Covid and the vaccine regime is killing SJW-converged Big Tech. An account from the inside:
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.
We are going to win this cultural war. Whereas conflict is the air we breathe, the delicate snowflakes of converged Corporate America can’t even handle reading the news headlines. Whereas our morale is antifragile, and we become more determined with every deplatforming, discrediting, and demonetization, their morale is breaking under the weight of their loneliness.
The history of 4GW is the history of the side that is weaker in terms of resources, but stronger in terms of morale, reliably proving victorious. We are steadily building strong foundations on every front. They are losing their ability to even release functional products.
We will win.