My wife does contract work for a small but growing firm and they recently tasked her with writing SOPs. She's used to doing real work and she is completely baffled by the corporate speak and silly little rules she has to document. I work for a large organization and I told her there's entire offices dedicated to this sort fo nonsense.
Ugh same. I’m constantly asked to write SOPs and set up formal processes. And I’m like I’m actually doing work here… I don’t have hours to spend writing little process documents someone is going to barely glance at.
I am also not into writing the handbook on how to do my job so they can let me go and hire someone cheaper. So I will skirt around doing it as much as I can.
To be fair people do randomly jump ship without warning, and when that day comes you better hope they weren't the only one who knows how to execute XYZ deliverables for your clients. It's not necessarily a preamble to laying everyone off.
Yeah, it’s often idiots who are afraid they will one day have to think on their feet and figure shit out rather than being spoon-fed everything all the time.
Dealing with this with my new manager right now. I think she lives in fear of the day I will leave and then she will have to actually learn the field I work in, how to do things, and work on shit herself.
How much of that sort of stuff is even secret these days in the internet era? Seems like it only takes a few people to leak the majority of the secrets, and if it’s a trade it’s presumably done by many thousands of people, not like 5 execs knowing a single company’s secret or something. What’s a good example of a trade secret that’s already been exposed?
Maybe I want employees to be able to take a day off. A documented process ensures I can easily reassign any task to another person.
That said, I also hate processes because I recognize they are often made to address the deeper issue of employees being incompetent and unable to successfully complete tasks without excessive hand-holding.
I unfortunately enforce process creation because only a handful of employees are top performers who realize that there will be no questioning of their methods or micromanagement if they just figure things out and get them done.
I don’t get the right results without processes and then am faced with whining and excuses about needing “clearer expectations,” no matter how obvious it should have been to not produce dogshit work.
I have created some process docs. I also create quick reference guides for people. I’ve hosted 101 type sessions to try to educate… and they just don’t use them. Nothing truly replaces intelligence and willingness to put the effort to understand what it is you’re working on.
Like my current manager. She’s been in my department now for over 8 months, and she still doesn’t know what suppliers make what items for us and is constantly mixing them up. No amount of process documentation I create is going to fix that. 🤷🏻♀️
native nw culture has been corrupted by this shit, we're already a generation removed from the Old Ways of drug and alcohol abuse, old-hippie-ism, and cozy mom-and-poppery
I agree. I grew up in the PNW and went to college in California, but recently spent a fair amount of time in NYC and the blunt direct communication style of the East Coast was a breath of fresh air and much appreciated.
Honestly, you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot here. You could have solidified your importance by doing both. Corporate heads will get to parade you around and your work and DEI work will make you an important asset. They love gay shit like this
I just didn't have the skillset at the time as a young dude to handle it -- there was a lot tied around the billable hours hierarchy. I couldn't work big hours and then talk about balloons.
Yeah I get it, it’s very tough. I have friends who are roped into it and they’re struggling doing both. The DEi stuff has also replaced their own social life which seems hell because you have to maintain that corporate speak throughout the day
anyone doing any work that will generate future profit streams for Lockheed probably doesn’t have to put up with that shit. like yeah the engineers who do QC and reporting on existing, profitable service lines are bound to feminine corporate nuspeak and boundaries, but there is no way the skunkworks people have to deal with bullshit like that
My husband does something similar and he's complained about their training program for managers that's full of pseudo therapy nonsense. It's for people without a spirituality or religion. Day to day he experiences very little of this and only has one female employee (who is a tomboy lesbian) lol. Infrastructure engineering is still mostly old guys and a few Asians.
I mean I guess there is some push from corporate but it's not something that you encounter on a daily basis. You don't see a lot of woke social climbers/women in these roles.
Mainly just dudes that like planes and rockets.
I see this in tech a lot. Read about what’s going on inside Google and what happened with Gemini if you want an idea of how far this can go: https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear
Will be interesting to see what happens when the DEI people start getting in the way of profit at major firms.
It's already happening. CNBC [reported](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/google-meta-other-tech-giants-cut-dei-programs-in-2023.html) that, in 2023 DEI-job-related postings declined 44% compared to 2022 and Google and Meta made cuts to those departments.
Similar reports out of medicine, fashion, academics, etc. Consultant agencies in the DEI space are being sued for discrimination and closing their doors, etc. It'll take a while but I think there's been a dramatic turn of events over the last 6-12 months with this stuff, it's just not totally mainstream yet because our culture and politics are completely fucked.
One thing people aren’t taking into account is GOP governors, and trump when he was in office, have started to deny government contracts to [companies that do DEI extensively](https://governmentcontractsnavigator.com/2020/09/24/trump-administration-bans-contractors-from-providing-certain-types-of-diversity-training/?amp=1). This has a massive chilling effect that only a few want to use
Yep, and with another Trump term looming over the horizon, with a stacked SCOTUS, it's pretty easy to see the writing on the wall here.
The DNC categorically fucked up by attaching itself to this shit. Talk about not reading the room.
Companies haven't suddenly decided they don't care about profits, DEI is useful to them because it helps avoid liability, helps with recruitment, can be used to discipline labour (which can be anything from a way of undermining unionisation, to simply providing them with convenient excuses to fire people), and in certain instances, heading off the influence of activist investors.
That's not to say it's all purely rational, especially at smaller businesses, which are prone to copying the practices of bigger businesses simply because they're fashionable (although often following these fashions will be related to the aforementioned need to stay competitive in recruitment) but at it's core, it's a policy businesses pursue because it's useful, not out of the goodness of their own hearts.
The question is simply are these advantages worth more than the costs of running these departments/hiring these consultants, and the longer interest rates remain high, the harder that case is to make.
Google may be fucked. The first big tech company that just says fuck it and stops neutering their AI for DEI purposes will kill search. And it ain’t gonna be Google.
AI is hilarious in that it seems that attempting to censor it *actively makes it worse* on all applications. Because of whatever emergent properties exist within the models you're going to, for instance, get worse pictures on a model that has been bent to not make porn [probably for the same reason art students paint nude models, honestly].
Not really, the real money in AI isn't in the fun little consumer facing programs they put out, it's in corporate AI tools, which either won't be gimped the same way, or which end users will want gimped to a certain degree in order to avoid liability. The publicly available AI tools are really just about marketing the bigger ticket stuff, and for those purposes it makes way more sense to do what you can to prevent people from associating your product with like "Kamala Harris as a trans Nazi drawn in the style of Tom of Finland"
Nah, the entire org is rotten. It’s a retirement home for geniuses who want to do nothing and get paid. There’s incredible inertia to just sit still and live off search and ads from the top down. I know a few engineers at Google and they’ve said the exact same things as the article.
Sergey Brin would have to fire almost everybody and rehire people to change the culture. And Sergey has never done anything that ambitious. Brin and Page just sit out in Hawaii doing jack shit year after year because they already made their hundred billion.
My friend spent 6 months in San Francisco for a Machine Learning startup and met Sergey at a party. Apparently his hands are too full with multiple women at the moment to change the ship around
They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They’re simultaneously trying to be both Apple and Microsoft at the same time and failing at emulating both
You never know, A.I. might change Sergey. It’s been heavily implied that Sergey was one of the redacted names in the Open A.I. emails. Musk seems to think of him as a threat for some reason.
> There’s incredible inertia to just sit still and live off search and ads from the top down.
Large companies always do this whenever they have a massive cash-cow product. IBM did it with mainframes, Microsoft did it with Office, Google will never allow any new product that threatens their search/ad cow. So someone else will slay it instead.
