"Unhuman"? Bombing maternity wards in Ukraine is "unhuman". Putting African refugees on too small boats to cross the Mediterranean with too little fuel and no water is "unhuman". Exploitation of construction workers in Dubai to the point of being coined modern-day slavery is "unhuman".
Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman".
Training someone how to use a tool to look up information is empowering. Making them use that tool to prove they know what you trained them is common sense. Making it about dogs is an attempt (clumsy in my mind) to make the process less painful and more enjoyable.
Learning your new hire refuses to read documentation and instead asks for the answer from someone else is valuable. Remember, that 10 second ask later can break a developer out of flow and impose a huge cost on them.
If the author wanted to avoid the work, they could have:
- written Fido and trust that the answer was never checked
- assumed it was checked client side and found the array of acceptable names
Those would be ways to move around the problem. Interrupting your coworkers for something you're supposed to do on your own isn't.
Wait until you realize that all of these situations are produced by the same system/structures, the same the same mindset/culture and often the same people/institutions. Though i agree with you that there's a few orders of magnitude of difference in violence, corporations do not care about your well-being and will suck all they can out of you, often leading to burnout or outright suicide.
If an institution is not capable to be human and empathic even in something as basic as an "onboarding" (which is supposed to make you feel welcome and capable), run for your life or burn the whole thing down. Fuck industrial capitalism.
> corporations do not care about your well-being and will suck all they can out of you, often leading to burnout or outright suicide.
This statement is too over-generalized and hostile to be made in good faith for a meaningful debate.
First, of course corporations do not "care" since they are not sentient. It's probably management of corporations that you mean.
Second, some individuals in some corporations may not care. And different companies may have different fractions of people not caring. In my experience, the long-term successful companies have a high fraction of people actually caring. And if they don't, then switch to a company where they do. I have worked at many places where the leadership team cared deeply, and it radiated into lower management and all employees. Foul apples tended to leave, since their constant ranting and disrespect was not appreciated or reciprocated, so they didn't feel welcome, and rightly so.
The irony is that it tends to be people with condescending and arrogant attitudes who do most of the "not caring". Just like the author of the blog entry we are discussing here.
It's just not their duty. Everything has a limit, and this onboarding/whole company is just humiliating and unhuman.