When I started out in practice at *** Law, I had a colleague one year my junior. She had it bad from the partner that we both worked for. The partner wasn't a very pleasant person to begin with. But I had (and I like to think I still do have) great tolerance for all kinds of personalities.
NS and signing on for a bit (for some of the money for my LLB) taught me a lot about dealing with difficult people.
But back to my colleague. She swore that one day, when she ran her own practice, she would be different. She would be kinder. She wouldn't swear at all. She wouldn't call people at 10pm, or ask them to do things over the weekend.
Eventually (and naturally), she left *** Law. I left not long after, and went in-house.
After some time, I had the opportunity to instruct her on some litigation matters for the company I worked for at the time. We had a great time catching up and swapping stories.
And I watched how she ran her firm. It was a small office in Tanjong Pagar - small enough to throw a full ring binder from door to window.
It was like the partner from *** Law had come back to life (he had passed away some years ago by that time), albeit in female form. Right down to the tone of voice and the choice of profanities. I had not heard such words since I was an associate at *** Law.
My point is that you and others that hold such noble ideals can pontificate at length on how things have to change, blah blah blah.
You won't understand until you become the business owners yourselves. I'm not saying that such behaviour is right, or justifiable in any way. But it's easy enough to say that such behaviour is wrong, and that the next generation has to change, etc.
Very, very few people out there are fundamentally good/nice people. And it's sad/ironic that in my (limited) experience, the ones who bitch about it the most are, in turn, the most likely to dish it out.
We all want to work for nice/humane people. We don't seem to extend this expectation to ourselves, and we thus fail to realise that hardly anyone out there, ourselves included, is nice/humane.