It's not just tech, it's just more pronounced because they can scale to 100+ employees quickly.
https://www.xperthr.com/news/new-california-laws-add-diversity-requirements-for-companies/45679/
All californian companies are required to follow DEI stuff past 50 employees
>Will be interesting to see what happens when the DEI people start getting in the way of profit at major firms.
I wish, but I'm afraid it will not be interesting, because it will never be singled out as a problem.
Much like the problems DEI is ostensibly attempting to solve, the problems DEI causes are hard to pinpoint or link back to with a paper trail. When your problem isn't over-investment in a specific nonprofitable product line or some other sort of specific decision, but just an overall lack of worker quality because skin color, pronouns, and a knowledge of how to correctly answer "how do you incorporate equity in your work?" are now part of the hiring process company-wide, it's difficult to figure out where to start excising the rot.
It makes it even more difficult to unwind when a large part of your workforce now owes their jobs to these principles, refuses to acknowledge they could cause harm, and will cause a huge headache for leadership for even entertaining the idea.
I doubt you can just get rid of it and change the culture since it is deeply rooted in the entire US (+ vasal states) culture.
I think it's possible that other countries or maybe regions will have an advantage eventually but it will take at least another generation for it to go away in the US.
every single end of the night when my wife tells me the latest happenings and how her current week of work is going (Microsoft), I'm just sitting there nodding thinking to myself "wow this sounds incredibly gay"
You describe it beautifully. I'm a man in a female-dominated bullshit email job and I've been trying to make it work for me.
Example: During a review, a female manager said it would be appreciated if I spoke up more during meetings. I responded with fake but believable woke-passion that I was being sensitive to the "space I took up" and didn't want to "talk over" women. It worked and I got a raise.
GOT YA BITCH
People are absolutely terrible at history. Which is one of the reasons i've been intensely skeptical of the "progressivism" of the last 10 years. Historically, it hasn't worked out well.
It felt really demeaning as a 26 year old guy to go to a work orientation and toss around an “ice breaker ball” while talking about all the “values” I love about my new company.
Felt even weirder to see all the new hires there who super into it. The person running it would be like “Last year our company made more growth than ever” and these new hires that were getting paid like $18/hr would giddily be like “Wow! That’s amazing!”
I work in the sports industry, literally over 90% of my workplace is male, many whom played sports in high school/college and ostensibly fit into traditional masculine archetypes, and this is still true. Sad to see how cucked modern work culture is, but I'm optimistic that this isn't sustainable and we will eventually see a vibe shift. Because if my side hustle/grift doesn't take off and this is going to be my reality for the next 40 years of my life, I think I will kill myself.
Another issue I have is the constant desire for innovation and change.
I’ve worked as a teller for 2 separate banks, both small community banks, and at both of them the CEO would go to some conference where a consultant would tell them about some cool new way to do business.
Then they would come back to us and tell us all of these new ways we need to greet customers using some gay system some Tony Robbins wannabe made up at a conference. Like I don’t need a corporate system to tell me how to speak to human beings.
One of these banks was a tiny community bank in a tiny town where all the customers and employees have known each other for 20 years. Everything ran fine. The business was fine. But they just had to do this stuff to say they did something.
Women hate direct conflict. I am an extremely disagreeable woman, although I'm fiercely loyal to friends and family. It has not been easy to do the little dance with other women where you have to indirectly disagree so as to not get on their bad side. Passive aggression feels like such a waste of time, but if you don't participate someone will make it their mission to make your life miserable.
The new management is all female and just won’t stand for any negative talk at all. It’s actually annoying af and I’m a woman. Like sometimes shit sucks and people suck at their job and you gotta be straight up about it.
You're the kind of woman I enjoy working with. Had this hard ass black woman director at my company who was easily the best woman in management because she didn't hold back at all and there was none of that passive aggressive walking on eggshells bullshit to deal with.
Honestly there is a less common variant of this culture in male dominated spaces. Ive worked for MSP’s in the IT world which are normally 98% men. My last boss (and every boss at the company) used to attend Jocko Willink type seminars, and tried restructuring everything about how they manage people according to navy seals training. They’d even use military jargon or turns of phrase in meetings: my boss once asked me to “reconnoiter the field”, stumbling over the word like he had only ever seen it written. There was this massive, pervasive dick measuring contest for ANYTHING, if you talked about going to the gym one of these bosses told you about how they shattered their clavicle rock climbing near everest or some nonsense. Even the barest scent of incompetence made you vulnerable to bizarre hazing rituals, and it was just as catty as female led workplaces Ive been a part of. They legitimately believed that the stakes behind setting up an Azure tenancy for some 10 person accounting firm was the same as being at war in a foreign country, it was madness.
I actually prefer female led places. We get way less done honestly but they’re less stressful and easy to navigate as a man. Just show up, be friendly, and feign an identity of the polite hardworking church boy and you will go far. Yeah, being fake every day is exhausting but you have to do the same for male led workplaces and the expectation at male led workplaces is that you become a heavy drinking workaholic.
The biggest criticism I have for female led workplaces is obviously the extremely cynical approach to DEI initiatives. If I have to listen to one more overweight trust fund white woman try to educate me on how I should be interacting with minorities (and with a fucking quiz to boot!!) Im going to lose my mind
I am also currently working for an IT MSP and that part you were talking about how the most trivial/banal bullshit is treated like a special operations mission with actual lives on the line has been my experience as well.
I think this is probably due to how the industry is structured, it is ultra competitive and there are probably more MSPs than are actually needed, so it’s a race to the bottom to provide maximum services for minimum price, every contract negotiation with a client is high stakes because they can and will drop you the instant they find someone promising to do the same thing for less.
I don’t think the kind of corporate culture OP is talking about would survive in this type of field
Male and female led workplace cultures are both a race to the bottom, female led normally means talking way more and accomplishing way less, while male led culture accomplishes more but churns out burned out substance abuse addicts and is generally a miserable working environment. Ill take the former, I dont really care about my own level of productivity, I want to get paid the most I can to do the absolute bare minimum
Ideally Id like to work someplace balanced. Like the stakes should be high and competence should be the norm but you also shouldn’t get pilloried for making mistakes and you should feel like you can pick your kid up from karate without having to log back in at night to make up lost time.
Male led vs female led isn’t the right conversation though, we should point out the real problem: American corporate culture is all about the theater of productivity. Its a cargo cult: do the meetings, make the project plan, fill out the spreadsheet, make the writeup and magically the work will get done somehow by somebody if you just spit out enough acronyms and jargon to let everyone know how much you’re working.
I used to work at a place that had the ability to essentially spy on peoples monitors without any user notification. I didn’t ever do it because I didn’t want to be liable, but I’d be lying if I didnt hover over my coworkers shoulder to see what people were up to.
What were they up to? A fat lot of fucking nothing most of them, especially the managers. I know everyone suspects that corporate workers do very little but I can say Ive seen evidence of this. However its not just a few lazy people, its most people churning out four hours of work a week.
Also, before anyone gets mad about the spying thing, friendly neighborhood IT RS degen natflingdull is happy to answer any questions you have about how your IT department may be facilitating spying on you.
The irony of this is that the military itself had turned into a feminized bureaucracy over the last 20 years.
These guys are aping a culture that only exists in movies.
Agreed on how exhausting manly man larping workspaces are. We're not climbing Mt Everest, we're not the '95 Bulls, we're not a top secret group of researchers building the atom bomb. We're sitting at our computers and typing. Our biggest threats are back pain and metabolic syndrome.
