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What It’s Like In Big Tech Today: An Insider’s Twitter Thread

“Make your peace with whatever comes after fancy tech. It probably involves something with a firing pin and an extractor.” — Klahn

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 the office. Pronouns are stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All that you’d expect.

But COVID/WorkFromHome (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 arguments 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 CEO’s 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 RealWorld (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 a 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 not show without punishment.

We hired a new employee and I pinged them at 1 pm 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 unproductive, 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 my 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.

Going to add a few more examples.

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. She drove 2 high-performing engineers straight out of the company. Totally demoralized a third. 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 experience with the company. Most left soon after. 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!

Another example. I’ve interviewed many times wanting to leave, but every comparable company now has a “Diversity Panel” interview, which is just a matter of gatekeeping ideological purity at these companies. They ask questions like: “Why is diversity important to you?” and… “What have you done to increase diversity at your company?” 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.

People have increasingly been taking “Mental Health Days”. Sometimes they’re using sick days, many times they don’t. It’s just a free vacation, unaccountable. I have no doubt half the time they ARE used for one of the 3 leading causes of mental illness:
– Anxiety
– Depression
– Leftism

We have or have had policies where interview panels must have at least 1 woman, resulting in having unqualified interviewers rushed in to meet the quota.

Any white men who are in high-up decision-making positions must have a BAME (black, asian, minority) partner sign-off.

I’ve now had messages and friends reach out to say this isn’t just in Big Tech. That even in manufacturing and hardware this is becoming the norm. FedGov and Big Tech are forcing “diversity, equity, inclusion” requirements on their suppliers.

White men in small-town Midwest are having some (((consultant))) come into their factory and say “Hello fellow white men” and talk about their privilege.

Among social liberals, learning about White privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for White people struggling with poverty. There’s way too much “feedback” and and praise in Big Tech. Just a big circle jerk of “shoutouts” at meetings. Praise for people just doing average at their jobs.

VIA Hazard Harrington on Twitter: “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.” / Twitter

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Francis W. Porretto January 14, 2022, 11:33 AM

    That story makes me glad to be safely out of wage employment and enjoying a totally unprofitable retirement. I don’t think I’d be able to stay temperate in the sort of environment the writer describes here. It sounds soul-destroying.

    Speaking of souls, the writer didn’t mention his coworkers’ treatment of the sincerely religious among them. I wonder what sort of sneers and jibes they face? Assuming there are any, of course.

    • nunnya bidnez, jr January 14, 2022, 11:54 AM

      “…didn’t mention his coworkers’ treatment of the sincerely religious…”

      Considering that the writer used the triple parentheses to denote a Jewish person..
      “…. some (((consultant)))….”
      it’s obvious that the writer himself has issues with religious people. With using that one phrase “some (((consultant)))” used to belittle and otherize one particular group, he devalued everything else he previously said. Stop blaming jews for CRT & DIE & feminism; put the blame where it belongs, on communists leftists and anti-westerners.

      • Rob De Witt January 14, 2022, 5:06 PM

        So…
        Triple parentheses mean “Jew?”

        Who knew?

      • sarah January 15, 2022, 1:29 AM

        In community health care “a consultant” is often a person who without relevant education and credentials
        who is jettisoned to a higher status and higher pay specialty position than they are qualifies for.

      • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 2:46 AM

        To the Jews the Holocaust happened yesterday. It is always happening. It will always happen. Nothing in all of History can possibly come close to the suffering of the Jews.

        • Snakepit Kansas January 15, 2022, 7:59 AM

          Mike,
          I think they keep it fresh so they don’t become a boiled frog again.

          • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 12:02 PM

            The Chosen keep picking at that scab that healed 75 years ago.

      • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 5:35 AM

        After the last diaspora (136) the Chosen were scattered thither and yon throughout the Roman Empire. Wherever they settled for the next 1900 years, the host nation eventually expelled them. The most common reason was “cultural pollution”. Now we see in the US that these fellows have been the movers and shakers behind Feminism, Pornography, Big Tech, International Finance, Globo-homo and Hollywood.

