Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman".

No, it's infantilizing your workforce. Don't do that.

Learning your new hire refuses to read documentation and instead asks for the answer from someone else is valuable. Remember, that 10 second ask later can break a developer out of flow and impose a huge cost on them.

If the author wanted to avoid the work, they could have:

- written Fido and trust that the answer was never checked

- assumed it was checked client side and found the array of acceptable names

Those would be ways to move around the problem. Interrupting your coworkers for something you're supposed to do on your own isn't.

If an institution is not capable to be human and empathic even in something as basic as an "onboarding" (which is supposed to make you feel welcome and capable), run for your life or burn the whole thing down. Fuck industrial capitalism.

This statement is too over-generalized and hostile to be made in good faith for a meaningful debate.

First, of course corporations do not "care" since they are not sentient. It's probably management of corporations that you mean.

Second, some individuals in some corporations may not care. And different companies may have different fractions of people not caring. In my experience, the long-term successful companies have a high fraction of people actually caring. And if they don't, then switch to a company where they do. I have worked at many places where the leadership team cared deeply, and it radiated into lower management and all employees. Foul apples tended to leave, since their constant ranting and disrespect was not appreciated or reciprocated, so they didn't feel welcome, and rightly so.

The irony is that it tends to be people with condescending and arrogant attitudes who do most of the "not caring". Just like the author of the blog entry we are discussing here.