I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now.
Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in office. Pronouns stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All what you’d expect.
But COVID/WFH has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.
There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?” Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”
It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not. I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.
“Good.”
Do read on. There’s a big red warning siren for tech investors in there.
That description sounds a lot like some of the tech outfits I used to work for many years ago.
Much of the problem was that they were intellectually root-bound. While they officially claimed that they wanted a variety of opinions and perspectives, presumably to do things “better”, consensus was really what was allowed. The reason for that was to make employees interchangeable and not depend on specific individuals, lest the firms become dependent upon them should those workers fall out of favour.
That consensus also extended to one’s social life, so one was expected to attend company functions or participate in group activities, regardless of how inconvenient or revolting one may have found them. After all, one wasn’t supposed to be “different” or have a life of one’s own outside of the company’s interests. The idea of clocking out at quitting time and having a private life was not encouraged.
I can’t say I’m sorry that I’m no longer in that business.
BAD – This is so familiar, including the WFH overwork and go woke means go broke parts. Our major technical services company has a disproportionate number of female execs. At a townhall last fall someone asked what older (white?) males are supposed to do to advance their careers (or something close to that) and the female president remarked that there are lots of training courses on our web site. In the three months after that, a large number of male execs and subject matter experts SME left the company. One SME was responsible for us winning over 65% of the business in a certain market. A competitor is rumored to have offered him his full salary to stay home. Maybe he took it.
I know a woman who works for a unionized organization. She has a coworker who takes sick days almost every week so she ends up doing her coworker’s work too. The coworker is up for a promotion.
The only way to fix this is to have a massive correction in the market. This looks like it could be the year for the great reset, unless we find that Omicron ends the COVID debacle.
She has a coworker who takes sick days almost every week so she ends up doing her coworker’s work too. The coworker is up for a promotion.
That sounds all too familiar to me.
One of the greatest disappointments about working for tech firms for me was how I was expected to burn myself out to get my work done, while some know-nothing crap artist, an expert in schmoozing and butt-kissing, and who didn’t do near as much as I did, was the one who got amply rewarded simply by convincing the management that he was an “expert”.
Half of the tech outfits I worked for eventually went out of business, which didn’t surprise me. The remainder were eventually acquired by other firms and, I’m sure, a lot of house-cleaning was done to turn them into useful sources of revenue for their new owners.
In many ways, those companies weren’t much different than what I encountered in the oil industry.
The only way to fix this is to have a massive correction in the market.
Can’t happen. This is all the endgame of allowing women to have the voting franchise, which means they vote for whomever will promise them comfort, security and status within the herd. Any large company is now saddled with immense numbers of useless power skirts and their pet minorities that are unfirable due to laws passed by the legislators those women voted for. Even if a company wanted to clean out the deadwood, the resulting lawsuits would sink it financially.
The perfect life: wallowing in misery.
I’m grateful to be working with sane people.
It sounds like these Cyberpunk Valley denizens are hopelessly decadent, because why else would they waste their time obsessing over demented nonsense and getting the square root of zilch accomplished in productivity.
I swear these people love being perpetually miserable and wallowing in toxicity.
Funny. I have a 20ish kid that works for me that is incredibly talented in an obscure field, but that will have a difficult time for not having a graduate degree. I asked him how things were going recently, and he laid out a soap-opera of family problems and long-standing psychological damage. When he was done I told him he could always speak to me about such things and that I was generally interested in his life, but that as a man (though gay), nobody gives a sh*t that he’s having some personal problems. The answer is always, “I’m busy, you know, but getting things done. It’s great. How are you?” And he was surprised, but later thanked me for being straight (if you’ll pardon the pun) with him. We need more of this: nobody cares. Get to work.
About a year ago, in a plot line on “Coronation Street”, someone was telling a “woe is me” story”. The other person was not buying it and said “We all have a sad story, my sad story is that I have to listen to you!”. I told this to a couple of friends in Toronto and they laughed their heads off like hyenas! We all start our conversations now with ” what’s your sad story for this week”.
These same friends also introduced me to clips from “Little Britain”. One of the transgender tag lines is “The computer says No!”
Try it some time when someone is annoying you, they stand there blinking and sputtering. Works like a charm every time.
I prefer ” talk to the hand “.
I don’t know why people bring their personal ills to the forefront.
It’s not even as confidences to friends. It’s like a drama everyone is made to watch.
It’s a sort of infantilism that must be indulged.
Genuine question: I wonder if they’d be happier after sixteen weeks of sixteen hour days working on farms during harvest. Clearly they need to get out more.
Ed
Or a two year mandatory stint in a non Genderized woke military. (are there any left.??)
The disgusting Feminization of men continues unabated.
Re: 16 hours, 16 weeks on a farm: That’s called my gym membership.
I left a government job of 20 years last year. Great job, doing good work with highly motivated people. Hard to believe I know, but there are some good people in some government departments.
The last 2 years though nothing was getting done anymore. The only thing i saw our management get excited about was “gender diversity in hiring” or rainbow flag week, but try to get them to make an operational decision…. not a chance. Every single one of them was afraid to approve anything, the organization is now paralyzed.
