@fabio I saw an example of this up close back when I briefly worked at Google, in 2008. (not a good year to start a new career, as it turned out). back then they made a big deal out of something called "20% time"—the idea that regular engineers hade 1/5 of their time for themselves, to do anything they wanted. famously Gmail came out of someone exploring their interests during this time.

I don't think much of anything else came out of it. I found out I was always overworked on drudgery; my job was basically fixing bugs on the Ruby on Rails internal user accounting system that someone else had developed. when I complained that this was a far cry of the academia-like exciting research environment I had been promised and asked to be assigned to a more challenging project, I was told: "no". moreover the deadlines and expectations were of the type that if I worked (unpaid) overtime (at an underpaid job for the market) every day, I still was at risk of a performance review. making use of "20% time" felt like a pipe dream.

like most people I blamed myself for my laziness, until I saw "Googlegeist" statistics that some 95% of employees never used their "20% time", being trapped under the same pressures as I was.

I started a discussion about the promise of "20% free time" being what was known in ancient Samarkand as "a lie". the result of this was my boss having a fit over me having "backstabbed" him. see, me complaining about the promises of recruiters being unrealistic marked me as an Unhappy Googler, which means my manager had Unhappiness in his team. and Google's image was of being the best place to work where everybody was happy all the time. Unhappiness isn't allowed.

I said, "didn't you say we operate under 'radical transparency'?" (I was young and believed this kind of thing. yes I was a sitting duck.) boss said, and I quote, "radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things."

I was fired not long after, allegedly because of the crisis, when they laid off 70% of the Latinoamerican precariat.