Do you have any sort of sources to back those claims up? I’m not American, and I can only speak from anecdotal experience from the Danish digitalisation sector, both public and private, but I’ve never met a CEO or any sort of manager they match your description. A few were assholes, more (managers) were incompetent but none of them were backstabbers, liars or cheats, because you genuinely can’t lead people if you are. This of course doesn’t apply to a lot of other lines of work, we recently had a grocery delivery where the drivers phone had malfunctioned, so I lend him mine to call his company while I tried to tech-support his. Long story short, I overheard some of the stuff he was told by his company and it was literal basic stuff like “remember to be really nice and say thank you” in a much more demeaning manner. The driver had already been way nicer than what they told them to be, but he kept the phone call open while I was thanked again… So there are certainly businesses where the company policy is to treat employees like shit. But I haven’t met those managers, so I can speak for them, and the ones I have met got there for various reasons where the worst was that they were the only ones they wanted the position. The CEOs I’ve met either came from money or made money from starting another company, then using that money to build a new one. Or they were hired through a tough process with a lot of competition. Only one was an asshole, and he still wouldn’t lie, cheat or backstab, but he would behave like an asshole, and mostly get away with it. It was while I worked in the public sector where we had municipality owned cars with designated parking spots, and he would park in one and refuse to leave. He’d also walk over people in meetings, if they let him, but that situation should frankly never arise.

What I have encountered, and this is partly because I did a stint in management (and the necessary education that you’ll typically be required to get in Denmark if you’re promoted into management) before I went back to being a programmer as I hated managing people, was that management lives in a different world than employees as well as being an employee themselves. I think this is a video of someone who forgot that there are two worlds, and also someone who maybe forgot (or never learned) about motivational theory, and well, how to communicate with dignity and respect, but at the end of the day, an organisation has goals and CEOs and managers are responsible for reaching those goals with the resources they are given. One or the first things you’ll learn in MBA type studies is that everyone is expendable, it’s only a question of how much it’ll cost to lose them. You can see this as a negative thing, but it can mean a lot of things. In programming it tells a manager to encourage their employees to build code in a manner that’s not too dependent on its authors. We do this by employing various principles for coding standard and documentation because if we don’t, it gets really expensive when someone quits. I personally think it’s a good thing to learn as an employee as well, because it’s healthy to keep a distance from your job and your personality, so that you can better be an employee and also a person and not have that melt too much together so that it gets soul crushing for you when you get fired. Which you probably will, and often not for any reasons you could help.

That being said. I get that this “pity city” was an eureka moment for her, but how hilarious is it that she didn’t consider how it sounded to non managers?