Getting free of toxic tech culture

has there been any factory floor, farm, private or government office where things have been different? Except may be for a situation like a tenured professor at Stanford. Or a 4 star general who after having been a cog for like 30 years finally gets to be the one burning and replacing the cogs at his will/choice.

If anything, i think tech is among the most progressive places, if only for the fact that one can easily switch jobs instead of suffering for years for example under harassing boss like it was before and still is in the other industries where job market is worse. With employees having such freedom, the tech companies and management are forced to treat the employees better than at the other industries. I wonder how many of the people complaining about toxic tech culture did actually work at non-tech places.

Thankfully I had the opportunity to make this change early in my career, although my financial situation is suffering dearly for it. And it's hard to swallow when everyone you know is making 2x your salary and just about all of them have a bunch of family money as well. (I grew up thinking I was upper middle class and somehow was the poorest person in pretty much all my social circles when I was at Google. The tech bubble is real.)

Keeping perspective and realizing that even if you leave toxic tech and take a pay cut you'll probably still be in the upper echelons of the world inequality distribution is hard but super important. And you'll realize that rich people are on average way shittier and probably not worth hanging out with anyway.

Drinking the cool-aid is generally enforced.

I remember working with some Swedes, who brought with them the (to engineers and fellow europeans) refreshing northern honesty/cynicism. Well...suddenly, after a trip to South East Asia to talk to our outsourcers (who were, er, "less than 100% effective") he suddenly started gushing in the typical corporate speak about how amazing and wonderful everything was. All the engineers wondered what had happened to him.

Two weeks later he was promoted to director.

(Anyway, personally, I think that toxic tech culture selects against "people who don't fit the stereotype," which includes lots of men, and lots more women, and I don't think framing this as either "it's terrible for women and not for men" or "actually men have it worse" is particularly productive.)

EDIT: I see that the article links the Kapor report with the sentence "Staying silent about the unfairness that causes 37% of underrepresented people of color to leave tech helps no one," which I think is the same misreading of the Kapor report. 37% of underrepresented people of color who have left tech have left because of unfairness - it is not that 37% of underrepresented people of color in tech have left because of unfairness. The previous sentence from the author, about the 50% retention rate, looks like it better supports the narrative point being made (although the source is about STEM as a whole and not just tech).