An Apple Manager’s Experience

Let’s just say he isn’t inclined to fall for Ramaswampy’s self-servingly nepotistic nonsense on the basis of 11 years as a hiring manager at Apple:

During my ~11 years as a hiring manager, I personally hired maybe 20 fulltime & intern employees. Filling empty reqs was a huge source of pressure, both due to workload being down a man and the risk of corporate operational changes yanking an empty req (which did happen). HR handled 100% of sourcing resumes for me, performing a first pass to exclude obvious mismatches. HR turnover was worse than mine, so I quickly told them to just send me everything remotely relevant and I’d filter them myself. “Everything” turned out to be quite a lot.

I never saved any firm stats, but on average I probably looked at 500-2000 resumes for every person hired. When I was inexperienced, this took several minutes per resume, carefully pondering & weighing each detail, and extrapolating to some hypothetical future on my new team. After a few years of experience, I would discard a resume within ten seconds. After a while, you’ve simply seen the same exact sort of person hundreds & hundreds of times. Once you know what’s not the right fit, there’s zero point in hemming & hawing.

I would speak to maybe 2-4% of the candidates I reviewed. Probably 90%+ were filtered out after the first call. Someone credible would talk to another guy on my team, and on or two more if things went well. Someone promising came in for a day with the whole org, two at a time. And this was just my own team. I also far more regularly interviewed on behalf of other teams in my org, & even other orgs, as other managers grew to appreciate my feedback & opinion. All told, I talked to probably over a thousand candidates from tens of thousands of resumes.

Lessons learned: it’s all about which schools’ programs produce the right minds for which specific tasks. Plenty of bright, capable candidates went to schools that simply taught them nothing relevant for an OS platform vendor. We’re not talking databases & web dev for this. Over the years, HR evolved its own prospecting strategies to prioritize schools that produced a high hit rate, plus serving executive bias. Tim went to Duke so after a while all of finance went to Duke. Virtually nobody in SWE came from Duke; different domain entirely.

Over ~2004-2014, the volume of resumes from Indian schools skyrocketed, virtually all the “superstar” IITs. I was always unbiased about the protected categories. Looking back, my all-male team was quite “diverse” although everyone was probably INTJ, now that I think about it. I talked at many dozens of Indians, and quickly learned a few things that are invariant: they are helpfully accommodating to the point of obsequiousness, and this holds regardless of whether they have any clue what they’re talking about. This is crucial to understand.

When you are speaking with an Indian, you are not communicating. You are engaging in a choreographed dance where they are exclusively tasked with mirroring your moves, and leaving you to walk away thinking that your needs will be satisfied. And that is all that has happened. If you don’t know which follow-up questions to ask, you’ll have no idea that you’ve just been handled by an entity that understands how to “close,” but not how to deliver anything promised. The idea of the latter is never even part of the equation. Utterly alien minds to us.

One of Britain’s greatest crimes was teaching them to speak with that hackneyed, goobledygook accent, because it simply fries the brains of most Americans. It is scamouflage for the fact that they will lie, lie, lie as easily as you or I draw breath. It’s indescribable. Thankfully, I became good enough at technical interviewing that a couple simple questions would break their lies wide open, & I could simply nope out in good conscience. After a while, a glance at such resumes told me how the conversations would go, optimizing away the rest.

During this time, in other parts of SWE & IS&T, I watched as a couple Indian hires within 18 months turned into an almost wholesale replacement of any other race in the blighted departments. The degree of their apparently illegal hiring practices cannot be overstated. But of course, who is going to complain, and to whom? One of my last cross-functional meetings at the company, myself & one or two other guys from our org met with one of the terraformed orgs. There were 25 of them packed into a room for a meeting that required 5 people tops.

Regardless of context, every American needs to understand that they will lie under any circumstances for any reason or no apparent reason whatsoever. It is “cultural,” so get over your Christendom-centric notions of morality; those exist nowhere else on Earth.

If you don’t hire and protect your own, you will soon be swamped by those who do. Unlike the tango, it doesn’t require two to play the nationalism game. And if you’re not playing, you’re losing.

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Ramaswampy Doesn’t Know America

A primary example of fake and manufactured “success” tries to convince Americans that emulating India is the way to make America great again.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

When America didn’t allow millions of Hindus to invade the USA, American culture venerated the prom queen and produced the world’s best engineers. Ramaswampy doesn’t know anything about American culture for the obvious reason: he’s not an American and the USA he grew up in was culturally dominated by the self-serving foreign elite that has driven the USA into second-world status.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswampy are not the good guys. They’re not Americans and they’re not on the side of America at all. They’re the Deep State’s attempt to control the nationalist opposition, which is why you’re seeing them come out hard against Americans, nationalism, and sooner or later, Christianity. As to why “Trump” is putting them front and center of his incoming administration, well, either Trump has been fully corrupted by the Deep State, Trump is playing his would-be gatekeepers, or the individual playing the role of Donald Trump is not, in fact, the genuine Trump.