I’m now at a small start up, work too many hours but the only thing that matters is productivity, nobody cares about your feelz thank God. I worry that we’ll grow to a point where the woke stuff can take hold, i see the chatter but we are to busy for it to gain traction…for now at least it’s refreshing.
It only takes a couple useless managers to drag the whole ship down. People who’s only accomplishment is getting promoted.
A one of my jobs, the site supervisor and I didn’t see eye to eye because many of his demands on the jobsite was unnecessary and more of an added project. My site manager and I got along great and many times we worked together on the job site. I knew my days were numbered and any excuse to get rid of me, he would as he hired a few new guys.
The site supervisor decided to do the roof of part of this massive addition and set up the end rafters on this addition. I could see that the pitch was wrong and told the manager. I also suggested to one of the new kids that that pitch looks wrong and he should ask the site supervisor to recheck that. It was wrong.
At break time, the site supervisor was praising this kid on how on the ball he was to catch the mistake, as me and the manager kept looking at each other and knowing he was full of it. The manager finally spoke up that I had caught it.
Shortly after, I was laid-off.
But it was almost hilarious on how this praising this new guy when actually he didn’t have a clue either.
“I have no way of verifying the truth of the person or his position, but it certainly squares with a lot of other accounts of how woefully woke Silicon Valley has become—the more so in the time of COVID—so I am reasonably confident it is authentic:”
I understand the reasoning for this ‘disclaimer’, the tweet almost comes across as ‘too good to be true’ for anyone critical of the completely leftarded Silicon Valley.
Anyways, it will be depressing as hell to watch the woke-Borg assimilate Austin TX, next.
Alternate way to read the thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481797871389351936.html
“If you don’t have something bad to say, don’t say anything at all.”
The world IS totally backwards.
My employee is heading down the same slope, all things woke, picking up speed.
Drama is why I have pretty well negligible contact with family, has been this way for a very long time, decades with some.
I’m good, wildcard weekend (football playoffs) start today. GO RAIDERS!
Many engineers are introverts. Computer techs are introverts^2.
Reading along, absorbing the story, saddened that meetings have to include pronouns,I Was waiting for the punch line.. That answering the
How are you today question with a simple
Good,
Upset a female, but without those pronouns,what can we really know?? Right!?
What a miserable scold of a person to suggest it should not Even Be Allowable to express anything positive,,
You Must be Crushed and Miserable!
Have a Sane Cousin who works in Tech,he does very well financially.
His favourite phrase for fellow geeks”Sucks to be You”.
Could be why he has been independent these last 10 years.
Work that can be done from home can be done from India, if it is worth doing at all.
What to add?
My favourite part of the thread:
“People have increasingly been taking “Mental Health Days”. Sometimes they’re using sick days, many times they don’t. It’s just a free vacation, unaccountable.
“I have no doubt half the time they ARE used for one of the 3 leading causes of mental illness:
– Anxiety
– Depression
– Leftism”
He forgot alcohol and drugs. This is why WFH (Wuhan flu hysteria) has dragged on. For nearly two years they’ve been free to start drinking at breakfast, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. They won’t go back to the office because they won’t leave their bottles and bongs behind.
There is an easy fix for all of this. Tell employees that they’ve been pampered enough, and they have two choices:
1. Report to their desks at 9am on Monday, on time, dressed like Christians, ready to do something constructive and not stinking of booze or weed.
2. Submit their resignations, and return all company assets in their possession as soon as possible after that.
I’m surprised Work from India hasn’t taken off harder, they have a huge labour market, well trained, eager, efficient and yes CHEAP.
My company has been using this workforce for some strategic IT efforts for years, around the fringes of the main work for years. Databasing, computer drafting, data analysis, etc. They aren’t perfect, they only do the work they are instructed to do, but never make a decision either, no matter how trivial or obvious the correction may be.
The reason big tech probably hasn’t gone down this road is EASY MONEY . When/If the market corrects, I would expect Indian contract labour will explode. And the wokesters will be crying their feelz even more.
I’d cut off my own nutsack before I’d ever agree to work with Indian (or Pakistani, or Mexican or other third-world-shithole-istan) contractors again.
Look, I work in this field and no, Indian programmers are not well-trained. At all. Most of them are autodidacts or graduates of some kind of tech diploma mill. They’re barely competent. They have no software engineering experience or skill, and their culture is based on clannish mercantilism (basically, it’s okay to lie your face off when selling things to people outside your family; it’s their responsibility to ensure you’re not cheating them). That is completely anathema to the basics of software engineering: you have to build something that is functional, reliable and maintainable, not some half-baked shim that looks good until you have their money in your pocket.
There are good Indian software engineers out there, but the only ones I’ve ever seen are the ones who were born here or grew up here and adopted Western culture over their homeland’s.
You could substitute in “Canadian Government” for Tech. Pretty much the same, especially the part about oversharing feelings/state of mental health in what are supposed to be business meetings. Pathetic.