My first job was in a "new media" agency in London in the late 90s and you're absolutely right. It was basically Nathan Barley but for real. There were employees who slept under their desks, job applicants who ran screaming from the building mid interview, egomaniacal bosses - the works. I lasted a month but it was hilarious in retrospect.

Wow :-) I did watch Nathan Barley through as we had one of the people parodied working with us.

We referred to his end of the office as the rich end as opposed to the ordinary millionaire end where the VC CTO sat along with the rest of us (just $ millionaire's at one point)

First Tuesday back in 1998-2000 had a few chancers. I saw the original boo crew presenting and thought I could pick 3 managers at random where I worked and boo would have done better.

The US seems pretty rife with examples too. Everyone wants to be the next tech billionaire here. From my first job as a software dev from like 13 years ago, I believe the CEO that was running that shop is still sitting in prison to this day.

TBF, he was nothing but awesome to me and the rest of his employees but his business ethics left a lot to be desired in terms of what's legally allowed to secure a contract and to make matters worse he implicated his wife in the business who also ended up in legal trouble, which put them in a real bind. I think he ended up taking a much worse plea deal to keep his wife out of prison to care for his daughter.