No doubt that sounds far-fetched, but then, most people thought it was pretty far-fetched when I said that Joe Biden was a) senile and b) did not win the 2020 election.

Regardless, Americans just want the USA to be American again. Ramaswampy and his fake elite are part of the problem, not the solution.

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The Ice Expands

The science is settled. Global warming is absolutely nonsense and the Earth is actually in a cooling trend over the last 40 years.

A major study has directly conflicted with one of the leading “global warming” narratives regarding the alleged impact of temperatures on ice levels in Antarctica. The study found that sea ice around Antarctica has “slowly increased” since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979.

According to the top researchers behind the study, any changes to the sea ice are caused by natural climate variation. Over the satellite record, the scientists note there was a “prolonged and gradual” expansion of sea ice to around 2014 followed by a short period of sudden decline from 2014-19.

Growth was then resumed, although there was a temporary downturn around 2022.

At this point, it is very safe to assume that whatever the “scientific consensus” states is not only false, but knowingly and intentionally false. When the very best, gold-plated scientody can’t even manage a 50 percent success rate, there is absolutely no chance that professional, government-funded, Clown World-corrupted scientistry is more than 10 percent accurate.

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Wailing at the Roman Wall

Archeologists and historians have determined that the so-called “wailing wall” that we’ve been told was part of the Jewish temple destroyed in 70 AD actually belongs to a Roman castra built for the Roman garrison of Jerusalem.

We have two major problems here. First, Roman and Christian literary sources agree with Jesus that not one stone of the Temple was standing on another. How can we reconcile this with the fact that the walls of the alleged Temple Mount still have more than 10,000 stones standing upon another? Secondly, Josephus, an eyewitness, says that that the only major building that the Romans spared in 66-70 was their own imperial headquarter, the Roman fort called Fort Antonia, built by Herod the Great and named after his patron Mark Anthony. Where is this fort? Archaeologists have been digging for it in vain, and can’t even agree where it was located. Here is what Israeli archaeologist Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah has to say:

Surprisingly, despite the long duration of military presence in Jerusalem, … no archaeological remains have been attributed with certainty to the military camp and its site has not yet been identified. … One cannot underestimate the difficulty caused by the absence of irrefutable evidence of the Roman army camp in Jerusalem. … At this stage, there is no acceptable solution to the problem of the “lack of remains”.

Fort Antonia housed a legion, that would number at least 5000 men and about 5000 support personnel. Josephus tells us it was like a city in size, dominating the Jewish city. It was so large that troops could perform military maneuvers within the enclosure, in mock war training exercises. We know that Fort Antonia was not destroyed in 70 because it continued to house the Roman Legion X Fretensis until 289 AD, when the Legion was transferred to Ailat on the Red Sea.

So while the sources tell us that the Temple was demolished down to the bedrock and the Roman fort remained in use for 200 years, we are nevertheless asked to believe that the opposite happened: the huge fortified Roman fort disappeared entirely, while the Temple compound is still perfectly recognizable, with its four walls almost intact.

By some additional miracle, that alleged Temple compound, the Haram esh-Sharif on which now stands the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, fits the standard design and size of the Roman forts scattered throughout the empire, and built after the pattern of the Praetorian Camp in the northeastern part of Rome.

There is only one way to make sense of this absurd situation: the Roman fort has been mistaken for the Temple Mount. As Professor George W. Buchanan put it in a 2011 article for the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs: “While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the ‘Temple Mount’ was really the Roman fortress — the Antonia — that Herod built.”

The more we learn, the more we learn that the mainstream version of history is fiction when it isn’t an outright fairy tale.

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At Least They’re Good for the Economy

Imagine how much worse the failing economies of the USA and Europe would be doing if it weren’t for the tens of millions of immigrants who have invaded their countries:

Data from the Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly suggests that crimes committed by illegal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers at least $166.5 billion and the severity of those crimes greatly exceeds that of typical American norms. The report was written by Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center and is based on data from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ). In September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed in a letter to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) that as of July 21, 2024, there are 662,566 illegal immigrants with criminal histories on the Non-Detained Docket (NDD), which means they are living freely in the U.S.

Of the 662,566 illegal immigrants, a total of 435,719 on the docket are documented to have criminal convictions in their home countries; that is 65 percent. Another 226,847 or 34 percent, have pending criminal charges.

FBI crime statistics show that in 2023 the rate of convicted killers in the NDD along is more than 13 times higher that of the rate of reported homicides when compared to American crimes. According to Dr. Lott’s research, out of the total crimes committed by the illegal immigrants on the docket, 14,944 are homicides; 20,061 are sexual assaults; 105,146 are assaults; 126,343 are traffic offenses; and 60,268 are burglaries, larcenies, or robberies. Lott’s report states that the financial cost of crimes committed by illegal immigrants on the NDD list is estimated at $166.5 billion, with the largest share of $153.8 billion coming from murder.

I suspect that the immigration-inspired pillaging of the USA is going to make for a very interesting chapter in the economic history of the decline and fall of the West. Especially since this estimated financial cost apparently doesn’t even include financial crimes of either the real estate or Nigerian Prince variety.

