Tales from inside Big Tech
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In which The Lotus Eaters discuss a Twitter thread in which a man discusses what its like on the inside of an unnamed major tech company. Validity is gained by the fact that Twitter censored the thread and it is now only available by archive.
The TLDR is that most of these companies have become more or less adult daycares with emotionally damaged employees who do almost no work. And the only reason any of this shit keeps working is due to old code from the before times that a lot of the new hires have no idea how it works and managements only hope is that no one breaks something important. Because if something breaks, it probably wont be able to be fixed. Carl points out how this very much reminds him of the state of the Imperium from Warhammer 40K.
To be fair that sounds like almost every tech company. Often it's spaghetti code written years ago by the boss himself and even trying to refactor it might break the very foundations of the business platform so nobody is allowed to touch it.
But at least in small companies the nepotism is usually family and friends getting promoted when they don't deserve it - not because they share woke ideological beliefs.
I think the bigger issue with most of the big boys is that they have started throwing their weight around to try and crush competition so others cant compete, and its inevitably going to make things that much worse when their stuff inevitably breaks and now vast swaths of the internet dont work because of borked spaghetti code.
I haven't seen that in some of my smaller companies. The Software Developers are a bit too protective of the applications they are building, and aren't commenting it enough, but I wouldn't say complete and total incompetency.
I did Tech at a Big Company (not "Big Tech"). We had 2 of the lead engineers (who combined probably did > 50% of new product development) quit, the only competent Project Manager in the department, and the only 2 competent engineering managers in the department took jobs outside of the department. This was probably about 75 man years' worth of experience gone. Whatever that department will be when they ultimately replace all those people will bear little resemblance to what it was.
I didn't experience anything as bad as in that thread, but certainly things started to feel like they took longer as the work from home thing dragged on and people realized that it wasn't going to be a 1-2 month thing and everything would go back to normal. None of the "how is everyone feeling" crap, but I did start to lose respect for coworkers seeing how cowardly they were behaving towards WuFlu; and outside of a handful of coworkers I had to stop talking to them about anything not work related because of it.
I did notice that the company started using company resources to coordinate social activities (eg. board and video game clubs, sewing and knitting clubs) outside of work. The company started to take on this responsibility of being this "hub" through which the employees' entire social lives could (if the employee so chose) pass through, and it struck me as a highly inappropriate role for an employer to take as well as an HR minefield I wanted to stay far away from.
And that's before the company started finding the token minorities to give talks during mandatory meetings about some ethnic holiday they practiced, or spoke about how hard it was for them to climb the company ladder as a minority.
Yeah - I had a VP, black, come out and finger-wag to us white slob engineers (non-execs, never promoted from within) about how she was oppressed and couldn’t achieve success because of her race.
Yeah we had a hispanic VP give a 30 minute talk about what we thought was going to be his area of responsibility in the company. He spent the first 25 minutes giving his life story about how he grew up not speaking English and how disadvantaged he was, then the last 5 minutes talking about his department when they told him he was about out of time.
The funniest part was he looked, acted, and sounded like a total WASP. So you have this guy who completely abandoned his identity to get ahead in the world and is now using that abandoned identity to score diversity points. Didn't exactly make the point he thought it did.
VP means a guy, probably white (jewishness notwithstanding) hired her. These guys should be shunned.
This has to be YouTube, right? They're the only one with a woman in charge. By this statement, it's obvious that's the unnamed tech company.
Its certainly a possibility. I did think its weird to include the fact that the CEO is a woman because I figured that would narrow it down significantly. The other possibility is that its a company that is large but not one of the big kahunas like Facebook, Google, or YouTube but is nonetheless a major company that less well known.
I've worked for big tech companies for roughly 15 years, is still not as bad as all that yet but not far from it. A few pronouns freaks have started showing up in meetings but is not full lets talk about your sexuality crap.
Is not just that diversity hires tend to be extremely bad or unwilling to work. Or that white people are sometimes bullied out of discussions. This happened to me a while back, when I still had faith in the system, I foolishly thought my manager would back me up but he threw me under the bass in an instant.
The diversity hires are very angry, short fused and incredibly annoying to work with. You have to stay as clear as possible from them and what ever they are working on or they will find a way to blame you for what ever mistake of delay. They also tend to be very sweet with people outside their direct working project, I find this very disgusting.
Things really go sour once they get in management positions, they want to make their mark on the project but have no skill, no understanding and no willingness to communicate with those working on the project rather then radical change something for the sake of changing it. This causes a large portion to leave the project to other projects.
Tech is a mess but I think youtube or google are a bit ahead of other companies in term of full blown woknes.
I've been slowly subverting and red-pilling my boss over the past 2 years of my employment (it helps that he's listening to Jocko Willink and focusing on personal responsibility), and I was able to use this to come to him about the fact that one of the new managers he hired is pre-disposed towards racialism.
You know me, I actually tried to rationalize it as "she has pride towards the accomplishment of being the first person in her family, and community, to go to college, and she's misconstruing her hard work for an inherent or systemic issue". But I was able to use that approach to make him realize: yeah, no, she can't be pushing racialism over merit.
It's a hard conversation to have with minorities without coming across like a lunatic, even if I'm right: "This a black national socialism". But if you're gentle and respectful enough, they'll no the direction they need to push people in. I think we're even getting her to turn around on some issues. There's a heavy push on personal development that I and my manager have been trying to make on the rest of our team, and there's another black woman on staff who had a strong father figure, and also pushes personal responsibility a lot to... so I think it's starting to rub off on her.
...
Hmmm. Maybe I am as bad as I'm labeled.
subvert all the racialists
Copy pasta:
Seriously, this is screaming all the signs of an imminent collapse of a bubble.
The biggest result of a bubble is malinvestment. Inflation promotes malinvestment.
This is like that scene in The Big Short where "Mark Baum" discovers that no one affiliated with the bank's mortgage sales even knows what they are doing. They aren't doing credit checks, they aren't interested in bank statements, they are just pushing out bad mortgages to people who can't afford them, then the idiots run around with the money blowing it out their ass. "Why are they confessing?"
The whole system is on fire, and nobody gets it. The stupidity is a necessary part of malinvestment. There's so much money being thrown around that it's being weaponized and nobody cares if any work is ever done. The over-financialization of the whole economy is blowing up in everyone's faces, and these DIE initiatives are just the most obviously useless malinvestment, that only exists as a method of controlling competition.
I know, I know, I sound like fucking Sarah Connor all the time, but she's fucking right.
The worst part is that this is the mania phase of the bubble. Everyone's just hysterically lying to themselves that everything is perfect. The longer the correction is delayed, the more violent the correction becomes. The Perennial Gale of Creative Destruction can't be denied.
Have google had a successful new product/service in the last decade?