Posted on 01/14/2022 4:01:05 PM PST by servo1969
A reader directed me to this Twitter thread from someone who goes by the name Hazard Harrington, who works in Silicon Valley. 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 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.
She made some argument about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them. They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.
So back to morale. Everyone is demoralized. This may surprise you, since Big Tech is extremely well paid and has been able to WFH throughout the past 2 years. They’ve been given extra days off, extra stipends, bonuses, etc. They never had to fear being laid off.
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 know this isn’t just my company because I’ve interviewed at many other companies (Big Tech and Unicorns). Awful conduct at interviews. Demoralized employees who show up late, unprepared, or absolutely do not want to be there.
Things my coworkers spend an enormous amount of their day on: – Coming up with a “clever” new Zoom background each day (something Harry Potter or Star Wars like children) – Clever Slack emojis – Reddit style responses in threads (“First!) and other low brow irony for the lulz.
Another tech crash like 2000 can’t come soon enough
You are now officially a hillbilly...
LOL
Count me as another who LOVES working from home. Neither I nor any of my friends wants to go back to the office. Ever.
That’s exactly what they are! I call them Neo Puritans.
They’re every bit as busybody, judgmental, self righteous, fanatical and humorous as the last group of Puritans. Is it any wonder that a lot of them are their spawn up in the Northeast?
HL Mencken nailed it perfectly. “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Its just as true now as it was 400 years ago.
“Dude’s got something weird against pets and cats especially”
lol. Apparently. Maybe he’s bitter. I remember meeting him during a political campaign back when he had hair. Looks like he aged hard.
◄ tech life bump ►
As someone who used to work high tech in SV, I can tell you it has always been a lonely place w a 10-1 M to F ratio.
Those who are wise enough to join a support group for events outside of work are the ones most happy.
I haven’t heard that for H1B visa holders. (Constant risk of being fired)
But I have made a ton of money over the last 20 years fixing code written by these ‘cheaper’ employees.
And if they are fired these Indian recruiting agencies will find them a new game tomorrow.
I get 50 calls from India based recruiting agencies for Everyone American.
During Trump's Inauguration, the security lines for the ceremony itself and the Inaugural Ball were extremely long and slow. We were standing with a couple from California who were farmers. Anyone with land, animals or production facilities for specialty crops like wine grapes, artichokes, etc., is very tied to their place. These people were so glad to be even in a line with other Trump supporters, just to be able to speak freely.
That right there is awesome! Congrats not only on your career; but now on your retirement; hope it brings you and your hub a lot of peace and joy.
I can certainly understand that! I still feel bad for them all, though, because the restrictions will become tighter and tighter and life will become more and more difficult.
Too bad the voting machines are so rigged.
At the company I worked at I did Helpdesk work. The new management (3 India born) in the past 3 years dumb down the job so much is was mindnumbing. They wanted to outsource to India which failed after the first year and now Poland and figured they could only do password resets and pass along a ticket to another group where before we did a bunch of things and got things done in usually the first day. Now it is eh... whenever.
One of the reasons I quit. If I needed the money I would have stayed just due to my age and the trouble I would have starting over somewhere else.
I had a co-worker who later became a supervisor who badmouthed everyone. He wanted to fire this person or that whole dept etc. Everyday you would hear him spout off. I had several quit during their first year as a reason for leaving. The manager was not much better. When we started to work from home the supervisor would not make any comments using the Teams chat we used for fear of his words being used against him : )
However I had 2 co-workers who after a meeting or a call they wanted to share they would bad mouth management and/or the caller. The upper managers had access but they did not know of the chat room we used as our director created a new one for those in Poland and in the US to use.
The co-workers did not use it to make any derogitory comments but used the other : )
I recall the director telling us there were people complaining about how busy they were. We were not busy and did mainly password resets.... she explained how little we were doing!
FTA:
1) 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.
2) 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.
3) 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.
4) 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.
Office Space - Motivation Problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgg9byUy-V4
Woke companies are like Wile E. Coyote, having run off a cliff and blissfully unaware of their situation because they haven’t looked down yet. We all know how this story ends.
The good news is there are plenty of other companies out there who will replace them after they crash and burn. The markets simply don’t care who you are or how glorious your past might have been. If you can’t deliver the goods, someone else will, and once your customers switch they won’t soon be back.
One set of great-grandparents on my father's side lived in DeRoche, and the other had a house that is now at the bottom of Lake Catherine (due to TVA). When I run out of reasons to live in central FL I might join you.
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