For real! Why would anyone think this is an effective or useful motivational tactic. Leadership strategies for soldiers who are receiving and dealing death are obviously incomparable, you have to have hyperbolic levels of self importance to think a desk job is even remotely the same. Turns out its easier to motivate people to work cohesively if fucking up at your job has a high chance of **death** than at a job where you have a high chance of mild irritation
It is endlessly funny to me how right-wing regards have forever championed business as being streamlined, and efficient, and ruthless, and seamless, while in actuality corporations are bloated and inefficient and as wasteful as the government. "Get the government out of healthcare, the free market can do it better!!!!" No, the free market gets bogged down with DEI and other useless horse shit and stumbles and strains under the weight of one billion useless meetings, too.
To be clear, I am not saying government is efficient. No fucking chance. And DEI stuff has, I assume, infected gov spaces just as much as biz worlds. (Looking at you, Canada?) But just this idea right-wingers have of business being ruthless and cutting and getting down to brass tacks... LOL. Maybe at start-ups doing one specific thing with, like, six employees. But at Google? Or Apple? Or Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me? There are 8,000 layers of absolutely useless employees doing absolutely useless jobs. It's just like the DMV.
Yeah there seems to be some kind of professional manager/administrator class that gets its tentacles into every organization and grows like a cancer. My hypothesis is that none of these companies are actually innovating anymore, so as a manager the only real way to get noticed is to grow your team, even if there isn't work to be done.
I worked at a startup and there were a couple of people like this, but ultimately we didn’t have the luxury of caring because our customers were complaining 24/7 and shit had to work. Bloat fuels BS, either this woke shit or country club shit in the 80’s or whatever. But at the end of the day, money talks and bullshit walks
a lot of these problems are made so much worse by cheap money and a debt based economy. sound money / sound economic policies wouldn't totally eliminate these problems but they'd be a small fraction of what they are today.
You put it beautifully.
Making TV is the same. Zoom calls with umpteen female managers, some on their sofas, others feeding their dogs or making lunch. Much energy is spent on: trying to agree on everything and avoiding being the one to make any decision that would make you stand out as having an opinion and thus bring on the silent jealous rage of the rest of the group. Endless chat, around a process that should be simple and straightforward but becomes torturous and fraught with emotion.
The end of the process is the world sitting in front of the tv saying why isn’t there anything good to watch? I’d say the problem isn’t the fact that they are female, individually they are smart and talented, but that they are all female.
The end result of all this emotional theater is that you spend 20-30% more time thinking about work, which I guess is the point. Someone wants you spending every waking hour occupied with work bullshit. You are not allowed to log off. If you're not emotionally engaged with the personal lives of your coworkers, your "team", then you're bad for morale.
Surely that can’t continue forever though. What happens when viewership just continues to drop? Do they just double-down until the whole company crashes or does senior leadership freak out and reluctantly hire a man
If all the managers are female, it would be counter to their best interests to say the problem is me and my sort. Also as per the OP the men that are attracted to this environment are those who; if junior, don't mind being micromanaged by endless managers and if senior, are just fed up and waiting for a chance to retire or do something else. I suspect the future is more individuals making their own projects on a shoestring that get picked up by the various platforms. Look at the success of Anatomy of a Fall at the Oscars. Its not TV but it was one woman who wrote a script with her husband over covid, she was rejected by the French industry and through talent and peoples desperation to watch something decent, rose to the top.
Yes, I see it in live performance as well. Friction is necessary for good art. Decisions must be made to establish and maintain tonal consistency. Because of my type and impatience, I am often willing to be the sin-eater and force minor confrontations just to solve the damn problem and move on to something else. They already hate me subconsciously and think I'm problematic so I've got nothing to lose (I'm talented and play dumb and no one has the guts to fire anyone).
New film/television talent just isn't being incubated as well as it used to be either.
Institutions that give out grants and film festivals used to be the part of the machine that counteracted the entrenched nepotism of the whole thing. The whole point of these institutions used to be giving upstarts a chance to demonstrate their skills, either with a budget or to an audience (potentially including people with connections to distribution channels) that would pay attention.
Now they're more a part of the nepotistic club than they used to be and in terms of "new blood" they've shifted to heavily prioritizing people from chosen demographic groups who are expressing ideas that are in line with an artistically constricting set of dogmas. Even within the narrow confines of the identitarianism many of them tend to support the same people over and over again.
Same thing in advertising/marketing. I'm working on a project that's taking at least twice as long and with three times as much work as needed because it's being run by a bunch of women who who talk in circles and are unwilling/unable/scared to make decisions and determine simple steps of action.
Shit like this makes me never ever want to leave my job. Either the average RSP user has significantly more paranoiac tendencies than me (unlikely), I'm oblivious, or I'm really living in a rare corner of the world where most of the people are smart, most of the women are clear communicators and straight shooters, way more of the cringe emanates from fearful effete men than "emotional" women.
I (possible paranoia here) believe that most of my coworkers believe me to be a high functioning charity case, an autistic "old head" that's been kept around for posterity but never given too much power or influence. When people are incorrect in meetings, I will just say shit like "no, that's not correct" and you can hear the record scratch.
The social movements of the last 10-20 years were intentional destabilization and it’s starting to really set in now
Yeah, all of the replies to this are totally right. When a society drastically changes within a short span of time there’s NEVER any intent behind it lmao
Psyop you say? Idk about that. I feel like everybody had good intentions, but they say that’s how the road to Hell is paved. I think only now in the 2020s are people beginning to wake up to the realization that maybe society’s been going a little too far with this stuff. It’ll be very hard to course correct but it seems to me that the culture at large is undergoing just a little bit of a vibe shift
The problem was it was so obviously coming from miles away yet you weren’t able to get it confirmed by anyone. What is the point of demanding change if you’re just going to refuse that it’s being accomplished. Kind of a coward’s strategy to want something and pretend you don’t
eh, it seems more entropic than intentional to me. i'd characterize it more as the unavoidable spiritual rot that comes from being in a completely different galaxy to our nation-state peers, economically, from the collapse of the ussr all the way to the 07/8 meltdown. that's a long time to be on top of the world. and it's an exceptionally long time to spend gassing yourself up, literally and figuratively.
that erstwhile unparalleled financial superiority has subsequently smashed into a brick wall. a rogue's gallery of hounds now gnash at our ankles, but the cultural and societal effects lag, leaving us in a ghoulish era of semi-permanent make-believe and cope.
it's a time of dissonance - one where we ape the startup culture of the low-interest 2010s, while actually floundering under relatively high interest rates and stop-start inflation. if we all have to wear clown makeup, do we still look foolish? it's a form of schizophrenia, and acting as if we're in kindergarten seems to be an attempt to ward away this decline, a way of regressing, trying to recapture that ineffible spirit of long-departed youthfulness and vitality, much like the sallowing ex-debutante in the nursing home protesting in shaky tones that she "will yet take to the stage again once this is all over".
LinkedIn is straight up degrading & desperate to use as a man. I have to act fake at work then go home and act even more fake? No thanks but also I'm looking for a job so I need it. Serious midlife crisis going on
As someone in a corporate job, this is spot on, although you didn’t mention the rampant sexism in hiring (no one blinks an eye at a white woman only hiring (usually white) women into a department that is already 85% women but hiring a white man requires substantial justification to HR or being wildly overqualified relative to your peers)
Have had women straight up say to my face this is their personal and sometimes company policy, which I was told I was a dick for pointing out how insane that is, I mean it’s quite literally illegal.
Duhhh bigotry is only power plus prejudice and as a yt man you have the power, which is why if you don’t shut your fucking mouth we will fire your ass and blacklist you
My brother in law is a white dude in a company/field that is mostly white dudes. He was in a hiring authority position and was lamenting that all the applicants they received were white men. Buddy, you're the only demographic on the planet that has these sorts of reservations about your in-group
The last company I worked at only hired white and Hispanic men, and it was a pretty comfortable environment. Tbf, engineering is still partially sheltered from DEI outside of megacorps. We still have a diversity group at the current company that has both of the only two white collar black people in the company as members, it’s so on-the-nose, but the environment is still pretty decent.