        A Carpenter once called the members of that tribe who were the movers and shakers of His day “white-washed tombs” and “scorpions”. I wonder why?

    • Mike Austin January 14, 2022, 2:14 PM

      Agreed. Retired from teaching—27 years in the craft—in 2019. Enjoying immensely being away from even the slightest hint of the woke nightmare at that “Big Tech” firm. Not much of that nonsense anyway here in Oklahoma City.

  • Kevin in PA January 14, 2022, 11:51 AM

    Well, I knew things were bad, but what this author describes is absolute insanity! You can not a business like that for very long.
    The left is eventually going to eat itself alive, one faction at a time.
    Get some popcorn.

    I have retired early, as well. Simply because I am not interested in playing games with mentally unstable Marxist radicals that hate me because of who I am.

    • Mike Austin January 14, 2022, 2:22 PM

      The Left always engages in autophagy. The “moderates” fall prey to the “purists”, and it’s the guillotine or the gun shot to the head or an ice axe for them. “Revolutions eat themselves” so goes the saying. Behind every Danton lies a Robespierre.

  • Richard January 14, 2022, 11:56 AM

    It’s unfortunate that these losers cannot be readily identifiable on sight. No normal person should ever have to be in their company for even the least amount of time. A lifetime spent exclusively amongst their own kind is merely just at this point.

    • billrla January 14, 2022, 12:11 PM

      But, they are readily identifiable on sight.

      • Mike Austin January 14, 2022, 2:33 PM

        Skinny jeans. Man bun. Man purse. Scraggly beard. Lack of musculature. High-pitched voice. T-shirt with Che on the front. Nose ring. Ear ring. Tats. Crocs. Soft hands. Feminine mannerisms. Says “like” a lot. Vapes. iPhone. Long-sleeved dark flannel shirt with sleeves rolled up.

        Questions?

        • Q January 14, 2022, 4:34 PM

          What’s wrong with “Long-sleeved dark flannel shirt with sleeves rolled up”?

          • Mike Austin January 14, 2022, 4:55 PM

            Nothing at all. It is only part of the millennial ensemble. If you as well clothed yourself in the rest of those accoutrements, then I might have a few questions. I myself exhibit none of them.

      • Richard January 15, 2022, 7:50 AM

        Well. I guess that’s the result of my living my life cheerfully sequestered in my sanctum. I’m fortunate that – other than to procure essentials – I do not have to interact with the public-at-large. My sympathies to those who do.

  • RedBeard January 14, 2022, 12:20 PM

    Despite all the insanity, political venom, and severe damage the liberals and Biden have inflicted on our country, my life is blissful, joyous, and serene.
    My Christian Euro-Caucasian ethnicity has never provided me any ‘privilege’ over any other race, and never will. I built my life and prosperity without anyone’s help- other than God and family.

    Were I ever to be trapped in a vocation as described in the article above, I would most likely lash out verbally and possibly physically at the insane wokester sheep, then find another workplace.

    Life is too precious and too short to waste even one second bowing down and kissing the asses of insane liberals.

    • John Venlet January 14, 2022, 1:03 PM

      Despite all the insanity, political venom, and severe damage the liberals and Biden have inflicted on our country, my life is blissful, joyous, and serene.
      My Christian Euro-Caucasian ethnicity has never provided me any ‘privilege’ over any other race, and never will. I built my life and prosperity without anyone’s help- other than God and family.

      Amen, and Amen.

      • Kevin in PA January 14, 2022, 5:43 PM

        “My Christian Euro-Caucasian ethnicity has never provided me any ‘privilege’ over any other race, and never will. I built my life and prosperity without anyone’s help- other than God and family.”

        Yes, absolutely and Amen.

