Common to all players is a fundamentally quantitative value system that manifests itself as a fanatic drive to grow; a mechanical modus operandi that serves as a Procrustean bed for employees, cutting off what’s valuable in them as human beings and keeping what could be replaced by algorithms; and a schizophrenic mental state that tries to reconcile this undeniably terrible reality with an ill-defined ideal that is supposed to serve as an operating system for doing the right thing.
To understand this, it’s enough to look at the beginning and the end of the employee experience: the recruiting process (including job descriptions, the interview process and onboarding) and the reasons for leaving:
The recruiting process as a whole is highly automated and this itself is quite telling. The job descriptions and their requirements are uniform across a full spectrum of companies with small variations in wording (like ninja vs. professional). The bureaucratic interview process is soulless, unfair and mechanical and the interviewers often specifically leave the human impressions, be they positive or negative, outside of consideration.
As for the end of the employee experience: people leave either because they’ve burned out, fed up or they’ve been discarded. (Accepting better offers is a somewhat different category.)
Surprisingly, it’s like in physics: the border conditions define the whole system. Judging cultures is best done at these points and not in the middle, which is where most of such efforts put the focus.