Hazard Harrington is a pseudonym. HH tweeted, "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."
His was a long thread of tweets detailing how Big Tech has become unable to function and is living on the fumes of its success 20 years ago.
HH tweeted, "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 live 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-assigning 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 initiatives 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 your 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 20s. 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.'"
***
Office Space 2022 is the opposite of the original.
Well, it's all so very well deserved. Let them collapse or be forcefully broken up. They are nothing more than totalitarians. Gooder and harder. I wish I had something more serious and thoughtful to say, but it's who they are and crashing back to the real world is overdue.
ReplyDeleteYou're talking about those working stiffs you claim to love so much, Jeffery, the middle class.
Delete^LOL^ Big Tech workers are the creative class that Obama brought in after he kicked out the middle class from the party.
Deleteaha, the new bourgeoisie
DeleteAll very well. But why does he need to use the ((())) crap, which is used to signify that the person in question is Jewish? Does it matter whether she's Abhkazian, Zulu, or anything in between? It's not as though her neuroticism is grounded in Judaism, after all (genuine Judaism teaches us, as per the verse in Psalms, "Serve G-d with joy").
ReplyDeleteIt does?
DeleteYour anti-Semitism rides again, Jeffery.
Yes, it does, you putz. I'm a religious Jew myself (so much for your "your anti-Semitism," moron), and I come across anti-Semites using it a lot on various sites.
DeleteAlex, Ed Doucher is this sites Douche.
DeleteMaybe Hazzard Harrington is the pseudonym of our very own resident anti-Semite Knifecatcher.
Man does that ring true. Never worked for a software outfit, per se, but I was in places with a large software shop for most of my working life.
ReplyDeleteI can just imagine how weird it's gotten now that all the wokery is imposed and only people that tout the party line are allowed.
Big Tech is often the only social life for people.
Noticed that years ago. Must be several orders of magnitude (geometrically) worse now.
Big tech has given a lot of really weird people good jobs.
ReplyDeleteThey are Obama's creative class.
DeleteI can validate, second hand, the bit about working harder from home. Our numbers when I worked at The Gas Station (FINRA) showed there were 26% more form reviews done by WFH people. That was 10 years ago. I can also validate that Drinking From Home also increased. First hand.
ReplyDeleteYep, as the perv in the blue dress oft said: "I feel your pain."
ReplyDeleteWhere I work, they promote lgbtqwerty groups (but strangely, no straight white men groups), they brag about all the women managers they have, regardless of experience level.
Our plant manager got the job not because she knew how to turn a wrench, run an assembly line or deal with parts issues, she got the job for being a black lesbian woman. (Color? Check! Orientation? Check! Gender? Check!)
I honestly don't care if the boss has a set of tits or not or who, what, when where, how, or why she get her rocks off, but damn, I come to work to move big agricultural steel, not to play woke bs games.
Finally you're on topic!!!
ReplyDeleteIn the grand scheme of things, Silicon Valley was ruined by the 1990s dot-com boom and never got back to what it had been before that.
ReplyDeleteBefore that, there was a focus on doing real stuff that took time and investments to bring to fruition (examples being Intel, Cypress Semiconductor, Cisco Systems, etc....). But when Netscape went public in August 1995, everyone lost their minds.
In the dot-com boom, the idea of building real stuff via time and investments was considered passe. In this new world, it was easy to fund a web start-up for a few hundred k, and then six months later do a nine-figure blowout IPO. Lather, rinse, repeat. And as long as the IPO dogs were willing to eat the IPO dog food, the game could continue.
One problem was that all the old hands who actually knew how to build real businesses doing real things disappeared, never to be replaced. And the lather, rinse, repeat cycle above was regarded as the "new normal" by the "new people."
When the bubble burst, the "new people" regarded the bubble as a normal that would come back - if they wished hard enough. So Silicon Valley became a cargo cult, and still is.
The "new people" are still there, always trying to find "the next facebook."
This is also one of the reasons that real industrial stuff waned during that period and since; all the money going to fluff for fast bucks, not enough going to real stuff that might turn into real companies doing real things a few years down the road.
This woke crap is infecting the Aerial firefighting business-the Fed contracting is a mess.
ReplyDeleteWhen a man’s man occupation is infected, thugs are really bad.
DeleteI hope what Hazard Harrington is experiencing has spread like a virus across Silicon Valley.
ReplyDeleteTrump's owner, good one!
ReplyDeletePerfect!
ReplyDeleteHazard can't fun me, he i1ad5s in the Federal government.
ReplyDeleteYes, but who is John Galt?
ReplyDelete“ We're running on the code written in years past. No major new product initiatives are being launched.”
ReplyDeleteCool. I am now an almost 18 year veteran municipal police officer in North Texas.
My college degree is Business Communications Information Systems.
I was trained in the 1990s to work on IBM mainframes, I learned. COBOL, SQL, JCL, Assembler, Rexx, etc. I also took classes in C and C++.
I worked as a software developer in the 1990s using SQL, C, C++, along with Visual C, Visual Basic, Oracle, MS Sequel Server, on projects in Unix and MS that were worldwide software. Heck, even was part of a dot bomb that thought Feng Shui was the best cubicle setup along with massive, expensive crystals in the executive area.
Meetings were fine, but on my first job out of college at Southwestern Bell, they were not productive. That job also had team building after hours when I would rather be at home with my wife.
Later, on what would be considered a failed startup, I worked 80 weeks many times with a bed in the owner’s home.
The difference?
Corporate demands all of you with giving little in return unless you are an executive whereas the startup has an infinite amount of potential return.
