I've never been able to understand the "other" side, even though I've talked to many people at various levels of the hierarchy at MS and similar organizations.

I've never been able to understand the "other" side, even though I've talked to many people at various levels of the hierarchy at MS and similar organizations. With the rank-and-file folks, my impression was usually that they are pretty clueless about the org they work for, and if it came to discussing their allegiance to the org, they would often act like radical political activists. With the higher-ups... I had this weird feeling they weren't really humans. Not that they ever had to be honest with me or had to even pretend to care about me. I only met such people in the work setting (outside of one time when I got invited to a Bar Mitzva because the email was sent to the entire company and then I was the only idiot to show up at the event since everyone else knew better it wasn't intended for my kind of people :D) I honestly cannot imagine the thought process of someone like that, or what do they do on a weekend, or how do they interact with people of their own social class. Some weird stuff about these kind of people is that often times they'd dress like a "simple person", but once you have a closer look at their jeans / t-shirt / sneakers, it'd be something that looks "plain" but in fact not even sold in the place a regular person shops for clothes because it costs like ten times the price of a similarly looking item. So... how do they do that? How do they justify doing what they do? -- It's honestly easier for me to try on the shoes of a religious fanatic or a hardcore criminal than to get any insight into the minds of these people. One common explanation is sociopathy, but it looks like these people aren't really it: they have friends, get married, have children, and, personally, they don't kill others, not anymore than an average person would. They just have the ability to completely ignore the negative and widespread consequences of their decisions. Something I'd be terrified of out of my mind to the point I'd not be able to close my eyes at night.