Innovative companies like DEC, Bell Labs, and Xerox Parc (not so much IBM) ran on playful maturity, not on jerkish narcissism.
Generally they were not terrible places to work - unlike the kind of startup that's a playground for dark triad people with emotional handicaps.
The latter are destructive. A small minority get shit done, but only some proportion of the shit that gets done turns out to be truly beneficial. The rest is just a toxic mess of bullshit, lies, self-aggrandising posturing, manipulation, and empathy-free exploitation, sometimes with a side order of overt fraud and criminality.
And there's been a lot more of that in recent decades than in the real-adults-but-at-play innovation powerhouses of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
And those destructive startups are run by people who seem "nice" in person but who enact their own sinister agenda, maybe while tricking themselves into thinking they're doing good.
Being "nice" and being a good person are two different things.
Generally they were not terrible places to work - unlike the kind of startup that's a playground for dark triad people with emotional handicaps.
The latter are destructive. A small minority get shit done, but only some proportion of the shit that gets done turns out to be truly beneficial. The rest is just a toxic mess of bullshit, lies, self-aggrandising posturing, manipulation, and empathy-free exploitation, sometimes with a side order of overt fraud and criminality.
And there's been a lot more of that in recent decades than in the real-adults-but-at-play innovation powerhouses of the 50s, 60s and 70s.