It mostly talking about structure and how it affects culture

Later when I offered to defer my wages until the product was released (it seemed he was "running out of money"), eventually all the trust building tactics he had used on me over the years were cashed out on as I gradually became disillusioned to realize him paying me dirt was deliberate. He could have easily paid me a decent wage for that work, but ultimately I met nothing but resistance and breadcrumbing and stonewalling when trying to get a decent pay

"I don't have the money to pay you" he said at one point after the fact when I asked to be paid what he owes me. But afterwards and after I had rage quit, he simply hired someone else to start from scratch on my 2nd project after I had told the other developer that one thing I saw first hand working for him was how corporations don't care about people

Granted I wasn't the fastest developer in terms of the number of hours I worked, and the new person he hired seems to have been pretty good, definitely above my level, assuming they implemented all the features I did. But I was getting my work done just fine as far as I and the other dev could tell

“Yeah so three of my colleagues got fired so now I’m doing the work of four people, but my boss won’t listen to me when I say I’m overworked”.

Professional people would likely been gone before the firings, but if this situation would have arisen, they would have set boundaries and negotiate what work is and isn’t done within a normal work week. They don’t let themselves get tricked or fooled like this. And the fun part is that management never even asks to take over the work.

So many people are so brainwashed they care more about a company that would fire them without a single thought than their own life, it’s so insane.

If you do what you can get done, and go home at a reasonable time, it's great. You don't have to worry about justifying your position, or trying to find work to do, you've got a bunch of stuff. You can pick from your choice of tasks, cause there's a ton of stuff. You don't have to bother with knowledge transfer, cause everyone else was fired. You can nope out of meetings because you've got a lot of stuff to do. When you leave or get fired, whatever, not your problem.

No need to collaborate with other contributors becauase there are none. Not great if you're junior, obviously.

Basically, drunk the kool-aid, doesn't know what they don't know.

I switched over to startups and have not looked back. Yeah, I work more, but I enjoy it a lot more. I can't do it forever, but the financial rewards have been better too, so I probably won't need to work to 65 like when I had the more stable, boring job.

In my experience people that claim otherwise are just getting less out of work than they could. Kind of a waste of 40 hours a week.

(Sure, bad situations exist etc. etc. but that’s just true of everything.)

My father is an orthopaedic surgeon and he definitely thinks about his job as much as I think about mine. My cousin is a cardiovascular surgeon who also does. Another cousin is a lawyer and she does too. A friend I met through another friend is a school vice-principal and he does too.

All of these people have family and friends who love them and who have hobbies that they spend time on.

I think people like this would just prefer to work with others like this. And so they write these things advertising that this life exists.

The market for engineers is pretty hot right now. To any junior engineer who wants to love their job, I'd say go for it. You have at least 40 h a week dedicated to your vocation. That's enjoyable.

Many people don't treat this 40 h as an enjoyable time of their life. But the reward is you have 40 more hours of enjoyment per week. Just remember that hard work and outcome are correlated at less than 1.