This is so frustratingly common. I worked for a company I loved and it got bought out by a company I hated. When people (including me) started quitting, the CTO said “but why? We have video games in the break room.”
Large companies are often run by crazy people, I guess.
A whole lot of Americans who don’t work from home look like that today :/
I did. I got hired as a Unix admin around 2008 and inheriteted the care and feeding of an old Jabber server the ~3000 employee company was using for internal instant messaging. I near-immediately migrated it over to an OpenFire server. A few months later I learned the pitfalls of using the built-in database (it blows up on you when it gets big enough cuz back then it was all in-memory, not sure about how it works out of the box now). I remember figuring out how to manually migrate that over to mysql… and I skipped the ITSM change control process and just had it execute overnight via some at commands and scripts. Went smoothly and I didn’t get fired :P
I learned a bunch from that and set up an OpenFire server at home so I could chat from my dynamic dns hostname to some people on gchat.
And that’s about the extent of it. My internal company chat eventually got replaced with skype for business and then teams. My personal stuff eventually switched over to text messages and Signal (and discord and slack and mattermost and whatever else for all the odds and ends communities I keep in touch with).
I’m OK with prohibited public burnings for the purpose of fire safety, I guess. Beyond that, I don’t think I’d want to limit free speech in this manner.