A Boring Dystopia

In my experience as a sysadmin, corporate structure almost always sees workers as liabilities that must be micromanaged, prodded, and scrutinized in regards to productivity, regardless of profits.

A good manager who wants happy, productive workers that don't quietly work against their employer knows when NOT to enforce the standard corporate HR patronizing infantilizing bullshit.

It sounds like you've either worked for small organizations or had good managers that recognize the reality that skillled workers like you are more competent and important to keeping the paychecks flowing than the connected narcissistic idiots on the top floor that get off on flexing power and barking irrational dictates just to hear themselves bark.

Remember, the workers make and do everything that keeps the world running. The scientists and engineers do the inventing and discovering. The capitalist owners just take all the money and the social credit, they don't actually do or know anything that benefits anyone but themselves. Even their supposed "charity" is usually used as an excuse to get praise while robbing the commons of owed tax revenue by writing it off, which makes it a transaction, not charity at all. Charity is giving and expecting nothing in return, save a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And they often "donate" to arts and political causes, while the victims of the society they bleed dry and leave to crumble die of exposure to the elements in tent cities.

Steve Jobs, who made like he was prometheus bringing the iPhone down from Olympus, couldn't have repaired a broken iPhone with access to every lab, component, and schematic in Silicon valley, a month, and a gun to his head. He wasn't even smart enough to go to real doctors and take real medicine when he was dying.