Yes, indeedy. BIG IMPROVEMENT!
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
Dude! You really moved out!
.
I’m retired but self employed. I can choose my clients. I select fun projects, which are both hardware and software. The designs and implementations are “all mine”. It seems the newbies are all high strung, egotistical, and smug. Outworking six of them doesn’t take much effort. Ah, life is good to me right now.
I love working from home. My productivity is at an all time high; and, no office politics or mandates.
That was our experience decamping from Silicon Valley to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. People are NORMAL. People are a lot HAPPIER. People are much KINDER and a lot more POLITE. People love to say hi on the street, stop and chat, have friends and neighbors over for dinners or just wine and snacks.
One thing I learned in central AR is that you Do. Not. Honk. In. Traffic.
No matter how long the wait is.
“An armed society is a polite society.”
““Bring your whole self to work” was the Big Tech mantra. “
Yes and leave it there.
All those so called perks like free meals and after hour activities were all designed to keep you in the plantation.
Yes, indeedy. BIG IMPROVEMENT!
Have you started gathering an “arsenal” yet?
When we were house shopping in AR last year about this time, a group in NW AR was offering to pay $10K to approved applicants to move to the area!
I think they were looking for people in the "STEM" fields: Science, Technology, Education (?) and Math
NW AR also advertised recently in the Seattle area, trying to lure people there.
It's a "Shall Issue," permitless carry state, which is nice.
Unlike CA, which is a "Only Celebrity Security and Illegals get to carry" state
Well,if you decide you want to start collecting etc… freepmail me. Been shooting since the ‘70s and semi retired in 2016 to help run a shooting range here in the mountains.
I worked for a major Aerospace Co in the Bay Area as a (female) satellite systems engineer for 39 yrs and retired in March. I was seeing this crap seep into the corporate culture; it was gross to say the least. I was bound to get in trouble for telling my manager (whom I’ve worked with for 36 yrs and is like-minded) “I don’t want diversity, I want smart people who work hard and diversity will take care of itself”.
Engineering doesn’t care about “feelings” or how people are “offended” by whatever.
At any rate, my husband will be retiring in July and his boss told him, as long as we stayed in California, he could continue to telecommute. We escaped the Bay Area to the Sierra Foothills. The Bay Area is turning into LA. We were born and raised there and our kids, too. When the “powers that be” decided high density/”affordable” housing is the #1 priority, we were done. They were building 3000 of these houses within 2 miles of our lovely, quiet suburban neighborhood. The traffic, in the best of times is horrid; this is only going to make it worse. Not to mention the fact that none of the affordable housing is for kids who’ve grown up, gone to school and are working their butts off in the Bay Area.
Not mentioned in theism thread is the spiritual vacuum in people’s lives, particularly the Zoomers and Millennials.
The left has devolved into the New Puritans—the obsessive fear that someone, somewhere may be a happy person.
My one normal neighbor in Santa Cruz County CA was talking about moving to ID. I hope he made it out.
Thanks! I still have your tips for reference and may take you up on that!
Coolness… happy for you and your new place. Now you’re a southerner like Constitution Day. 😀
I live in Upper Magalia. A beautiful small community.
Ahh, near Chico and Paradise. My brother was the soccer coach for Chico State.
I think I’d prefer not to live in his shadow.
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