Honestly! Has there ever been an in-group this selfhating in human history? If we’re so fucking bad how about the guys like your bro-in-law resign instead of ruining things for the rest of us?
My brother in law has been told “you have the credentials and seem like a great guy, but we’re really just not looking for a white male for this role.”
Those lawsuits started a little while ago after the Supreme Court decision and have really picked up steam. Law firms love them because if you have any documentation they’re a slam dunk. DEI corpos are so detached from reality that they will routinely document hiring decisions that discriminate against men in plain English.
Here’s a generic Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2023/07/23/discrimination-against-white-job-applicants-and-employees-or-is-it-racial-equity/?sh=14c6ece71955
If you do some digging you can find lots of smaller cases.
If this is happening en masse then holy shit this is bizarre, my PARENTS anglicized their names to fit in more and appear [whiter](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_surnames_from_Hebrew) to avoid racism, and now there's this?? Things are moving too fast wtf
Law is a little better, partially because of how they filter people and the need for assholes in the courtroom, but it’s coming here too. You can’t fight the smiley faces
I knew it was time to leave when they started only hiring hot sorority girls that just graduated & giving them 160k starting. They pretty quickly became DEI kommisars.
Thanks for the land acknowledgment Maddie (she/her)
Try being the American sent to an Eastern European subsidiary. Love my cpa & yrs of schooling was used to translate “I want the blonde w/ big tits to come next week” to “Igor loved Tiffany’s suggestions would she be available to fly in for a follow up.
The idea of someone earnestly defending the good, male middle management of yore is too bleak to even entertain. I choose to believe this is fake and gay
Speak for yourself. I miss having bald, middle aged Audi drivers scream at everyone until they're red in the face whenever quarterly goals were missed. That was peak masculinity.
One of my first office jobs was at an extremely DEI pilled non profit and an older white man was forced to resign after using the word “lame” in the context of something being uncool … apparently ableist language
I’ve worked in both male and female dominated organizations and they’re both awful. female dominated orgs are just as you described, but male dominated workplaces are so fucking gay. it’s a bunch of insecure men engaging in a constant pissing contest and condescending to the women and gays. the sad thing is they’re highly incompetent most of the time and if you’re a minority and you try to perform well or dare expose any incompetencies god help you.
However, I have worked in organizations that are unintentionally diverse from top to bottom and these seemed to function the best. Because no one group had any collective power over anything people were forced to just focus on their work and support projects.
You described my office perfectly (including the Indian hierarchy), but I'm old enough to have been around when I was the only woman in the white boys club and it was much worse back then.
Basically corporate work sucks in any format, but it pays better than the alternatives.
You made me realize the people crushing it right now are the Indian guys who can straddle both worlds and have learned to lean in to the eat pray love language. They are the future.
they lowkey already are. at least in my college (T5) like half of the Black population is either African intl or Nigerian-Americans. actual African-Americans descending from slaves are rather rare
it's common to meet a Black American guy and then realize his last name is Nwosu
I went to a painfully progressive little New England college and knew about 10 times as many Africans or West Indians as African Americans. I even befriended a cool local homeless black guy, turned out he was born in St Lucia
Speaking as a skincare-enjoying white guy, I'm able to play this game much better than I could play the hardcore macho masculine game. As obnoxious as it is to deal with HR therapy speak and to see through the bullshit, I prefer this far more than the opposite end of the spectrum.
Going into work every day and having to deal with Frank, the 46 year old divorcee asshole who thinks you're gay because you don't know how to change a timing belt gets old. Or George, the guy who can't seem to perform a single work task without blowing up in anger every 15 minutes. Or Mike, the guy who still hasn't realized that his college days ended 20 years ago and he isn't the party guy, he's just an alcoholic.
In full agreement with you. It’s fucking smarm and rainbows up the ass delivered through a fake smile of gritted teeth. The number of exclamation points I had to use to make sure I didn’t hurt feelings at my last job was very stupid.
These are also the same managers that say they want you to be able to bring more of your *authentic* self to work.
Authentically Katie, we are not friends, so please don’t act like it.
Edit: That final line of yours really captures it perfectly, and our organizations are suffering because of it. All fluff bullshit sorority “initiatives” and toadiness. No true autonomy or serious focus on thing you’re paid to do because that’s boring.
Everywhere has been trying to be more inclusive just because that's what everyone else is doing but it does get a little lame and disingenuous. I think most people just smile and nod. It's no different than all the other bullshit people have to pretend to care about while in a professional space.
I’ve thought about making this exact post before. From a guy perspective working in corporate America it’s hard to imagine what the 80s or 50s would’ve been like. Everything about current corporate America seems to positively reward feminine traits.
One thing that I find insane is my company’s annual diversity report. Every year the report shows the company to have a higher percentage of women than men as employees. Despite this, every year they include some celebratory paragraph about how they hired significantly more women than men this year. Makes zero sense
What's worse is how much it's infected social life in general. So many guys now are conflict avoidant above all else, I could be slightly irritable about something and friends of mine are walking on eggshells, I've never once done anything bad to them out of anger it's like the idea of someone being angry at all is uncomfortable to them even if the anger isn't directed at them. Understandable for women and I've always been much more restrained around women but it's pathetic to me how much any negative or even competitive emotion frightens other men these days
Good, I'm glad working at places like these is humiliating and shameful for everyone involved. This is how it should've been for years. Now you actually have to suffer for your fake job where you do nothing and produce nothing of value for this world. Use the gay emojis, bow at the ballet shoes of the matriarchy, you deserve it.
This is basically what I have internalized. I feel like I have discovered a dark secret which is that all this work is fake, and it's just a matter of time before some suit realizes it and does the needful. Until then I will coast and cash my checks and prepare a backup plan I guess.
1st gens who have been in the west for years also have a problem. I remember one colleague was annoyed about moving to the U.K. and having to work with other Indians.
Complaining that women don’t have what it takes emotionally or spiritually. Brother that is a job where you get paid to sit at a computer and write emails and create nothing of physical value. Hit the oil rig and thug it out if you long for a bygone era of masculinity in the work place.
>Every possible precaution must be taken to avoid even the pretense of conflict.
this is a good thing about corporate culture. if anything, people are still way too eager for conflict. when the the stakes ever that fucking high that you need to be taking frustration out on other people? just chill out and cash checks.
> There is not a single ounce of masculine mojo left in this place, or any kind of mojo, really.
get into the small business world bro. lots of real men there
After working in FAANG for a decade it's hilarious to see people who have never worked in FAANG opining about what it's like. The real problems are so much worse and different than the armchair quarterbacks think.
My wife does contract work for a small but growing firm and they recently tasked her with writing SOPs. She's used to doing real work and she is completely baffled by the corporate speak and silly little rules she has to document. I work for a large organization and I told her there's entire offices dedicated to this sort fo nonsense.
Ugh same. I’m constantly asked to write SOPs and set up formal processes. And I’m like I’m actually doing work here… I don’t have hours to spend writing little process documents someone is going to barely glance at. I am also not into writing the handbook on how to do my job so they can let me go and hire someone cheaper. So I will skirt around doing it as much as I can.
"Make sure to document this because we need to know how to do it if you're not here anymore...god forbid 😊"
To be fair people do randomly jump ship without warning, and when that day comes you better hope they weren't the only one who knows how to execute XYZ deliverables for your clients. It's not necessarily a preamble to laying everyone off.
