I work in Big Tech. It’s going down the toilet… fast… Stand-Alone; Bird’s Eye View!
THE READ READER APP | By Hazard Harrington | Jan. 14, 2022
Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now.
They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work.
Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”
I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.
They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.
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.
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 so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote.
This would be fine for a normal person, but again, we’re attracting the family-less urbanites scared of…
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.
There are many software engineers who’ve not written a single line of code in the past year.
This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts.
People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing.
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.
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.
We hired a new employee and I pinged them at 1pm to see if they’d join a meeting.
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..
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.
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-repres
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…
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.
I worry about this apathy spreading to companies that matter. Ones that write software for utilities.
She wasn’t just not productive, she actually dragged the team down.
I worked with my Director to finally get her fired after…
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.
But eventually you keep hitting the same problems or gatekeepers over and over. I recall asking an older coworker (mid-thirties at the time)…
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.
There’s something special about this combo of remote and “your feelings are valid”.
Awful conduct at interviews. Demoralized employees who show up late, unprepared, or absolutely do not want to be there.
– 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.
Our director hired a manager, female minority. He said “She’s not qualified but she checks the boxes.”
The first order effect is that this is not good for her or her direct reports, but it gets worse.
Engineers who were able to switched managers, which overloaded the other managers.
Since she had so few direct reports, all new employees were assigned to her and had an awful first
Instead of firing her (obvious answer), she was moved to another group, where she had the same effect.
She’s still here years later, wreaking havoc.
Don’t hire unqualified people because of race and gender!
They ask questions like: “Why is diversity important to you?” and…
In one interview, they re-asked me 3 times because they weren’t satisfied that I was ideologically pure enough.
I value diversity of experience, they were wanting me as a white man to apologize for my sin of being born
– Anxiety
– Depression
– Leftism
Any white men who are in high-up decision making positions must have a BAME (black, asian, minority) partner sign off.
Not healthy for self-esteem.
Embrace your biological sex!
Find someone who loves you!
Exercise!
Stop eating so much corn and soy! Big ag hates you.
Give pets to animal friends!