        I just finished watching a very good presentation titled – Monumental.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGSAiw50fg

        • John Venlet January 15, 2022, 5:22 AM

          At an hour and 12 minutes, I’ll have to set aside some time to watch this, Kevin. The intro piques my interest. Thanks.

          • ghostsniper January 15, 2022, 8:05 AM

            John, if you install this free app on your PC you can download youtube video and mp3’s to your HD and watch them when you feel like it. I’ve been using the free version for at least 6 months. I may go ahead and pay for the real version.

            https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloader/8

            • John Venlet January 15, 2022, 10:01 AM

              Thanks for the heads up, Ghostsniper.

        • RedBeard January 15, 2022, 10:26 AM

          Kevin, that looks good. I’ll give it a watch.
          Thanks for posting it here.

  • Uncle Mikey January 14, 2022, 1:15 PM

    Pretty sure I work at the same place, although not at that level. Management grants anyone “covid” time off, or mental health time off, whenever they ask. In CA, the law says if you have a doctor’s note that’s paid leave, so the CA employees just disappear for long periods on a regular basis and have for years. That’s probably why we’ve started hiring day laborers to do tech support for products they’ve never heard of, our products are already not ready for their release dates and overloaded with features no one wants, so why bother helping customers when they can’t use them correctly.

  • lh January 14, 2022, 4:16 PM

    I fear for our future. Important products and essential services slowly becoming more unsafe, or unusable, or unreliable, etc

    • RedBeard January 15, 2022, 10:24 AM

      Don’t fear for the future.
      Instead, fear getting caught doing to our enemies the things they deserve.

  • gwbnyc January 14, 2022, 4:40 PM

    retired knucklebuster. we just told each other to go fuck ourselves.

  • John the River January 14, 2022, 5:27 PM

    Well, that explains the software App that came with the new ‘fitness watch’. Worst piece of software I’ve ever seen. Totally worthless. Trying to link to the watch locks the watch and the tablet up completely. Without it I won’t be able to use at least half the features of the thing.
    “Customer Support” is a AI Bot on the web page, that’s a moron studying to be an idiot. And failing.
    The one thing I can use it for is real time monitoring my heart rate while doing something strenuous; i.e. running the snow thrower or lifting weights. Or thinking about what I paid for that damn thing. After my heart attack I need to be careful.

    • Zaphod January 14, 2022, 9:54 PM

      Not a Garmin by any chance?

      If they ever cost cut and sack their avionics software people and give the jobs to the Garmin fitness tracker folks, planes will be falling out of the sky. These clowns famously made a body composition scale that would read anorexic one day and Rosanne Barr the next for the same person.

      • John the River January 16, 2022, 8:12 AM

        G-Shock. That’s Casio.

        BTW Is there some way of getting a notification when your comment gets a reply here? If someone has ever replied with the expectation of a answer and heard nothing, it’s because I didn’t know.

    • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 2:55 AM

      I used to work out with a guy who had one of those “fitness watches”. After a while he could not be without it. It monitored all that he did. He set it so that it would talk to him while he exercised. That watch was annoying and intrusive, but that did not bother him at all. It became part of him—the man melding with the machine.

      • John the River January 16, 2022, 8:15 AM

        No. Me the watch and me are estranged.
        For the watch to ‘talk’ to me it would have to be paired with my cellphone, but the phone is just a phone. Not a smart(ass)watch.

        • Mike Austin January 16, 2022, 8:25 AM

          I love it: “a smart ass watch”. I look at my “smart ass phone” the same way. It is so annoying. I turn it off when I go to bed and don’t turn it on in the morning until my 2nd cup of Joe. I never take it out of my apartment unless I absolutely have to; and if so I place it in a Faraday cage.

  • Sid V January 14, 2022, 5:50 PM

    I work in corporate America for a multi billion dollar corporation. The level of wokeness and left-wing insanity over the last two years has really been getting out of hand, and I frankly don’t know how much longer I can tolerate it. It really got ramped up after Saint George Floyd ran out of oxygen with them actually raising money for BLM which pissed off a whole lot of people. They’ve been on a big “DEI” kick of late, and with me being white, well I frankly feel as though there is a target on my back (probably because there is!)

