I’ve met one who asked me a question like this and he’s still at Apple having been promoted several times to a fairly senior position. But the question was only half hearted because the question was “how much CO2 would we save if we made something 10% more CPU efficient” and the answer even at Apple’s current scale of billions of iPhones was insignificant.

So now you and I both have come across such a manager. Why would you make the claim most engineer’s don’t come across such people?

It turns out iPhones are not actually a huge contributor to worldwide carbon emissions. Data centers, on the other hand…

Anecdotal evidence and all such, but in my environment actually good managers were rarer than UFO sightings.

Environments and local markets matter a huge amount.

I believe the better question here would be: why would the reverse be claimed at all? Many people in the USA, and a lot of them are over-represented here on HN, are privileged and this is not obvious to them, leading to cringe-worthy reactions like "just find a better company".

I guess I am barking up the wrong tree. I do dislike how over-represented certain perspectives are on HN. It's a very classic filter bubble, and the fact that it's about privileged people makes this even worse.