Yes, the atmosphere at most big tech companies is this way. Everyone writes their emails with a plastered-on fake smile.

The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.

It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.

I wouldn’t say that’s universal or inevitable.

Oh, so they’re California Happy.

I'd say it's more a cultural echo of a time when it felt like anything was possible, and you were making stupid money to work on whatever you felt like working on, and everyone you interacted with was super competent and happy to help you out.

It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.

Yeah the book "The Circle" (now of course a major motion picture :) really captured that culture well, I thought. A lot of these companies are really like that.

My problem with the movie was that it played it straight with a novel that IMO could only be enjoyed as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" satire. The film really needed some Doctor Strangelove level black humor.

I don't know, it's a form of extrapolation IMO. The 1984 of our time. That was also not realistic back in the day but reality overtook it.

However it feels like the time of social media is already coming to an end. With the companies filling our timelines with ever more crap in a futile attempt to 'engage' us, they are only driving us ever more away.