  • julie January 14, 2022, 6:43 PM

    I spent a lot of last year looking for art or design jobs on Indeed. After seeing listing after listing steeped in wokespeak, the idea of working for the vast majority of those businesses was nauseating. The few that came from businesses explicitly on our side of the aisle were so inundated with applications mine never stood a chance.

  • Zaphod January 14, 2022, 7:16 PM

    And it’s a great article, too. I follow Apple news and rumours pretty closely. A recurring theme this past year+ has been what a bunch of snowflakes a lot of their people are… All kinds of panic attacks about the possibility of having to go back to work in the office.

    Millennials really seem to be a lost generation.

    • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 1:16 AM

      Never quite understood the phrase “panic attack”. Looked it up. Sounds like yet another invented disorder.

      “Panic attacks are sudden periods of intense fear and discomfort that may include palpitations, sweating, chest pain, shortness of breath, trembling, numbness, or a feeling of impending doom or of losing control.”

      Sounds exactly how I felt the first time I tried to kiss a girl. We were both 12. She said yes.

      • ghostsniper January 15, 2022, 4:56 AM

        The take away was in your last sentence with the number 12.
        A child’s chronological age.
        And that’s how many adults (those over the age of 18) behave today.
        It’s not unusual now to see people in their 50’s still behaving like children.
        Trying to have a conversation that goes more than 1″ deep with these people is impossible.

        When my son was about 5 he asked me a question about building design that was more “adult” in nature than what his child mind was capable of understanding. I had to figure out a way to “translate” the adult answer to his question to one that a child could understand. Quite difficult. Fortunately he grew up. Some folks, it seems, never do. I don’t waste a lot of my time with such people. Their parents damaged them and society facilitated.

        I’ve been “retired” now for 4 years. That is, I am getting some of the money back that was stolen from me over most of my life. I continue to work though because I like it, and every cent I make is mine. It’s nobody’s business except mine and the people I do business with. Laws do not make morality.

        • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 5:48 AM

          A nation’s collapse into infantilism is unsupportable, though it is breathtaking to watch. The “very important people” of our day think they are the best and the brightest in History. They match ignorance and childishness with arrogance and condescension, a weird farrago of weakness and cowardice. Masculinity is unknown to them—indeed, they fear it as a child fears the dark.

          Imagine some Roman Legionnaires of the 1st century BC running into the entire staff of Google and Facebook. They would slaughter them all, no doubt concluding that these were nothing more than a traveling troupe of male prostitutes.

          • ghostsniper January 15, 2022, 8:29 AM

            lol, your last paragraph.
            Very true.

          • Zaphod January 15, 2022, 6:21 PM

            Well said!

          • Dave January 17, 2022, 2:33 PM

            Who’s to say that the Roman legions wouldn’t hire male prostitutes rather than murder them?

            More importantly though, why would the violent intentions of Roman legions against anyone have anything to do with Big Tech today?

      • julie January 15, 2022, 1:38 PM

        Panic attacks sound kind of silly, admittedly, right up until you have one. I learned that the hard way in 2020 (for non-covid reasons). Even if you know and understand what’s happening, there’s really nothing you can do but ride it out until the limbic system or the amygdala or whatever stops sending out panic chemicals. It’s kind of like getting faint at the sight of blood or certain injuries; you may know consciously that it’s ridiculous and there’s no reason for you to pass out, but if your brain says “lights out,” well… good night. I took my kids to a children’s museum in Florida for a birthday party once, and my son scraped his scalp on a metal structure. Teeny tiny injury, but it bled like a waterfall, so they called the paramedics to come take a look. He was fine, and I knew he was fine, he just needed a new shirt. They were more concerned about me, apparently I turned an ugly shade of grey and really needed to sit down and just breathe. Very embarrassing.

