> Everyone will just move to a non toxic workplace.
This is a silly notion that ignores the fact that there are plenty of people who are both capable and want to work for leaders like Jobs/Musk. Nobody forces anyone to work the hard hours at these companies, and the complainers who don't make it are usually all you hear about since the individuals driving toward the mission are busy doing just that.
It's like Navy SEALS, you take any random selection of 1000 people, ask them how much they believe in the mission, and then put them into the sieve and see which ones have the chops to make it. Drill instructors would be called "toxic" too, but that's the entire point of the filtering function.
Not sure if it is binary as the gp says, but it seems people do take more shit in the US for a shot at wealth. In NL at least, I know that most people I know (and most are well off, but not millionairs) will and have walked if their manager talks to them in the wrong tone of voice. In the 80s you still had hard ass vs empathic managers : it now shifted very much to the latter and the former is generally considered strange and indeed toxic.
I guess this has less to do with the culture (the culture was more or less the same in the 80s and 90s in many countries when I did work for hard ass drill sergeant shouters as CEOs in both NL and DE: I even was one for 5 years until I noticed that it pained me as much as it did the people working for me) than with the realization, which seems to be in a large part of the EU now, that you basically do not have to do any of it: the social net allows to do mostly whatever you want. Sure you will not be able to drive lambos, but that is also considered silly (and a bit sad) in most places here anyway. But you won't starve here if you do not bend over and take it.
Covid sped up this realization again: what are you doing it all for if you lose your good years working like an animal and take abuse to boot?
This is a silly notion that ignores the fact that there are plenty of people who are both capable and want to work for leaders like Jobs/Musk. Nobody forces anyone to work the hard hours at these companies, and the complainers who don't make it are usually all you hear about since the individuals driving toward the mission are busy doing just that.
It's like Navy SEALS, you take any random selection of 1000 people, ask them how much they believe in the mission, and then put them into the sieve and see which ones have the chops to make it. Drill instructors would be called "toxic" too, but that's the entire point of the filtering function.