I'm not trying to troll you, I'm trying to get you to take off your rose-colored glasses to save you from some real heart break down the road. Believe me.

>namely that personal relationships somehow "do not matter" or are purely exploitative at organizations.

Relationships can matter up to a point, but if your company took a hit in the market and has to shed 30% of its human resources your relationship is not going to matter. It can't, the company is trying to survive. And this goes double for a public company, it's basically illegal for them to value your friendship over their bottom line.

>First, I've found that one's work experience is dependent to a huge degree on the direct manager.

Fair enough.

>This simply hasn't happened - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple are all examples of places that by and large treat their employees fairly.

The question is vastly more complex than that. For one thing, the aggressiveness of a company is going to depend on the market their in. You'll have the worst experience in retail because they have such tight margins.

For another thing, how do you figure they treat their employees "fairly"? "Fair" is a difficult thing to pin down, but if we look at some knowns: Google makes billions in profit. Google pays under market rate for developers because "but you'll be working at Google! GOOGLE!". Now if you could provide some citation that shows that Google employees end up making more money at their next company on average because of this situation then I would find it less unfair/exploitative, but I doubt you can.

>a company that is not nice is not going to attract top talent.

Not to nit pick, but the last company I worked at thoroughly debunked this idea. The devs were very high end and the management was horrendously bad but it was a hedge fund paying nearly double market rate in total compensation (i.e. most of the money came in bonuses which could be as much as double your salary).

>On a personal level, it is always advantageous to be friendly, nice, respectful, and take everything in stride because it wins you friends and lets you do things like get other companies to hire you, a process which increases your market value as an employee.

Of course. I've liked most everyone I've ever worked with, and I think most people I've worked with have liked me. I form friendship, etc. I just know what my relationship with the company is. As long as I'm good value, they'll keep me around. I view them the same way. I like the people but if I find a better deal [1], well, it's nothing personal, just business.

>The start-up sector tends to attract and encourage a rather different breed, but the conditions are also completely different from a traditional corporate environment, so different personality characteristics will be adaptive.

This site gives the impression that the start up culture is much more greedy. Most people appear to create a startup to get rich. Fair enough, but they also seem to want employees who will pull insane hours and cost nearly nothing. All this for an idea that probably wont pan out and even if it did, what kind of equity would they get for so much effort? If the startup tanks it doesn't even look that good on a resume.

[1] And by better deal, I mean overall. Making twice as much money but doing boring monotonous and stressful work wouldn't be a good long term trade off for me. I currently make enough that I don't have to make those kinds of sacrifices.