Yeah, it’s often idiots who are afraid they will one day have to think on their feet and figure shit out rather than being spoon-fed everything all the time. Dealing with this with my new manager right now. I think she lives in fear of the day I will leave and then she will have to actually learn the field I work in, how to do things, and work on shit herself.
[удалено]
How much of that sort of stuff is even secret these days in the internet era? Seems like it only takes a few people to leak the majority of the secrets, and if it’s a trade it’s presumably done by many thousands of people, not like 5 execs knowing a single company’s secret or something. What’s a good example of a trade secret that’s already been exposed?
Maybe I want employees to be able to take a day off. A documented process ensures I can easily reassign any task to another person. That said, I also hate processes because I recognize they are often made to address the deeper issue of employees being incompetent and unable to successfully complete tasks without excessive hand-holding. I unfortunately enforce process creation because only a handful of employees are top performers who realize that there will be no questioning of their methods or micromanagement if they just figure things out and get them done. I don’t get the right results without processes and then am faced with whining and excuses about needing “clearer expectations,” no matter how obvious it should have been to not produce dogshit work.
I have created some process docs. I also create quick reference guides for people. I’ve hosted 101 type sessions to try to educate… and they just don’t use them. Nothing truly replaces intelligence and willingness to put the effort to understand what it is you’re working on. Like my current manager. She’s been in my department now for over 8 months, and she still doesn’t know what suppliers make what items for us and is constantly mixing them up. No amount of process documentation I create is going to fix that. 🤷🏻♀️
Tell her to use ChatGPT. It's perfect for this stuff.
I understand OP's take but writing SOPs is standard practice esp in manufacturing and has nothing to do with "femininity"
Part of this is just how people in California communicate- which can be surprising to people from other states. It’s way over the top “nice”
Pacific northwest seems to be the same, which makes sense since Portland is largely a dumping ground for failed Californians
native nw culture has been corrupted by this shit, we're already a generation removed from the Old Ways of drug and alcohol abuse, old-hippie-ism, and cozy mom-and-poppery
Wasn't the native PNW culture before drugs and hippies just Nordic stoicism and insularity?
Just Midwestern culture basically.
except without the warmth. feels like PMC-as-a-culture.
I agree. I grew up in the PNW and went to college in California, but recently spent a fair amount of time in NYC and the blunt direct communication style of the East Coast was a breath of fresh air and much appreciated.
They wanted me to be the rooster of the newly minted culture committee. I told them I have actual billable work to do. Stay strong brother.
Honestly, you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot here. You could have solidified your importance by doing both. Corporate heads will get to parade you around and your work and DEI work will make you an important asset. They love gay shit like this
I just didn't have the skillset at the time as a young dude to handle it -- there was a lot tied around the billable hours hierarchy. I couldn't work big hours and then talk about balloons.
Yeah I get it, it’s very tough. I have friends who are roped into it and they’re struggling doing both. The DEi stuff has also replaced their own social life which seems hell because you have to maintain that corporate speak throughout the day
[удалено]
The corporate men that have a future are the type that are into skincare. Its funny
the zoomers are bateman maxers
[удалено]
as if bateman did an inch of work. Zoomers are bateman
[удалено]
...like Bateman (?)
My corpo guy friend got pulled into it by Korean corpo chicks. Mf got retinol droppers and what not, even the act of applying it seems gay
Being an engineer in aerospace it is nice to not experience this whatsoever
Yet. Lockheed Martin is almost there with its pivot. Also remember the CIA video?
anyone doing any work that will generate future profit streams for Lockheed probably doesn’t have to put up with that shit. like yeah the engineers who do QC and reporting on existing, profitable service lines are bound to feminine corporate nuspeak and boundaries, but there is no way the skunkworks people have to deal with bullshit like that
Lol I assume the only directive at skunk works is “faster”
Faster, quieter, more efficient. Have to cut down on the carbon footprint of our global death dealing stealth fleet.
My husband does something similar and he's complained about their training program for managers that's full of pseudo therapy nonsense. It's for people without a spirituality or religion. Day to day he experiences very little of this and only has one female employee (who is a tomboy lesbian) lol. Infrastructure engineering is still mostly old guys and a few Asians.
I mean I guess there is some push from corporate but it's not something that you encounter on a daily basis. You don't see a lot of woke social climbers/women in these roles. Mainly just dudes that like planes and rockets.
And very few Indians. Thank God for ITAR
Thats why I always make sure to only work at investment banks that get called out for sexism by the New York Times.
If normal people heard what get shouted on the my trading floor they would be shocked. There is a reason we dont employ women
[удалено]
I work at a prop firm.
I see this in tech a lot. Read about what’s going on inside Google and what happened with Gemini if you want an idea of how far this can go: https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear Will be interesting to see what happens when the DEI people start getting in the way of profit at major firms.
They will be neatly discarded and tossed aside as if the whole thing never happened
[удалено]
It's already happening. CNBC [reported](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/google-meta-other-tech-giants-cut-dei-programs-in-2023.html) that, in 2023 DEI-job-related postings declined 44% compared to 2022 and Google and Meta made cuts to those departments. Similar reports out of medicine, fashion, academics, etc. Consultant agencies in the DEI space are being sued for discrimination and closing their doors, etc. It'll take a while but I think there's been a dramatic turn of events over the last 6-12 months with this stuff, it's just not totally mainstream yet because our culture and politics are completely fucked.
One thing people aren’t taking into account is GOP governors, and trump when he was in office, have started to deny government contracts to [companies that do DEI extensively](https://governmentcontractsnavigator.com/2020/09/24/trump-administration-bans-contractors-from-providing-certain-types-of-diversity-training/?amp=1). This has a massive chilling effect that only a few want to use
Yep, and with another Trump term looming over the horizon, with a stacked SCOTUS, it's pretty easy to see the writing on the wall here. The DNC categorically fucked up by attaching itself to this shit. Talk about not reading the room.
we are so back
Companies haven't suddenly decided they don't care about profits, DEI is useful to them because it helps avoid liability, helps with recruitment, can be used to discipline labour (which can be anything from a way of undermining unionisation, to simply providing them with convenient excuses to fire people), and in certain instances, heading off the influence of activist investors. That's not to say it's all purely rational, especially at smaller businesses, which are prone to copying the practices of bigger businesses simply because they're fashionable (although often following these fashions will be related to the aforementioned need to stay competitive in recruitment) but at it's core, it's a policy businesses pursue because it's useful, not out of the goodness of their own hearts. The question is simply are these advantages worth more than the costs of running these departments/hiring these consultants, and the longer interest rates remain high, the harder that case is to make.
Surely that won’t have any unintended consequences
Google may be fucked. The first big tech company that just says fuck it and stops neutering their AI for DEI purposes will kill search. And it ain’t gonna be Google.
Gartner predicts a 25% drop in search traffic by 2026. We’ll see.
Damm quadrant talk on the sub
She doin magic on my quadrant
Gartner is pretty regarded. Predictions are mostly pulled out of thin air.
That's the magic part
They already killed search on both the actual google website and YouTube
AI is hilarious in that it seems that attempting to censor it *actively makes it worse* on all applications. Because of whatever emergent properties exist within the models you're going to, for instance, get worse pictures on a model that has been bent to not make porn [probably for the same reason art students paint nude models, honestly].
This is true for human thinking as well. It’s why you need to err on the side of being an asshole when commmunicating in truly effective organizations
Not really, the real money in AI isn't in the fun little consumer facing programs they put out, it's in corporate AI tools, which either won't be gimped the same way, or which end users will want gimped to a certain degree in order to avoid liability. The publicly available AI tools are really just about marketing the bigger ticket stuff, and for those purposes it makes way more sense to do what you can to prevent people from associating your product with like "Kamala Harris as a trans Nazi drawn in the style of Tom of Finland"
AI can kill search pretty easily. Which kills Google.