        All that said, if you’re having panic attacks at the thought of engaging in perfectly normal, healthy interaction, you probably need some serious therapy. Given that most of these people already identify themselves by their list of mental illnesses, well…

        • Mike Austin January 16, 2022, 8:32 AM

          I understand. When in the Air Force I ran the Emergency Room for Webb AFB in Texas. I had to deal with blood, sutures, injections, trauma and death regularly. None of that bothered me at all. Now almost 50 years later I grow faint and breathless at the sight of my own blood. Before getting a blood test, for example, I have to explain all that to the nurse so that she does not herself panic when I go a bit wobbly.

  • brinster January 14, 2022, 8:38 PM

    “The app you’ve been working on for the last three months doesn’t work. It’s garbage.”
    “It works for me. You’re just saying that because you’re part of the heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist, homophobic, islamophobic culture.”
    We’ve arrived at the idiocracy. Glad to know I’ll be gone before any of these morons take over completely. You younger folks, start learning Chinese.

  • Annie Rose January 15, 2022, 6:20 AM

    When you start to lose hope for the future of our country, may I suggest watching Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs series?

    The current season shows a couple who do the iron rod work to build highways. They’ve built their business into a multi-million dollar/year, multi-year contract enterprise.

    A family of fishermen switched to being jellyballers-jellyfish fishermen-and is raking in the dough, thanks to an immigrant in their small town who knew the market for jellyfish in Asia and offered to partner with them to process and ship their catch.

    Then there is the father and son who strip restaurant kitchen floors and re-epoxy them and who are doing very well financially.

    Sure these are all filthy, manual labor jobs, but it is inspiring to realize the ingenuity of our fellow countrymen and that there are opportunities to have a good life if we are just willing to roll up our sleeves. One thing I learned a long time ago if I hate where I’m working, it’s a good sign that it’s time to get out and work someplace else or change direction and do something else. It’s scary to think about, especially when you are earning good money, but following that rule has always turned out to be a blessing for me. Life is too short to put up with BS.

    • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 11:32 AM

      Mike Rowe is a “man’s man”. During my teaching career I always stressed to my kids the vastly more important trades over a college degree. Many of the parents of my students were themselves in the trades: tile work, HVAC, plumbing, electrical and so on. I used one of my girl students as an example. She hated high school, and entered a trade school at 16. She became a computer engineer. At 20 years of age she owned a new home, a nice truck, a marvelous audiophile system and 4 dogs.

      And as you said Annie, “Life is too short to put up with BS.” So very true.

  • KCK January 15, 2022, 6:49 AM

    Reporting from behind the lines.

    Yesterday my wife & I made a rare trip into the city to see about her fairly new, high-end iPad. The Apple care online made an appointment for her to go to: the Geek Squad at Best Buy. We scratched our heads, but dutifully went to the repair counter for her appointment. The trouble is that it discharges its battery at a fast rate and is essentially useless for any computing, even if plugged in constantly.

    Hold on, this gets good and strange and is on topic. The kid told us they don’t work on the iPad, and so we were now going back downtown to go to the Apple Store to bitch about the inconvenience, and seek proper help. She made a call and the AS was closed during normal Friday hours! I had her phone the local downtown mall, because I had learned during the lockdowns that their information desk keeps informal track of whose open – we had learned that Google is unreliable and any amount of chaos was possible at that time. Stores listed as open – weren’t, and vice-versa. Bingo! They informed us that people did come and go from the AS.

    When I pulled up to the load-n in front of the store, it was lights mostly on, uniformed security at the door, and…no admittance. One employee was exiting the door to bring a purchase to a young customer, but otherwise Apple was closed to actual business. I thought, literally and with infantry emphasis, WhAt Thah FuCk?

    I had visual memories of the big glass storefront when it was plywood-boarded up entirely during: riots. I think we experienced that twice. Then, the lockdowns phase for many months (was it almost a year?) when they also were closed. How in the Sam Hill can anyone sustain this amount of bullshittery and stay in business? What does their over-under report look like each quarter? Fiction, no doubt.

