You've worked at a company that had a "must wear ties to the office" requirement (yes, those still exist) and came out thinking that their employees were less "docile" than those of the median SFBA startup?
but, worked with, not at, but generally about equal in raw numbers - it really depends where the docility comes out - in fortune 500's being weird in general is strongly discouraged, but the penalties for stepping out of line are small usually, the big benefit is, cultural norms are clearly established, and generally followed - in a SV company, being weird is strongly encouraged, cultural values are somewhat more nebulous, and the penalties for stepping out of line are often much more harsh.
So you're saying tech companies have vague 'cultural values' that encourage a certain degree of non-conformity and then harshly punish/fire non-conformists? That doesn't really make any sense, at least, not in the non-specific form you've put it. Right at a time of a fair bit of tech-company culture examination and critique, this particular complaint seems to come up mostly never. How do you explain that? The docility? It gets a little circular.
The well defined Fortune 500 culture prevents identity politics from coming into play - the nebulous SV culture does not, there is no line other than 'be yourself' so the out of line issues can violate peoples concept of self, which is clearly bad, and therefor the punishments must be harsh.
To explain further - in F500 Culture, only a narrow band of self expression is possible - but what is and isnt is clearly defined - in SV Culture, a much wider band is acceptable - but the unacceptable is much less clearly defined.
That's an interesting narrative but, again, how do you explain nobody is complaining about these apparent frequent and wanton harsh punishments and firings? My guess is because nothing of the sort really happens, statistically speaking.
I think many of us attribute it to being socially awkward geeks - we just presume we violated another one of those unspoken rules that have been tripping us up our whole lives - it wasn't until I started working around F500 companies that I realized that, that while yes, I'm a socially awkward geek - the cultures I was in before were of little help to me in understanding the unspoken rules.
But that leaves you with the exact same question. These same socially awkward geeks have managed to complain for decades about everything from office plans through software methodologies to equity compensation, hours, the intrusion of work into social life and more recently, diversity issues, crappy interview practices, you name it. And in all that time nobody has piped up about how they're being harshly punished and outright fired for some ill-specified non-adherence to unclear expectations, at odds with what they thought their employers encouraged. There should be crusty USENET threads and brand new Medium posts about this injustice. But there aren't.