The idea that “immigration is good for the economy” is an even bigger and more obvious lie than “free trade is good for both economies involved” and “kidnapping Africans and transporting them by sea to pick cotton is good for the economy”.

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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Haruki Murakami has a new novel out. He gave an interview about it last month when it was released.

It’s hard to explain what The City and its Uncertain Walls is about. It opens with a guy whose job it is to read dreams. Those dreams are stored on shelves of a library. And that library exists in a town that is surrounded by a wall, with a Gatekeeper watching the one entry point. Oh, and each person has a shadow — one that can live independently from its…host? Source? Person?

It’s Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years. And it’s actually a re-visiting of a novella he wrote in 1980. In an interview conducted through a translator via email, he talked about his inspirations behind the new book, how he feels about getting older and his unyielding love for The Great Gatsby.

The City and its Uncertain Walls has its origins in a short story you wrote and published in 1980. The novel is also connected to a previous book you wrote, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. How do you feel when you’re revisiting work you wrote decades ago?

The 1980 novella I wrote, “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” is the only work of mine I haven’t allowed to be reprinted. It appeared in a magazine, but I didn’t let it be published in book format. The reason is that when it was published in the magazine, I felt it was still raw and immature. The theme I explored in that story was a very important one for me, and what I wrote about was, you might say, an inception point for me as a novelist. The problem was I lacked the requisite writing skills at the time to convey the story the way I thought I should. So I had decided that I would go back to it and do a complete rewrite once I had acquired the necessary experience and writing expertise.

In the meantime, however, other projects came up that I wanted to tackle, and some 40 years passed by (in the flash, it seemed) without me getting back to work on that story. By then I was in my 70s, and I thought maybe I don’t have all that much time remaining. So it’s a great relief to manage to finish writing this novel now, from a fresh perspective. I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I will, of course, be writing a review of it once I finish it. I was very pleased to find a hardcover edition under the tree this morning.

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The Limited Lessons of the Ukraine War

A lot of important lessons are being learned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “relearned” from the current war in Ukraine. But, as Anarchonomicon observes, a number of the various elements of this war are unique and unlikely to be repeated:

You have the resources of dozens of nations representing over half the world’s economy being poured into a country that can neither win nor negotiate, to fight its similar neighbor that also has to fight it out despite the cost due to the international strategic implications, both of whom are Slavic-white countries who both had strong reserves of nationalism and patriotism and avoided the kind of multi-culti mass-immigration that has zapped the willingness to fight for their country right out of every white man in the west, and because of a series of geostrategic accidents they spontaneously agreed to limit the fighting to stretch of land as narrow as that between the Swiss Border and the English Channel.

That’s a whole lot of conditions that will probably never hold again. Or at least certainly not for the next hundred years given the demographic crises everywhere and the pending death of the nation state.

  • If the smaller state doesn’t have allies who can fund it to the tune 50+% its annual GDP it can’t happen.
  • If either country has endured mass immigration/multiculturalism and doesn’t have an eastern european level paradoxical ultra-nationalism for their decaying shithole country…it can’t happen.
  • If either country isn’t being bribed/backed into a corner to refuse all negotiation, it can’t happen.
  • And if either country would rather just expand the war geographically and not fight an attritional trench war, it can’t happen.

The most important thing to note is that Ukraine is Clown World’s proxy. The entire Empire That Never Ended is fighting Russia, and is in the process of losing the war militarily, economically, and diplomatically. And once Clown World either contracts or collapses entirely, there isn’t a similar force on Earth capable of recreating it.

Which means any lessons about late-stage imperial proxy wars will probably not be relevant for another 200 years.

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Women in Tech Fail

The diversity crowd is going to have a tough time increasing the number of women in tech as long as the women are able to get paid more for their less-technical talents.

The draw of making content can overwhelm just about anyone. That includes a bioengineer who was working on her PhD. Last year, Zara Dar made headlines when she shot up to the 0.3% of creators on OnlyFans making content as the “hot science girl.” She was bringing in $30k a month while furthering her education at the University of Texas at Austin. A few days ago, she announced on YouTube, where she has more than 100,000 subscribers, that she had made the decision to become a PhD dropout in order to focus on creating content full-time.

The self-described “nerd with a passion for art, fitness, and reading” admitted that it was a difficult decision to make. Dar said, “I’ve dropped out of my PhD. I’ve cried so much over this decision to quit my PhD, you know, because it’s a stressful decision, not that I’m particularly sad about it… moving on to doing OnlyFans and content creation full-time, it’s not just a career choice, it feels kind of like a gamble on the direction of my entire life.”

This hot science girl is now a PhD dropout, taking her talents to the content game full-time. The draw of furthering her engineering career was strong, but not as strong as doing content. That and having her life tied to someone else’s vision while working for a company, spending her time doing things she didn’t want to do wasn’t what she wanted for herself.

It’s fascinating to observe how fast the social justice movement is destroying itself as well as every corporation, institution, and industry it touches.

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