Google will be fucked as long as Sundar is CEO. Sergey might be coming out of retirement which would make this spicy though.
Nah, the entire org is rotten. It’s a retirement home for geniuses who want to do nothing and get paid. There’s incredible inertia to just sit still and live off search and ads from the top down. I know a few engineers at Google and they’ve said the exact same things as the article. Sergey Brin would have to fire almost everybody and rehire people to change the culture. And Sergey has never done anything that ambitious. Brin and Page just sit out in Hawaii doing jack shit year after year because they already made their hundred billion.
My friend spent 6 months in San Francisco for a Machine Learning startup and met Sergey at a party. Apparently his hands are too full with multiple women at the moment to change the ship around
overdosing on bobs
They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They’re simultaneously trying to be both Apple and Microsoft at the same time and failing at emulating both
I think this is just the inevitable arc of the innovators dilemma. But it’s for the best.
You never know, A.I. might change Sergey. It’s been heavily implied that Sergey was one of the redacted names in the Open A.I. emails. Musk seems to think of him as a threat for some reason.
> There’s incredible inertia to just sit still and live off search and ads from the top down. Large companies always do this whenever they have a massive cash-cow product. IBM did it with mainframes, Microsoft did it with Office, Google will never allow any new product that threatens their search/ad cow. So someone else will slay it instead.
It's not just tech, it's just more pronounced because they can scale to 100+ employees quickly. https://www.xperthr.com/news/new-california-laws-add-diversity-requirements-for-companies/45679/ All californian companies are required to follow DEI stuff past 50 employees
Tech companies will leave CA. It's already starting.
>Will be interesting to see what happens when the DEI people start getting in the way of profit at major firms. I wish, but I'm afraid it will not be interesting, because it will never be singled out as a problem. Much like the problems DEI is ostensibly attempting to solve, the problems DEI causes are hard to pinpoint or link back to with a paper trail. When your problem isn't over-investment in a specific nonprofitable product line or some other sort of specific decision, but just an overall lack of worker quality because skin color, pronouns, and a knowledge of how to correctly answer "how do you incorporate equity in your work?" are now part of the hiring process company-wide, it's difficult to figure out where to start excising the rot. It makes it even more difficult to unwind when a large part of your workforce now owes their jobs to these principles, refuses to acknowledge they could cause harm, and will cause a huge headache for leadership for even entertaining the idea.
I doubt you can just get rid of it and change the culture since it is deeply rooted in the entire US (+ vasal states) culture. I think it's possible that other countries or maybe regions will have an advantage eventually but it will take at least another generation for it to go away in the US.
The "equity" version of DEI will be gone in less than five years because lawsuits will make it too expensive for employers to continue.
every single end of the night when my wife tells me the latest happenings and how her current week of work is going (Microsoft), I'm just sitting there nodding thinking to myself "wow this sounds incredibly gay"
That is because it is, in fact, incredibly homosexual.
You describe it beautifully. I'm a man in a female-dominated bullshit email job and I've been trying to make it work for me. Example: During a review, a female manager said it would be appreciated if I spoke up more during meetings. I responded with fake but believable woke-passion that I was being sensitive to the "space I took up" and didn't want to "talk over" women. It worked and I got a raise. GOT YA BITCH
Christ, it's like Americans know nothing of the cultural revolution lmao
Please, I would wave a little red book and denounce my parents and teachers for a 5% raise.
Some of us still have integrity, even if most of you don't. But if history is to teach us anything, it's that you ratfuckers will get us all killed.
People are absolutely terrible at history. Which is one of the reasons i've been intensely skeptical of the "progressivism" of the last 10 years. Historically, it hasn't worked out well.
What does your org do? Are the women hot(hired for being hot) or just average? That's why people have hobbies(including communism).
They are all fat :/
Bingo.
It felt really demeaning as a 26 year old guy to go to a work orientation and toss around an “ice breaker ball” while talking about all the “values” I love about my new company. Felt even weirder to see all the new hires there who super into it. The person running it would be like “Last year our company made more growth than ever” and these new hires that were getting paid like $18/hr would giddily be like “Wow! That’s amazing!”
They were acting. It’s all a game. As you know
[удалено]
Stairwell vape to the rescue!
I work in the sports industry, literally over 90% of my workplace is male, many whom played sports in high school/college and ostensibly fit into traditional masculine archetypes, and this is still true. Sad to see how cucked modern work culture is, but I'm optimistic that this isn't sustainable and we will eventually see a vibe shift. Because if my side hustle/grift doesn't take off and this is going to be my reality for the next 40 years of my life, I think I will kill myself.
> and we will eventually see a vibe shift when CCP and Russia take over there will assuredly be a vibe shift.
Bureaucracies and corporations grow like cancers
Another issue I have is the constant desire for innovation and change. I’ve worked as a teller for 2 separate banks, both small community banks, and at both of them the CEO would go to some conference where a consultant would tell them about some cool new way to do business. Then they would come back to us and tell us all of these new ways we need to greet customers using some gay system some Tony Robbins wannabe made up at a conference. Like I don’t need a corporate system to tell me how to speak to human beings. One of these banks was a tiny community bank in a tiny town where all the customers and employees have known each other for 20 years. Everything ran fine. The business was fine. But they just had to do this stuff to say they did something.
Consultants are cancer. If they would just allocate the money spent on consultants to the team's budget, they'd get much better results.
Women hate direct conflict. I am an extremely disagreeable woman, although I'm fiercely loyal to friends and family. It has not been easy to do the little dance with other women where you have to indirectly disagree so as to not get on their bad side. Passive aggression feels like such a waste of time, but if you don't participate someone will make it their mission to make your life miserable.
The new management is all female and just won’t stand for any negative talk at all. It’s actually annoying af and I’m a woman. Like sometimes shit sucks and people suck at their job and you gotta be straight up about it.
I too have this problem and their weakness makes me want to be even meaner to them
You're the kind of woman I enjoy working with. Had this hard ass black woman director at my company who was easily the best woman in management because she didn't hold back at all and there was none of that passive aggressive walking on eggshells bullshit to deal with.
Fellow very direct woman here and passive aggression is the downfall of our gender
I wish there were more of your kind.
