Not many Americans there, I expect.

Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite painfully.

But yes, your point is valid: it's all relative.

> A cup of coffee are starbucks is a luxury.

In Melbourne, Australia a coffee at Starbucks is considered:

1. A sign that you’re a tourist.

2. A sign that you’re a masochist.

3. A cry for help.

4. All of the above.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself :)

(I love my Saturday morning Turkish)

At least is still sounds pretty crazy to me.

I'm quite surprised this has gotten so many upvotes. I generally do not feel I am responsible for how other people react to my comments. I certainly don't run around trying to figure out how to be the top comment.

I'm a demographic outlier here. I try to give my point of view as best I can, knowing that it will often be neither respected nor appreciated.

If people want to talk about BigCo, they are free to do so. But understanding how much of her story can be reasonably attributed to the company and how much to other things is the best way to criticize a company, if that is your desire. If you blame them for everything, people stop listening and won't take even legitimate criticisms seriously.

My opinion is somewhat respected on specific topics, such as homelessness. This article is not on a subject where I expected anyone to care one whit what I thought.

Plenty of my comments are initially met with downvotes or strong criticism. I participate here a lot because I'm medically handicapped and don't get out much, not because I have any fantasies that the world is particularly interested in my opinions.

I generally figure if the world were strongly interested in my opinions, my various websites would have more traffic and make more money. In point of fact, I am routinely mocked on HN for complaining about how my participation here has failed to garner me anything resembling a middle class income and told to STFU and go get a real job.

Choosing to engage with a specific comment is not necessarily evidence that I'm all up in arms about it. It is an unfortunate truism that there is generally more to say when people have a difference of opinion than when they see things the same way. It is unfortunate because it tends to promote an appearance of fightiness rather than conversation in online forums, even when the explicit goal is conversation, as it generally is for me personally.

I've participated here nearly ten years. Rest assured, I have some familiarity with how the forum operates.

(Between my old handle -- Mz -- and this one, I have more than 40k karma. If it were under one handle, I would be respectably high on the leader board.)

I'm a former military wife. So I was involved in protecting national security while changing diapers and generally being viewed by the planet as a big fat nothing homemaker. "Loose lips sink ships."

So I viewed my corporate job as merely a day job of no special importance, thus I was not sucked into the cult-like atmosphere of the place. I imagine I would be equally resistant to the cult-like atmosphere at a tech company.

She waited 18 months to say publicly what she thought about it. She's still quite young and 18 months is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

I'm 53. I had an affair in my twenties. I then read as much research as I could get my hands on.

Some common themes:

People frequently are unfaithful while physically separated from their spouse. It's a common feeling that it somehow doesn't count if you are far apart. In fact, some people use that stance as justification to have an ongoing long distance affair.

Affairs are common in stressful situations. When things are overwhelming, humans have a weird habit of reaching for a smidgen of distraction and comfort amid the chaos.

Although popular opinion is that affairs ruin relationships, cause and effect almost always runs the other direction: Affairs don't kill relationships. Instead, relationships in their death throes foster affairs.

I generally consider 18 months to not be a whole lot of time to gain perspective on international and cross cultural experiences. Cultures and nation's tend to be far older than the individuals in them and it can take quite a long time to digest the intersection where two such things meet in one person's life and, unfortunately, all too often grind on that specific individual.

The phrase "cult-like atmosphere" of corporations is meaningful too. Having lived in different national/regional/organizational cultures, I'd agree that there's a significant correspondence between culture and cult.