> Wow. This blog post is unbelievably condescending and arrogant. Everything is beneath them, they already know it all.

I feel like this is a sign of one's tolerance for inefficiencies going down with age. When i started out development, i'd tolerate things like having to manually restart services that went down every few days, or applications without proper logging so debugging errors would be guesswork, or shared access credentials (which are frankly a risk). But as time went on, i stopped thinking that "that's just the way things are" and instead fixed all of it: systemd services (or containers), proper logging and log shipping, separate credentials for each person and so on.

I fail to see why social issues should be treated any differently, with the caveat that you actually need to present yourself as professional, any criticisms as constructive and just generally need to work towards making the job environment not miserable for anyone. That said, there's no reason not to be able to vent about your frustrations freely. I disagree that you're supposed to stay silent about dysfunctional aspects of environments, since they can be a learning experience for others.

> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Is that your approach to deal with criticism? Putting people on the spot and humiliate them?

If answering a simple question truthfully is humiliating, i doubt that that's necessarily a failing on your part. Though it's nice that the author was able to find and set up a desk for themselves - a few years ago i myself would have just been miserable in those circumstances... and would have probably cried. I don't think that not even having a place to work at is adequate, unless that's just the culture in the company (e.g. no assigned seating), otherwise it's maybe a tad awkward/humiliating and singles the person out.

> If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here.

I somewhat agree, but i also don't seek to vilify the person because the way they handled the situation differs from how i would. It is perfectly normal to feel frustration as a human being. I still do that when i find blatant N+1 problems in the codebase due to someone wanting to use nested service calls instead of just writing a single longer SQL query to load all of the data for a particular section of the site in one go. Or when i find situations where a lack of indices slows down the data fetching 112 times.

And yet, i bite my lip, decide not to be an ass about it, fix what i can without breaking anything, even if that reflects more poorly upon my own performance (e.g. more time taken per issue, less interesting issues solved on my own) whilst still making the product better. I then proceed to reframe those issues as a win for improving performance and add a few helpful suggestions for the next meeting, to illustrate the potential benefits, fully knowing that none of them will be taken to heart and that the system will slowly rot over the years to come.

That's just how things are - sometimes things are out of your control and you just have to deal with them, other times you can fix things yourself. It is fine to vent about either, though i hope that the author was less snarky in person.