    At any rate, I never did get an explanation as to why they were dog-styling their business so cavalierly like that. If I were the district manager I’d be either hung by my fingernails and flayed at dawn by regional management, or else I’d be boot up the ass of the local store management, breathing fire and flames. perhaps this article is the intelligence I sought. I wondered if they had a lack of employees due to covid-fatigue, or Biden welfare. Sick-outs? Extreme zealotry in the face of the Omicron (common cold-level Covid)? A combination? If this article sheds any light, certainly the dashed morale of the geeks is at play. Who gives a fuck? I told my wife over dinner, across the street from the AS, that we need to visualize a life after Apple products because, maybe we won’t have the courage ourselves to quit them, but they certainly weren’t long for this world with their last 3 years of fuckery.

    My smart and fabulous wife got on the phone, and received a ticket number conversation with support, in India, with the promise of an exchange for a new iPad. In normal times, they’d have taken the device in-store, and replaced the battery (if that was indeed the problem – otherwise they’d have undone the software issue). Apple takes it in the shorts – out short-term benefit. But, at the cost of what? Apple has that stench of the necrotic about it. Make your peace with whatever comes after fancy tech. It probably involves something with a firing pin and an extractor.

    Fastens his chinstrap. Eyes the horizon.

    • Vanderleun January 15, 2022, 8:35 AM

      High marks for: Make your peace with whatever comes after fancy tech. It probably involves something with a firing pin and an extractor.

    • Annie Rose January 16, 2022, 7:01 AM

      Congratulations! You just experienced the Apple Covid policy. Our AS here in locked down Illinois have been that way since the start of the Big C. So frustrating! Yes, you must call Hello Peggy halfway across the world to get an appointment. Then you drive to the store. The other day my husband did this only to discover that even though he had an appointment, he still had to stand in a line of 30 people in the freezing cold. He never was allowed into the store by the extremely rude and unhappy gatekeepers. But there were those who were sitting inside in socially distanced groups getting some type of tutorial, all masked of course. In the age of Zoom, I can’t imagine why Apple has not gone to virtual classes with their level of C paranoia.

      • KCK January 16, 2022, 2:45 PM

        That fills in my box: overzealous Coof policy.

        It’s Orwellian. I’m going to give the manager an earful when they do open. Somebody has to adult these silly children.

  • KCK January 15, 2022, 7:00 AM

    No edit function, so I’ll add that another theory I had was that their China-assembled shit was languishing in LA Harbor, or strewn along a railroad siding somewhere in California. Perhaps they were closed in order to limit their in-stock sales.
    https://youtu.be/w8PXI7RXIuU
    Soviet style America.

    • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 6:23 PM

      And Mexico-style America. When there were trains south of the Rio Grande all the tracks leading out from cites looked like what was shown in the video.

  • OneGuy January 15, 2022, 7:48 AM

    I put most of the blame on women in the workforce. Not all women of course but because of cultural and physical reasons women are always treated differently. Imagine in 1950 a group of construction workers and someone tells a dirty joke and one of the workers throws a hissy fit because he is offended and tries to force the boss to fire the joke teller for making it a hostile workplace. Right! You can’t imagine it because it wouldn’t have happened. Now it happens a million times a day all around the world because women and their special status. Put 20 men together, all strangers and give them a job to do and appoint one of them to lead and most likely that is exactly what will happen; the leader will lead and the other 19 will get the job done. Now try that with 20 people half women, half diversity hires, half beta males and put a woman in charge and see what happens.

    • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 12:11 PM

      The 19th Amendment was a great curse. No civilization worthy of note was governed by women. Men rule from above. Women rule from below. Deus vult.

