I agree it's abuse, but it's more normal than people realize when there is a lot of money on the line in high stress situations. The solution is to remove some of the stress, but I'm not sure how easily that can be done when so much money is on the line since they naturally go together.

I remember working in a 'startup' in the 90s with people routinely yelling at each other. I remember hearing the owner stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss (who was awesome). Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours so he could present it and hopefully get the next check. Let's just say I may have then yelled at the computer while coding. Fun times :)

Heck, one of the owners decked the other one in a meeting, walked out, and we never saw him again.

This is fine. It's a hostile work environment. But if everyone's on the same page, it can, I don't want to say work, but not totally suck. Especially if there's good money.

Threatening to punch people, smashing things near someone to show them who's boss and "getting physical" is different. It's abuse. It's illegal. It was somewhat commonplace in and before the 80s [1], but it has not been common for decades now nor should it be.

[1] I have a theory for this, and it involves leaded gasoline.

May just be coincidence but this is the second time in the past few weeks I've heard about this, and I'm curious. Would you mind going into more detail?

There's a LOT to chew on in there.

Note that I don't disagree with your notion that abuse is abundant in all human societies.

If you assume that abuse can be caused or influenced by more than one thing -- which I believe makes sense but you might disagree -- then it doesn't matter what communism was doing if we're talking about capitalism.

The thing with banks is that they aren't productive in the first place. They're scalping off whatever they can get, with fierce competition. If you're fresh out of college and get hired into these places, you can't just walk away without risking your whole career. It's a monopsony. That's what enables abuse, human nature takes care of the rest.

It really really hammers home the power of training.

I remember two instances pretty clearly: in one, the CEO and head of architecture were having a 1:1. The CEO got a bit shouty, and the head of architecture very calmly said, "Don't talk to me like that. If you do it again, I'm walking out the door and never coming back".

Unfortunately in another incident, with a different coworker and his boss, my coworker did get pissed enough at his boss' tone that he walked out of the conference room, slammed the door, left the building, and never came back.

This is all just toxic garbage. The people in power require that their employees "act professionally", but then feel free to heap verbal abuse on their people. Not ok in any situation. If you're unhappy enough with an employee's performance that you feel the need to yell at them, you either just have anger management issues and should see a therapist, or they're a bad employee, and you should step back, calm down, and after you're calm, fire them.

> Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours

This is why I never agree to anything until they tell me the deadline :-P

My own experience was getting into a fist fight with someone after I told them to fuck off and open a ticket because I wasn’t going to drop everything and fix his shit right there right then.

Fist fights never go how you expect them to which was fortunate for me in the end.

We’re still friends 20 years later :)

Edit: I’d like to clarify that this is in no way acceptable but it is normal to some degree.

https://www.businessinsider.com/no-such-thing-alpha-male-201...

That's what I don't get in these abusive industries: Just because someone is higher up in a hierarchy he is not strong, he is not untouchable, the police is not on his side. Those pencil pusher bullies get in the face of the wrong young new intern and they get trashed. Should happen all the time. Should end such behaviour very fast. But doesn't. Seems like it's baked into recruiting, only hiring people that wouldn't even think about defending themselves.

It's unfortunately common in many places. Maybe "normal" denotes the default state, and perhaps abuse of this sort isn't the default, but it seems to occur in lots of high-competition, high-stress workplace hierarchies. I experienced it working in a sales branch for enterprise business equipment (pre- and post-sales support) where there were junior sales, sales, team managers, branch manager, regional manager, regional VP, and this sort of verbal & even physical intimidation was an every day thing. I was "fortunate" that I reported to the branch manager and couldn't be pushed around too much by the rest: "Take it up with my boss" became a mantra, and no one ever wanted to do that because they'd get shat on in some form or another, but that just meant I had lots of shouting matches with people who wanted me to do things but couldn't actually force me to do it-- and most of the time their issue was that someone else had already reserved my time and I wasn't available for them. I still had to endure a verbal tirade from the branch manager, complete with common macho comparisons to a little girl, when I decided to take a better position with corporate headquarters.

(My whole experience at the branch level left a bad taste in my mouth though, so I didn't stay much longer... it didn't help that I became part of a team with an incredibly competent manager that had already automated away most work, leaving mostly boring tasks. Interesting work was on the horizon with a new system implementation coming up, which is why they kept a full team, but as I said-- bad taste. That second manager did however leave an impression, and I've tried to be strategically lazy in automating my own work ever since)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker