Suggestion for Silicon Valley

Antonio García Martínez writes in the wake of his firing from Apple over some woke hysteria:

In those confessionals of Silicon Valley life—private Signal groups where everyone is sworn to a secrecy enforced by the mutually-assured destruction of impolitic candor—venture capitalists and CEOs confide that every company is now agonizing over which way to break on the issue: Coinbase-style defiance and voluntary severance? Or Google-like caving to a small but burning-hot swarm of employees? They’re also debating strategies to avoid the woke trap altogether: How do we hire employees who won’t start internal woke crusades and waste everyone’s time? I just want to make this go away: what do I do? Can you just look at this shit? (Slack screenshot attached.)

(My suggestion: Hire mostly immigrants, who still entertain the quaint notion that getting a job means actually showing up and doing it, rather than mounting Slack crusades to fill the spiritual hole at the core of their lives.)

I can refine this suggestion: hire Russian-speaking immigrants. Has anybody seen a woke Russian speaker anywhere? OK, Masha Gessen but that’s it. Russians can write code and can’t take anything ideological seriously.

6 thoughts on “Suggestion for Silicon Valley

  1. The funny thing is that there is a very simple solution to this, but that will never be implemented. Fire your HR department and have actual employees do the hiring interviews. Not new hires obviously, but have senior qualified personnel test the applicants on are if they are reasonably qualified to do the job.

    Take silicon valley companies for instance. You would think the most important thing an applicant could have is an engineering background or a background to that effect. However since most companies gave hiring over to HR, it was no longer which applicant is the best fit for the company, it became which applicant does the HR rep like best.

    Obviously there are other things that allow SJWs to infect and destroy companies, but the HR department is generally at the heart of the cancer.

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    1. Candidates for technical positions at successful software companies have multiple interviews with current employees, usually including their prospective teammates, and are given difficult problems to solve on the spot.

      A Silicon Valley company letting HR dictate their hiring the way you’re describing would not survive for long.

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  2. “the HR department is generally at the heart of the cancer”

    With HR it’s less about meritocratic skills and more about being able to pass personality tests (which the most destructive can do with ease).
    One of the dumbest bits of business CW in the last 30 years is a combination of HR and companies wanting job ready applicants rather than being willing to train people.

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    1. When my husband was going through this last round of job applications, the tedious electronic personality tests were taking up hours of his day. They were so annoying we finally sat down and picked apart the questions, consulted with our respective hiveminds about them… and determined that quite a lot of the “personality” testing is actually covertly assessing your religious/political affiliations. Which employers are not allowed to ask about directly, because that’s discrimination and it’s illegal.

      A similar thing happens when they want your last TEN YEARS of employment history, and specify that they want all of it even if it’s not relevant to the current job. Nobody actually needs to know about your foodservice jobs from eight years ago, or that temporary substitute teaching gig. What that question is really asking is your age. Which is also illegal to ask directly. But if you only have, say, eight years of employment history, going back to your very first summer job at the carwash or the movie theater… your potential employer can nail your age in the neighborhood of 25 (give or take), without ever having to ask it. If your history goes back ten years, and the earliest thing on that list is a professional job that required a degree or real experience to get… they know you’re old. And bad for their group insurance plan.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. “Russians can write code and can’t take anything ideological seriously.” Profound in its simplicity.

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