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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I believe tech companies are meritocratic in the hiring process

Hopefully without doxxing myself, I work as a contractor for several of the top-5 tech companies (however that is construed it is true). So I'm privy to a lot of their internal communications, culture, etc. And I can tell you that these people are simply falling all over themselves to worship the dark and the lame. The gay, the fake, the trans. It's pathological and it's clearly a very high priority.

at least for the tech positions

Yes, but this is doing a lot of work. A serious skilled employee (i.e. white or asian male) generates enough productivity to support maybe 10-20 others. But this is being utilized. I go to a lot of sales meetings, etc. with the 'big guys' and it turns out that almost everyone in a position to function in other-than-coding-or-facilities is a woman of color, and they (mostly) have no idea what's going on.

I like to ask people questions. E.g. I was once at the Udvar-Hazy museum, where resides the actual Enola Gay, and was fortunate enough to chance upon a veteran who had flown the same model of plane. I asked him one of my favorite questions, which is, "If you could change anything about it, what would you change?" This is, more broadly, a great question to ask of anyone about his industry. But the guy's response was, "The head." Apparently people at one end of the plane had to crawl through a long, cramped, dark, very cold tube to get to the bathroom. Fair enough and good answer; precisely the sort of insight for which I am fishing.

So anyway, given what I do, people very high-up on the corporate ladder like to meet me and have a conversation. Executives, etc. And I like to ask them, "How did you get into this?" Up until about 2017 it was mostly white men with blue eyes and they had interesting answers. Long life histories, fascinating twists and turns, happened to be in the right place at the right time so as to illustrate broader trends and forces. These guys were enthusiastic about describing their journeys and, frankly, grateful to tell someone who clearly wanted to glean what wisdom he could from their examples.

Now it's all girls with names like Roselia and they have no idea how they got where they are. Not only that, but they perceive that they don't belong, and suffer terribly from impostor syndrome, and hate me for asking. So, after a couple years of bad sales, I stopped asking, started emotionally supporting them, and am doing just fine. Except inside.

And I can tell you that these people are simply falling all over themselves to worship the dark and the lame. The gay, the fake, the trans. It's pathological and it's clearly a very high priority.

True, but worshipping various identities is one thing but working with the incompetent is quite another, and in general they don't want to do the latter, which is why their diversity numbers remain what they would consider abysmal. Google had a rather large group of true believers who really thought (and perhaps still do think) that they could somehow find and/or create far more black and (cis)female software engineers. And they failed, over and over again.

I believe that the best argument for HBD is that years after setting progressive diversity goals for themselves, the most powerful, wealthy, data-rich companies still can't meet them. Perhaps we need some kind of kamikazes willing to crash entire departments by hiring large numbers of random brown people to hit the diversity targets (only), but that wouldn't exactly look good for anti-racism enthusiasts.

Not only do they believe they can make engineering representative of US demographics, they believe that racism within the company is the reason it isn’t already representative.

Never mind that the company sources talent globally and neither India or China can help to deliver black engineers.

I know some guys from India who are black-passing.