Posted on 01/15/2022 10:44:05 AM PST by Beave Meister
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at twitter.com ...
Or, I suspect, in any Fortune 500 public company these days. The PC atmosphere was suffocating when I left it, thankfully never to return. Idiots who lack any kind of critical thinking processes and hipsters a few years out of business school running things they have no clue about, and who will have 2 or 3 more jobs on their resume before their legacy of bad decisions in the present one is fully known.
Of course these are the same people running the country now.
He is 100% right. WFH is a disaster.
If only!
The electronics will last a long time.
As for the software, next week your hardware is obsolete and you can kiss off anything you spent for that particular item.
companies think they're building unity within but it's quite the opposite. they're forcing employees to balkanize.
and with the wokies they're hiring the ceo's don't realize the virus they've brought into the workplace. the wokies are going to be demanding things....equity in terms of pay. for the ceo making millions those days are numbered.
Hazard Harrington
@HazardHarringto
I have some sympathy, and can feel some of this myself. It’s normal and natural to work with people in-person. WFH can make it easy to overwork. You take fewer breaks, often work past normal working hours. You don’t feel connected to customers or celebrate success in person.
And as I mentioned, Big Tech is often the only social life for people. I fortunately never made it mine, but my company had all sorts of after-work activities. Sports leagues, game nights, different classes taught by employees. There was a rhythm and connectedness that’s gone.
The Great Resignation is real. Many employees are leaving for better jobs. Remote work has (so far) resulted in more job opportunities for those working in Big Tech, especially outside of Silicon Valley. And so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote.
We now have employees who have nearly 2 years of tenure who have never met another employee in person, and lives alone in some city away from where the office was. This would be fine for a normal person, but again, we’re attracting the family-less urbanites scared of ... even meeting up with their friends at a restaurant.
The churn in jobs also has the major effect of constantly dealing with the overhead of re-assinging projects from people leaving, and onboarding new people. The new employees don’t get enough attention to succeed.
And the employees that stay end up with a load of work dumped by the former coworkers, plus the responsibility of onboarding the new ones. There are many software engineers who’ve not written a single line of code in the past year.
While the Woke agitation has slowed due to the productive employees’ ability to simply log off, in addition to the tiredness of the agitators, there is more and more open rebellion regarding pay and profits. “Bring your whole self to work” was the Big Tech mantra. Tell people about your cool hobbies, share your politics (if you’re far left only), share your sex life.
This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts. You used to have to have the balls to knock on the CEOs office door, or schedule a meeting. Now you can fire off a nasty Slack message straight to her.
People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing. It’s unreal what people will write, with no recourse.
If it were anything remotely RW, I’m certain they’d be immediately fired, but so long as they’re sufficiently LW or minority (anything but straight white man), they can agitate, complain, do no work, and continue employment.
And so the entire company has devolved. We’re running on the code written in years past. No major new product initatives are being launched. Workers complain that they’re understaffed and demoralized.
People take constant sick days, or don’t show up at all without record. It’s very easy to hide when WFH. With such a flux in employees/management and so much allowance for “mental health”, it’s easy to simply no show without punishment.
We hired a new employee and I pinged them at 1pm to see if they’d join a meeting. They came 10 minutes later. Said they slept in because they didn’t have anything to work on. It’s got to be mind-boggling for someone not in software.
On a given day, managers (there are several in weird matrix structure) will say things like “What can I do to support you?” “Do you have enough to work on? Too much?” It’s like emotional support.
And you can simply say. “Oh, I’ve had a hard week. Barely slept. Felt sick. Don’t think I can handle much more this week.” There’s no real accountability to anyone. Record profits at the top, because of existing code and product-market fit cruising along, so leaders don’t notice.
It’s utterly surreal to watch the deterioration. To see how quickly an organization can crumble. And I’m not productive either. I’m constantly bombarded with anti-white, anti-male, woke propaganda.
We’ve even had explicit discussions of assigning less work to URMs (under-represented minorities), because “life is really hard for them right now.” This suggestion was from a lesbian white woman with cats.
As productive as one person can be, you can’t add value when constantly thwarted. Nobody in IT doing tickets anymore to provision things for you ... large bureaucracy to gatekeep any actions (needs review by X number of committees including now DEI committees).