    • Annie Rose January 16, 2022, 8:25 AM

      Anyone who wants to see how some men can equally have the vapors need only work in today’s kinder and gentler firehouses. It’s been getting worse for some time. Ten years ago, a local fire department held up negotiations for the better part of a year on their union contract over toilet paper and hand soap. Not salary. Not bennies. But paper and soap. Those were the top priorities. That was the hill they were willing to die on. Their little heinies felt that the TP ordered for the rest of their village government was too rough for their delicate skin. The hand soap provided for them left their soft hands rough.

      I was told this story by one of the firefighters and he bragged how they had held out and won. The village caved and it was written into their contract that they would get their choice of products. They didn’t care that it would cost the taxpayers more for their specialty products. In my husband’s FD, one guy threatened to bring a grievance because he had used up all of his family leave for the birth of his baby and wanted more time off but didn’t want to use his vacation days. He wanted to use his sick days. His wife was the one who gave birth, but I guess 12 weeks of paid time off wasn’t enough time for him to recover from the rigors of birth. His wife and baby were perfectly healthy, so it wasn’t about health complications. He said it was so he could watch their other two kids and give his wife a break.

      My husband, the chief, refused unless the time off came from vacation days, so this guy went crying to HR and they gave it to him without docking his vacation time, even though the overtime costs to hire back were outrageous. If someone dared to utter a politically incorrect word in the firehouse, some weasel would gasp in horror and come running to my husband to tattle. The gossip was rampant—and always has been (the same in the police department).

      Firemen are worse than fishwives at gossiping. One time one of the deputy chiefs actually began crying when he was chewed out in private for a major screw-up and said my husband’s “mean” words had hurt his feelings. He cried harder over my husband’s reply. One newer fireman complained that he preferred to only work the engine pump during fires because going into the burning buildings was “too hot and smoky”. He was sat down for a “career discussion” because guess what? The word “fire” is part of the word “firefighter” and fires are hot and smokey—as if he never knew that before taking the job. I’m sure his feelings were majorly butt-hurt. Incompetents, delicate snowflakes, and whiners come in both genders.

      As for women leaders, my 28-year-old daughter leads mixed archeological crews on multi-week, back-breaking digs, where they have to haul equipment on their backs and hike to the site and then put in 10+ hour days with shovels in scorching sun, rain, and snow. The men and women work together from before sun up to sun down, because time is money with contractual work. The women do the same amount of work as the men, digging deep test pits through rock, roots, and clay and documenting and bagging any artifacts. No one’s lugging their equipment for them. There are no special cooling tents with cots for them to rest and revive from cramps should their Aunt Flo have arrived. Everyone takes short breaks together and then it’s back to work. Anyone who doesn’t pull their weight doesn’t last long, male or female.

      Every place has its share of slackers and they always have been there, but now there are more of them-males and females, and a lot of them have moved into leadership positions. That’s the real problem.

      • Mike Austin January 16, 2022, 9:09 AM

        Annie: Tell those delicate types at the firehouse that from now on they can clean their rear-ends the ancient Roman way: They will use sticks with sea sponges at one end. When a man has wiped himself, the same sponge is left to soak in a bowl of salt water to be used again and again.

  • Doctor Septimus Pretorious January 15, 2022, 7:50 AM

    Thanks for this interesting review of “days of future past” angst.
    Many decades ago I drove a forklift on the midnight shift in a San Jose automotive assembly plant. Days I spent in college trying to achieve a passing grade from some foreign born professor , or a draft dodging beta male PhD lucky enough to secure a float life in academia. I vividly recall incidents where some bull-redneck would make an issue about me trying to study from a physics book while sitting on the forklift, then having some squat grubby little Pakistani prof bitch that I was closing my eyes too much during his sacred physics lectures.
    Survival in the workplace has always been a choice between freedom and conformity. Who told you it was not ?

  • RedBeard January 15, 2022, 10:20 AM

    Addendum to my previous statement-

    After listening to a shrill-voiced liberal complaining that Caucasians have so much privilege and that (I can’t stand this term) “people of color” are so horribly burdened by poverty- somehow due entirely to their skin pigmentation, I asked him how he came to that completely erroneous conclusion.