I found out I hated corporate life, hated offices, hated cubicles, and even though I was making 6 figures in my 20s, I felt being inside any office type setting life was passing me by.
My starting salary as a cop when I was 33 years old with a wife, one child, a house, two vehicles still paying on was around $36k.
Today, I still live in that same house, have 3 more kids, my wife and I drive “refurbished” cheap vehicles, and I am making a ton of money, especially with extra duty jobs.
Moreover, I am not in an office or a cubicle and even though I complain about some of the calls and weather, I am happy!
I would have been very confrontational if this woke crap happened when I was in software. It’s stupid and totally nonproductive. It’s a waste of time in every single way.
The movie “Office Space” is very funny and in many ways representative of that time, along with the Apple and MS movies that showed a decade or so prior.
“I was trained in the 1990s to work on IBM mainframes, I learned. COBOL, SQL, JCL, Assembler, Rexx, etc.” I got my BS in Computer Science in 1975. I trained on COBOL, Fortran, PL1, and Assembler. As a freshman, my programs were “written” on punch cards, which were then loaded into a punch card reader. The computer we used was a mainframe IBM 360/65 with a bank of mag tape drives, like in the old movies.
DeleteThis was way before personal computers, and even before businesses were computerized. As such, the only conceivable use for computers was in science, like sending a man to the moon. So instead of putting the Computer Science Department in the College of Business, the University put it in the College of Mathematics. That means I had to take such topics as Calculus (I, II, and III) Statistics (I and II), Boolean Algebra, Matrices, and several other math courses I’ve completely forgotten. But I slogged through it, because I wanted to join the Air Force and kill commies in Vietnam. Then Surprise! The Vietnam war ended right before I graduated, and they were shedding GIs, not recruiting more. I could write code with the best of ’em, but my life went in another direction, thus proving the old saying, “Men plan; God laughs.”
Thanks for allowing me this stroll down memory lane.
Same on the memories. Math degree - I remember nothing as well!! Then, an MVS systems programmer in the late 70s, early 80s. On to IBM as a Systems Engineer supporting the largest data centers in the state. Self employed consultant from mid 90s to retirement. Office Space was and still is awesome.
Delete“ We're running on the code written in years past. No major new product initiatives are being launched.”
ReplyDeleteCool. I am now an almost 18 year veteran municipal police officer in North Texas.
My college degree is Business Communications Information Systems.
I was trained in the 1990s to work on IBM mainframes, I learned. COBOL, SQL, JCL, Assembler, Rexx, etc. I also took classes in C and C++.
I worked as a software developer in the 1990s using SQL, C, C++, along with Visual C, Visual Basic, Oracle, MS Sequel Server, on projects in Unix and MS that were worldwide software. Heck, even was part of a dot bomb that thought Feng Shui was the best cubicle setup along with massive, expensive crystals in the executive area.
Meetings were fine, but on my first job out of college at Southwestern Bell, they were not productive. That job also had team building after hours when I would rather be at home with my wife.
Later, on what would be considered a failed startup, I worked 80 weeks many times with a bed in the owner’s home.
The difference?
Corporate demands all of you with giving little in return unless you are an executive whereas the startup has an infinite amount of potential return.
I found out I hated corporate life, hated offices, hated cubicles, and even though I was making 6 figures in my 20s, I felt being inside any office type setting life was passing me by.
My starting salary as a cop when I was 33 years old with a wife, one child, a house, two vehicles still paying on was around $36k.
Today, I still live in that same house, have 3 more kids, my wife and I drive “refurbished” cheap vehicles, and I am making a ton of money, especially with extra duty jobs.
Moreover, I am not in an office or a cubicle and even though I complain about some of the calls and weather, I am happy!
I would have been very confrontational if this woke crap happened when I was in software. It’s stupid and totally nonproductive. It’s a waste of time in every single way.
The movie “Office Space” is very funny and in many ways representative of that time, along with the Apple and MS movies that showed a decade or so prior.
Oh, I taught myself BASIC on a Commodore Vic 20 (20 kilobytes of RAM, Random Access Memory). I had a cassette tape “hard” drive.
ReplyDeleteIt was fun listening to Van Halen’s Diver Down while copying BASIC programs from computer magazines like Byte.
I still program, but not much.
LOL.
ReplyDeleteMy brother worked writing code in Silicon Valley for a long time. He's retired now thankfully. Sent him this story for comment.
ReplyDeleteBut he did tell me years ago he went to either FB or Google to apply for a job. He was told back then that as a white man he wouldn't get hired.
So the white man hate isn't new stuff. But my question is where did it come from? Basically white men developed all the computers and coding. How did it get to this point where they're hated for no particular reason?
What this person describes is a microcosm of what the Nation is experiencing and for the same reasons and aided and abetted by the same people and organizations.
ReplyDeleteWe are bringing this on ourselves and it's like most believe that they deserve to be destroyed/ruined put on the trash heap as useless.
It's a lot to do with the cognitive dissonance required for white people to blame white supremacy for all the problems. Let alone to face other groups joining in. You either fight it or succumb. There isn't any other choices. And because of the temperment and ideology of most corporate particularly big tech they only choice is surrender. Giving up does not lend itself to struggling with a problem and being thwarted continually. This is what coding is like and you must constantly keep at it with an attitude that the solution is there you just have to find it.
Now? They don't care so the solutions go unfound or found but sloppy and incomplete.
Our infrastructure and technology is faltering. Partly due to the supply line catastrophe but also because of our mental/emotional state.
The Nation is undergoing a nervous breakdown of the physical type where the mind and emotions are destroying the persons health.
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ReplyDelete