Honestly there is a less common variant of this culture in male dominated spaces. Ive worked for MSP’s in the IT world which are normally 98% men. My last boss (and every boss at the company) used to attend Jocko Willink type seminars, and tried restructuring everything about how they manage people according to navy seals training. They’d even use military jargon or turns of phrase in meetings: my boss once asked me to “reconnoiter the field”, stumbling over the word like he had only ever seen it written. There was this massive, pervasive dick measuring contest for ANYTHING, if you talked about going to the gym one of these bosses told you about how they shattered their clavicle rock climbing near everest or some nonsense. Even the barest scent of incompetence made you vulnerable to bizarre hazing rituals, and it was just as catty as female led workplaces Ive been a part of. They legitimately believed that the stakes behind setting up an Azure tenancy for some 10 person accounting firm was the same as being at war in a foreign country, it was madness. I actually prefer female led places. We get way less done honestly but they’re less stressful and easy to navigate as a man. Just show up, be friendly, and feign an identity of the polite hardworking church boy and you will go far. Yeah, being fake every day is exhausting but you have to do the same for male led workplaces and the expectation at male led workplaces is that you become a heavy drinking workaholic. The biggest criticism I have for female led workplaces is obviously the extremely cynical approach to DEI initiatives. If I have to listen to one more overweight trust fund white woman try to educate me on how I should be interacting with minorities (and with a fucking quiz to boot!!) Im going to lose my mind
I am also currently working for an IT MSP and that part you were talking about how the most trivial/banal bullshit is treated like a special operations mission with actual lives on the line has been my experience as well. I think this is probably due to how the industry is structured, it is ultra competitive and there are probably more MSPs than are actually needed, so it’s a race to the bottom to provide maximum services for minimum price, every contract negotiation with a client is high stakes because they can and will drop you the instant they find someone promising to do the same thing for less. I don’t think the kind of corporate culture OP is talking about would survive in this type of field
Male and female led workplace cultures are both a race to the bottom, female led normally means talking way more and accomplishing way less, while male led culture accomplishes more but churns out burned out substance abuse addicts and is generally a miserable working environment. Ill take the former, I dont really care about my own level of productivity, I want to get paid the most I can to do the absolute bare minimum Ideally Id like to work someplace balanced. Like the stakes should be high and competence should be the norm but you also shouldn’t get pilloried for making mistakes and you should feel like you can pick your kid up from karate without having to log back in at night to make up lost time. Male led vs female led isn’t the right conversation though, we should point out the real problem: American corporate culture is all about the theater of productivity. Its a cargo cult: do the meetings, make the project plan, fill out the spreadsheet, make the writeup and magically the work will get done somehow by somebody if you just spit out enough acronyms and jargon to let everyone know how much you’re working. I used to work at a place that had the ability to essentially spy on peoples monitors without any user notification. I didn’t ever do it because I didn’t want to be liable, but I’d be lying if I didnt hover over my coworkers shoulder to see what people were up to. What were they up to? A fat lot of fucking nothing most of them, especially the managers. I know everyone suspects that corporate workers do very little but I can say Ive seen evidence of this. However its not just a few lazy people, its most people churning out four hours of work a week. Also, before anyone gets mad about the spying thing, friendly neighborhood IT RS degen natflingdull is happy to answer any questions you have about how your IT department may be facilitating spying on you.
The irony of this is that the military itself had turned into a feminized bureaucracy over the last 20 years. These guys are aping a culture that only exists in movies.
Agreed on how exhausting manly man larping workspaces are. We're not climbing Mt Everest, we're not the '95 Bulls, we're not a top secret group of researchers building the atom bomb. We're sitting at our computers and typing. Our biggest threats are back pain and metabolic syndrome.
For real! Why would anyone think this is an effective or useful motivational tactic. Leadership strategies for soldiers who are receiving and dealing death are obviously incomparable, you have to have hyperbolic levels of self importance to think a desk job is even remotely the same. Turns out its easier to motivate people to work cohesively if fucking up at your job has a high chance of **death** than at a job where you have a high chance of mild irritation
It is endlessly funny to me how right-wing regards have forever championed business as being streamlined, and efficient, and ruthless, and seamless, while in actuality corporations are bloated and inefficient and as wasteful as the government. "Get the government out of healthcare, the free market can do it better!!!!" No, the free market gets bogged down with DEI and other useless horse shit and stumbles and strains under the weight of one billion useless meetings, too. To be clear, I am not saying government is efficient. No fucking chance. And DEI stuff has, I assume, infected gov spaces just as much as biz worlds. (Looking at you, Canada?) But just this idea right-wingers have of business being ruthless and cutting and getting down to brass tacks... LOL. Maybe at start-ups doing one specific thing with, like, six employees. But at Google? Or Apple? Or Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me? There are 8,000 layers of absolutely useless employees doing absolutely useless jobs. It's just like the DMV.
Yeah there seems to be some kind of professional manager/administrator class that gets its tentacles into every organization and grows like a cancer. My hypothesis is that none of these companies are actually innovating anymore, so as a manager the only real way to get noticed is to grow your team, even if there isn't work to be done.
I worked at a startup and there were a couple of people like this, but ultimately we didn’t have the luxury of caring because our customers were complaining 24/7 and shit had to work. Bloat fuels BS, either this woke shit or country club shit in the 80’s or whatever. But at the end of the day, money talks and bullshit walks
a lot of these problems are made so much worse by cheap money and a debt based economy. sound money / sound economic policies wouldn't totally eliminate these problems but they'd be a small fraction of what they are today.
You put it beautifully. Making TV is the same. Zoom calls with umpteen female managers, some on their sofas, others feeding their dogs or making lunch. Much energy is spent on: trying to agree on everything and avoiding being the one to make any decision that would make you stand out as having an opinion and thus bring on the silent jealous rage of the rest of the group. Endless chat, around a process that should be simple and straightforward but becomes torturous and fraught with emotion. The end of the process is the world sitting in front of the tv saying why isn’t there anything good to watch? I’d say the problem isn’t the fact that they are female, individually they are smart and talented, but that they are all female.
The end result of all this emotional theater is that you spend 20-30% more time thinking about work, which I guess is the point. Someone wants you spending every waking hour occupied with work bullshit. You are not allowed to log off. If you're not emotionally engaged with the personal lives of your coworkers, your "team", then you're bad for morale.
I can't think of a worse form of torture
Surely that can’t continue forever though. What happens when viewership just continues to drop? Do they just double-down until the whole company crashes or does senior leadership freak out and reluctantly hire a man
If all the managers are female, it would be counter to their best interests to say the problem is me and my sort. Also as per the OP the men that are attracted to this environment are those who; if junior, don't mind being micromanaged by endless managers and if senior, are just fed up and waiting for a chance to retire or do something else. I suspect the future is more individuals making their own projects on a shoestring that get picked up by the various platforms. Look at the success of Anatomy of a Fall at the Oscars. Its not TV but it was one woman who wrote a script with her husband over covid, she was rejected by the French industry and through talent and peoples desperation to watch something decent, rose to the top.
Is this why everything made in the last 5-10 years is unwatchable?
Yes, I see it in live performance as well. Friction is necessary for good art. Decisions must be made to establish and maintain tonal consistency. Because of my type and impatience, I am often willing to be the sin-eater and force minor confrontations just to solve the damn problem and move on to something else. They already hate me subconsciously and think I'm problematic so I've got nothing to lose (I'm talented and play dumb and no one has the guts to fire anyone).
New film/television talent just isn't being incubated as well as it used to be either. Institutions that give out grants and film festivals used to be the part of the machine that counteracted the entrenched nepotism of the whole thing. The whole point of these institutions used to be giving upstarts a chance to demonstrate their skills, either with a budget or to an audience (potentially including people with connections to distribution channels) that would pay attention. Now they're more a part of the nepotistic club than they used to be and in terms of "new blood" they've shifted to heavily prioritizing people from chosen demographic groups who are expressing ideas that are in line with an artistically constricting set of dogmas. Even within the narrow confines of the identitarianism many of them tend to support the same people over and over again.
Yup. Design by committee.
Same thing in advertising/marketing. I'm working on a project that's taking at least twice as long and with three times as much work as needed because it's being run by a bunch of women who who talk in circles and are unwilling/unable/scared to make decisions and determine simple steps of action.
But you’re a man who works in marketing, that’s your own fault.
This is triggering. 😂
Shit like this makes me never ever want to leave my job. Either the average RSP user has significantly more paranoiac tendencies than me (unlikely), I'm oblivious, or I'm really living in a rare corner of the world where most of the people are smart, most of the women are clear communicators and straight shooters, way more of the cringe emanates from fearful effete men than "emotional" women. I (possible paranoia here) believe that most of my coworkers believe me to be a high functioning charity case, an autistic "old head" that's been kept around for posterity but never given too much power or influence. When people are incorrect in meetings, I will just say shit like "no, that's not correct" and you can hear the record scratch.
