I worked as a movie theater usher/concessions guy in high school. One of the assistant managers would occasionally steal from my till. The general manager, simpleminded but experimenting with metaphors, perhaps trying to get his point through to this cerebral kid, implied I was somehow a flesh eating bacteria that he'd chop off if he needed to.

After high school, I was a clerk at a grocery store chain that had a union. The threat of the union protected us from most top-down nonsense.

The only post-grad job I had was super hands off. I had great bosses/mentors there. One was an ex-bittorrent 10x eng kind of guy. The other was a math phd that modeled/invented their congestion control algorithms. I was left to myself after a year or so and reported to the cto/cofounder directly once every 6 months or so.