How this can be made even worse is when you have a startup company that in principle operates like a large company because it wasn't founded on equal terms by a

How this can be made even worse is when you have a startup company that in principle operates like a large company because it wasn't founded on equal terms by all employees as a group, but started by one or a handful of people that fund and hire everyone else. There is no skin in the game as there's no stock options nor revenue share (founders want to keep it all for themselves ofc) and you can be fired on a dime without any due process, software proprietary and closed source of course, so you can't use it for your own stuff either. Only the PM spends hours on the phone talking to users and then gives you a direct task to work on. The task is always max priority and comes in randomly so you must drop whatever you were doing before to immediately implement it, usually getting the next one before the previous one is even done, making sure that critical tasks inevitably get forgotten and end up at the bottom of the backlog, leading to catastrophic software cohesiveness. Working on something you want? Haha, right. Do what you're paid to do, no exceptions. Coworkers of course all remote or hybrid so there's no meaningful cooperation and endless Jira review meetings to tell everyone what to do. Daily progress reports of course, gotta make sure people aren't slacking. The result is 100% turnover.