    He said his opinion is based on ‘numerous in-depth studies of what causes poverty.’

    So I asked him– okay, so why don’t those researchers also do ‘numerous in-depth studies on what causes prosperity,’ see what causes it, and simply implement that as a model for everyone?

    Being a typical little liberal, he called me a racist while walking away.
    These people absolutely cannot be reasoned with on any level.

    • ghostsniper January 15, 2022, 2:59 PM

      Instead of wasting time considering what OTHER people think, he should go find out himself by interacting with them directly. Until he does that he has no clue at all.

  • Mike Austin January 15, 2022, 12:14 PM

    You got it. The real question is “What causes poverty.”

  • RedBeard January 15, 2022, 3:31 PM

    As unsettling as all the ‘big tech’ problems affecting our society today are, I think the absolute worst is the development and use of Artificial Intelligence.
    I have read up on it- everything from Elon Musk’s warnings to heavy concerns from the actual Scientists in the A.I. field are right out of a horror movie. And China seems to be more heavily invested in it than all other countries.

    Anything that can learn (and teach itself) at a rate over 20,000 times faster than the greatest human mind on earth seems like a very, very dangerous and uncontrollable thing.

    • Zaphod January 15, 2022, 6:25 PM

      You’ll know AI has taken over when you post something reasonably fair and balanced and factual and spade-a-spade-ish about AI and your post gets disappeared.

      And let me be the first to say that I, for one…

  • Tom Hyland January 15, 2022, 5:56 PM

    Vox Day has bestowed upon me, and to others that create their own reality, a warm compliment. Very much worth reading… https://voxday.net/2020/10/18/the-journey-sans-ticket/

    • Zaphod January 15, 2022, 6:27 PM
      • Tom Hyland January 15, 2022, 8:38 PM

        That was nice to read. The most livable inner ring to dwell within requires no others in membership. Cool website, too. I’m going to check it out. Thanks….

    • KCK January 16, 2022, 6:28 AM

      I read the well-written brief with a critical and a skeptic’s eye, because that’s what I do. I’m so disengaged and distanced from corporate America, now. I guess my last paycheck was close to 20 years ago, which is the blinking of an eye. I experienced hostility for my outward Christianity even then and for many years. I can only imagine, and with much bewilderment, the workforce now. It imagines out as utterly nightmarish. Is it true that there is a glass ceiling for actual normal people? The article of this thread describes some under-qualified mid-level manager making an absolute mess of her office. That rings absolutely true: shitty management will destroy everything in its path.

      Remember when we used to read about the absolute zero level of worker performance in the Soviet Union? Welcome there, Comrade.

      It can’t be said enough or with enough emphasis that creativity is the nuclear-fired catalyst of productive growth. If we do sink below some threshold of creativity, say hello to that new millennium of darkness that’s been foretold. Who wants to invest in this present shit show of corporate America? If the engine of American economic power goes cold, imagine the rest of the world.

      Suddenly I feel cold.

  • Gary Hartman January 16, 2022, 8:39 AM

    Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

    Feel free to choose another occupation. With all the opportunities of today the old adage “Get a life”, is never more true. We can be happy and successful as never before. Look around, a new life is there to be had. The darkness in the mind can be lifted. Regulations and their nuances are for others who can’t see. Make your own rules.

    Btw, I left many good positions because of unhappiness. The day I decided to strike out on my own was the day my true happiness began. Never then did I earn enough to be able to participate in what others described as happines, they never knew what I felt.

  • Phloda January 17, 2022, 6:16 AM

    I’m retired but work part time at a community college here in Texas. A new dean was just installed in my division whose main talking points in a sort of townhall interview was that he was an affirmative action champion at his previous jobs and helped those institutions set up their DEI (or is it DIE) programs. Oh, and he wished to be addressed as “Doctor Jamal.”

    I love my direct boss – a middle-age white woman – but as a 71-year-old white guy, I’m guessing my days are numbered.