do certain companies have negative effects on the personality of the people who work for them?

Basically it seems as though the guy is firmly on the road for wife/2 cars/house where we grew up.

I actually feel sort of sorry for him, me and another friend rib him a bit and say stuff like "ah well, no need to worry about dreams or 'human emotion' anymore" and stuff but in a way I wonder is it actually like that. on the other hand he probably enjoys what he's doing to some extent. he was never so conservative before, not at all. the irony is he's taken plenty drugs in his time and probably knows better than to be so safe but I think it is a case of simply giving up.

Personally I have seen it affect many people including myself. It kind of works that once you get to accept the culture, and find the ways to survive in it - some of us don't take it to easy. I have had stages where the only way I could sleep involved a pint or two in the evening. It is a difficult cycle to break - kind of often associated with the social life from work, the demands, and the depression it causes.

he is still earning a lot of money and working hard, but he's never going to get six-figure bonuses or work such long hours that he doesn't see his kid grow up.

I've always assumed this as well - that you don't accidentally apply for a position where your job is your life, you do it because you're ready to knuckle down / knuckle under.

Ronan's other question's more interesting to me: it's the opposite to humanity being three square meals from chaos. Is the most committed raver (of a certain age) just three quiet weekends away from voting Tory/FF?

Back to the question: Does / why does everyone who buys a house remain fascinated (and personally involved) in house prices? I reckon it's a "first in my family to go to college" thing, where everyone I know is a graduate, and has an expectation of a career, and everyone I judge myself against had a job, and bought/built a house to die in.

What's the "cityboy" stereotype? I have a fairly good idea but nonetheless.

I speak with some feeling on this, as in 1997 I got offered a fairly heavy-duty job managing a £50M business and took it solely for the money. The stress was hideous, I was permanently exhausted from constant travel, no time for the things I love doing etc etc. I nearly got divorced too. Also, and this is at the heart of what Ronan is talking about, I just about lost 'who I was' when I was doing the wretched job. You spend so much time working with and talking to hateful executives that you start behaving like them. Some of the people I worked with/for were unbelievable - seriously, seriously nasty people - and they are incredibly manipulative. You are pretty much going to do what they want, most of the time. It got to the point where I couldn't sleep, couldn't even *think straight* because of my overwhelming workload. I hated it so much that one day I couldn't even get out of the car when I arrived at work. I could not make myself walk in. So I went home, put an automatic reply on my email saying ' I am out of the office at the moment. I couldn't care less about your question. Go f-ck yourself' and went to bed for a week. Amazingly this didn't get me the sack, so I resigned. I did this job for 3 years. 1997-2000 is honestly a total blank to me now.

my pal felt he couldn't say, 'i can't take this' until he'd practically had a breakdown. it's totally fear of failure/being seen as a wimp/girl (ronan - hideous sexism is a major part of the cityboy stereotype, along with red bull and suits. indeed, it's generally defined by an obnoxiousness to anybody deemed a social inferior, as decided by sex, race and wealth).

As far as breeding conservatism I'm not so sure. I've become more left wing as I see the absolute waste (I just got a $2200 color printer for the sole purpose of printing bar code labels while my raise this year amounted to $700) and fraud (illegal tax shelters which they just got busted for) of corporations.

There is a big deal about putting in a lot of hours. Dick wagging stuff that I completely don't relate to.

This may be a British (or at least Anglo-Saxon) phenomenon. I know Europeans who worked for the big firms on the Continent and in the UK. They thought that the behaviour of the average Brit high flier would result in poor promotion prospects on the Continent - not having a balance between work and other interests would mark them down as not the sort of people the firm wanted in responsible positions.

I think the personality type indicated by some posters above - the kids, the ski-ing holidays, the house in the country, the flash-but-not-too-vulgar motor is a caricature but one with a basis in truth. The difference with the Monty Python caricature is that a lot of younger accountants are often pretty intensely hedonistic before they get to that stage. Their work may be dull, and they ultimately may be headed for a life of suburban dullness, but in the meantime there's plenty of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll.

I do think there is a widespread culture that means people do things on behalf of the firm that they would not do on their own behalf. (Eg selling a client a product on the basis that it will add value to their business when they don't believe for a minute that it will). People are applying lower moral standards to their behaviour when they are operating on behalf of the firm than they would in their personal lives, because the alternative is to say "this is bullshit" and head for the door. (Of course, a small minority are just unscrupulous bastards from the get-go). I think this is a fact of corporate life in much more than the accountancy firms, but ultimately I think it must have a corrosive effect on some peoples' moral judgement in their personal lives.

Yes I think the cityboy stereotype is apt for my friend, I remember when the EU summit was in Dublin and there was footage on the TV of the police spraying the protestors he was like, bizarrely, "they should batter those hippies!". it's sort of semi-joking but not really. Also the sexism, I mean there's always a certain amount of it with a group of guys, at least in my experience, but there's a certain viciousness in it sometimes.

I think another thing I find interesting is that my friend is acting like he might have acted when we were 16 or so, it's almost like by being faux-naive and feigning irresponsibility he can shield himself a bit from the job or whatever.

I think if he realised, he could do something about it, though perhaps he wouldn't want to.

"re "innate conservativeness": i've always wondered whether certain people who were cool in their youth but quickly fell into the "house/kids/volvo/no interest in anything/no sense of humor" trap were really just born that way and any interestingness they accrue is merely a happy accident of being young and temporarily frivolous."

perhaps, I think some people seem to hit a certain age and assume everything they did in their youth was wrong or silly, at least disrespect for youth seems to be a fairly staunch pillar of the conservative ethos, and I'd include dire comedy like You've Been Framed and its "oh the daft things kids do" in that aswell, it's not as though there isn't a glut of that type of attitude around.