I worked in some draconian, authoritarian circumstances for some real assholes in my career.

How about teachers? I think you're around my dad's age and he's complained about these types teaching in schools back then.

I've had some authoritarian assholes bosses (who I stayed with far too long) and others who were insecure soy boys, which has its own issues. Good bosses are rare.

I rarely found commisseration. The people in shitty environments hold the abuse like a badge of pride and you're automatically in the out group if you complain.

Isn't that the truth? There are always people on the team that are willing to take it up the ass. For example, co-workers who sacrifice their personal time for the company without compensation.

You can say something like "Bobby Knight should not have done X" and maybe he was a real creep, but people told me to find another job if I was as good as I said I was and didn't deserve the bad treatment.

So I don't give a crap. F*** people's feelings. I got shit on. I hope others do too, because I couldn't even change the local environment to protect myself, so why do I care if someone I don't even know gets shit on? It's karma, my suffering ought to be universal.

LOL

You might get some satisfaction reading some of the recent Reddit threads. For awhile, there were mostly positive threads about how great the job market was. Over the past year or so, things have taken a turn for the worse and there are more and more threads like these re people giving up on tech:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ITCareerQuestions/comments/17qe7rs/how_are_more_people_not_giving_up

Knight got results, made his employer millions of dollars in donations and endowments, as a result he had carte blanche, and this is the rule for almost all jobs in the economy.

And if the players felt they were abused they could go to another team if they felt they didn't deserve the treatment.

THIS

They could have played somewhere else but wanted the prestige of playing there. The same can be said about certain companies in the tech industry.