It’s hard to feel unproductive. I’m not the type who feels great about getting paid to not work, but that’s essentially what I’ve been doing for the last year.
This problem is the worst in Big Tech, so if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon Prime, or Netflix go down, the world will probably be better off. It’s not essential. I worry about this apathy spreading to companies that matter. Ones that write software for utilities.
We had a woman who worked for us who was just awful at her job. Could not understand instructions at all. Could not do the job. Barely spoke English. She wasn’t just not productive, she actually dragged the team down.
I worked with my Director to finally get her fired after ... failing her Performance Improvement Program (PIP). HR told us they can’t fire her because she’s Asian and female and in California, that it’s just simply too hard. This was over 5 years ago.
You have a certain fire in your 20’s. Ready to reform and change everything. You get noticed when you perform. Promoted, bonuses, etc. But eventually you keep hitting the same problems or gatekeepers over and over. I recall asking an older coworker (mid-thirties at the time) ... what drove him, and he said he just does it for the paycheck now.
I’m at that point. Lost the fire for career and collecting my paycheck for other purposes in life where the fire has been rekindled. I worked remote for 5 years at a prior job and this was never the case.
There’s something special about this combo of remote and “your feelings are valid”.
I can’t read more! Banned from twitter. How rude not to put up the entire post!
I worked at Nike....a bunch of effing hypocrites.
Read post 6
I’ve been in the software engineering business for years. Decades in fact. I’ve worked with some of those un-fireable types.
They cause negative productivity. Because not only were they not getting their work done but I wasn’t getting my work done while I was Trying to show them how to do their work for them.
Is there a thread readership of this? I can’t install a new enough browser on this old iPad. Twitter will only allow new browsers to access site.
The truth is, they were no better behaved when they were face-to-face, probably worse. Just look at an university campus today. Their feelings are validated by the group; they dwell in their loneliness and disconnect when home alone.
What they are incapable of seeing is how the rest of us built our own support systems of family that came first. Identity politics, so-called microaggressions, and petty offenses only serve to drive away the things that these people really need to live fulfilling lives.
-PJ
Read post 6. PIF posted the entire Twitter thread.
I am gleefully out of this mess now but I worry about my investments with these children running things.
PS, instead of counting years to be able to retire I count years for something else now.
Yup. And who doesn’t want to be as cool as Nike, or Google, or (fill in the blank). The large public companies actually think these overeducated inexperience numbskulls they hire are the “best and brightest” because they came out of the “top business schools” or places like McKinsey, so they worry they will lose them to cooler more woke competition if they don’t copy everything the cooler more woke companies do.
Before long you have what we have. A mess.
I also work in big tech. There are some diamonds in the rough. Work from home isn’t that bad. I’ve been doing it for years. Not much has changed. I don’t miss the social interactions, but I’ve always been face down in technology.
There are areas where the crazies come out, but in the pure tech areas such as engineering, you might be surprised how many conservatives lurk in the shadows. We even have an email alias internally to discuss things right-of-center. Not all big tech outfits are completely unhinged, FWIW.
Though maybe but it didn’t start with the first two sentences
Well worth reading - outlines the troubles in our enemys’ tent.
I strongly disagree that work from home is a disaster.
I have been lucky enough to have been iN DEMAND for the last two years, And I often work on more than one contract at the same time.
I love what I do so 80 or 90 billable hours a week is no big deal for me.
I get up at 6 AM and I’m on my computer 15 minutes later with a big cup of coffee. I often get an hour or two of significant work done before anybody else even comes on line In the Morning.
And I’ll be on my computer until eight or nine at night. Not 14 hour 15 hours straight I’ll just stop for dinner and coffee and breaks And More coffee... But I usually bring it to my desk and while I’m thinking about the solving the next problem.
I absolutely love what I do and I would be writing software for fun if I were Not being paid for it.
So work for from home has been great! I can pack in a ton of hours and everybody’s happy.
Plus I can afford to have a housekeeper come in once or twice a week and my house is cleaner than ever before that I was able to do. So I am actually hiring and paying somebody, Who is grateful to only have to work a couple of days of the week and I pay very well.
So, Work from home has been far from a disaster.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.