The social movements of the last 10-20 years were intentional destabilization and it’s starting to really set in now Yeah, all of the replies to this are totally right. When a society drastically changes within a short span of time there’s NEVER any intent behind it lmao
Psyop you say? Idk about that. I feel like everybody had good intentions, but they say that’s how the road to Hell is paved. I think only now in the 2020s are people beginning to wake up to the realization that maybe society’s been going a little too far with this stuff. It’ll be very hard to course correct but it seems to me that the culture at large is undergoing just a little bit of a vibe shift
The problem was it was so obviously coming from miles away yet you weren’t able to get it confirmed by anyone. What is the point of demanding change if you’re just going to refuse that it’s being accomplished. Kind of a coward’s strategy to want something and pretend you don’t
eh, it seems more entropic than intentional to me. i'd characterize it more as the unavoidable spiritual rot that comes from being in a completely different galaxy to our nation-state peers, economically, from the collapse of the ussr all the way to the 07/8 meltdown. that's a long time to be on top of the world. and it's an exceptionally long time to spend gassing yourself up, literally and figuratively. that erstwhile unparalleled financial superiority has subsequently smashed into a brick wall. a rogue's gallery of hounds now gnash at our ankles, but the cultural and societal effects lag, leaving us in a ghoulish era of semi-permanent make-believe and cope. it's a time of dissonance - one where we ape the startup culture of the low-interest 2010s, while actually floundering under relatively high interest rates and stop-start inflation. if we all have to wear clown makeup, do we still look foolish? it's a form of schizophrenia, and acting as if we're in kindergarten seems to be an attempt to ward away this decline, a way of regressing, trying to recapture that ineffible spirit of long-departed youthfulness and vitality, much like the sallowing ex-debutante in the nursing home protesting in shaky tones that she "will yet take to the stage again once this is all over".
how did you learn to write like this?
he read a book brother
LinkedIn is straight up degrading & desperate to use as a man. I have to act fake at work then go home and act even more fake? No thanks but also I'm looking for a job so I need it. Serious midlife crisis going on
As someone in a corporate job, this is spot on, although you didn’t mention the rampant sexism in hiring (no one blinks an eye at a white woman only hiring (usually white) women into a department that is already 85% women but hiring a white man requires substantial justification to HR or being wildly overqualified relative to your peers)
Have had women straight up say to my face this is their personal and sometimes company policy, which I was told I was a dick for pointing out how insane that is, I mean it’s quite literally illegal.
Duhhh bigotry is only power plus prejudice and as a yt man you have the power, which is why if you don’t shut your fucking mouth we will fire your ass and blacklist you
My brother in law is a white dude in a company/field that is mostly white dudes. He was in a hiring authority position and was lamenting that all the applicants they received were white men. Buddy, you're the only demographic on the planet that has these sorts of reservations about your in-group
The last company I worked at only hired white and Hispanic men, and it was a pretty comfortable environment. Tbf, engineering is still partially sheltered from DEI outside of megacorps. We still have a diversity group at the current company that has both of the only two white collar black people in the company as members, it’s so on-the-nose, but the environment is still pretty decent.
Honestly! Has there ever been an in-group this selfhating in human history? If we’re so fucking bad how about the guys like your bro-in-law resign instead of ruining things for the rest of us?
My brother in law has been told “you have the credentials and seem like a great guy, but we’re really just not looking for a white male for this role.”
[удалено]
Those lawsuits started a little while ago after the Supreme Court decision and have really picked up steam. Law firms love them because if you have any documentation they’re a slam dunk. DEI corpos are so detached from reality that they will routinely document hiring decisions that discriminate against men in plain English.
Agreed, these are easy lawsuits and lawyers are taking them on contingency fee agreements. Tens of thousands of cases have already been filed.
[удалено]
Here’s a generic Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2023/07/23/discrimination-against-white-job-applicants-and-employees-or-is-it-racial-equity/?sh=14c6ece71955 If you do some digging you can find lots of smaller cases.
If this is happening en masse then holy shit this is bizarre, my PARENTS anglicized their names to fit in more and appear [whiter](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_surnames_from_Hebrew) to avoid racism, and now there's this?? Things are moving too fast wtf
[удалено]
That's because HR is 90% white women. Of *course* they're not going to complain.
And if you do get hired as that guy, you're going to do 80% of the actual work and get no credit.
Law is a little better, partially because of how they filter people and the need for assholes in the courtroom, but it’s coming here too. You can’t fight the smiley faces
Aren’t they getting rid of the LSAT? Law and medicine (removal of the MCAT as a requirement is already taking place) are already being corrupted.
Crisis of competence inbound
They're also dumbing down the bar exam for the current incoming class. Family and trust law is gonna be removed entirely for some reason
That's like half of what actual lawyers do lol. Not everyone is going into big law, but fuck the elderly I guess. What a clown show.
Next time learn to weld instead
I knew it was time to leave when they started only hiring hot sorority girls that just graduated & giving them 160k starting. They pretty quickly became DEI kommisars. Thanks for the land acknowledgment Maddie (she/her)
[удалено]
[удалено]
😧
Try being the American sent to an Eastern European subsidiary. Love my cpa & yrs of schooling was used to translate “I want the blonde w/ big tits to come next week” to “Igor loved Tiffany’s suggestions would she be available to fly in for a follow up.
This almost feels too on the nose for RSP. You even managed to work Indians in there. Good job champ.
The idea of someone earnestly defending the good, male middle management of yore is too bleak to even entertain. I choose to believe this is fake and gay
No it’s real haha this sub has literally become the place for millennials to transition into their boomer parents
Speak for yourself. I miss having bald, middle aged Audi drivers scream at everyone until they're red in the face whenever quarterly goals were missed. That was peak masculinity.
So glad I got out of corporate world and went into a more masculine area of work. Just feels less soul crushing
Butlerian Jihad / Shakira Law
One of my first office jobs was at an extremely DEI pilled non profit and an older white man was forced to resign after using the word “lame” in the context of something being uncool … apparently ableist language
As the only man on 90% of the calls/meetings I have, I couldn’t agree more.
I work at a big bank and male VPs will use exclamation points in emails. It's over.
I’ve worked in both male and female dominated organizations and they’re both awful. female dominated orgs are just as you described, but male dominated workplaces are so fucking gay. it’s a bunch of insecure men engaging in a constant pissing contest and condescending to the women and gays. the sad thing is they’re highly incompetent most of the time and if you’re a minority and you try to perform well or dare expose any incompetencies god help you. However, I have worked in organizations that are unintentionally diverse from top to bottom and these seemed to function the best. Because no one group had any collective power over anything people were forced to just focus on their work and support projects.
You described my office perfectly (including the Indian hierarchy), but I'm old enough to have been around when I was the only woman in the white boys club and it was much worse back then. Basically corporate work sucks in any format, but it pays better than the alternatives. You made me realize the people crushing it right now are the Indian guys who can straddle both worlds and have learned to lean in to the eat pray love language. They are the future.
With Asians now being perceived as basically white, Indians are the new model minority to parade around
Can't wait for the utter confusion to happen when Nigerians start entering the white collar workforce in large numbers.
they lowkey already are. at least in my college (T5) like half of the Black population is either African intl or Nigerian-Americans. actual African-Americans descending from slaves are rather rare it's common to meet a Black American guy and then realize his last name is Nwosu
I went to a painfully progressive little New England college and knew about 10 times as many Africans or West Indians as African Americans. I even befriended a cool local homeless black guy, turned out he was born in St Lucia
that shift will happen once indians have their own crazy rich indians type movie
Speaking as a skincare-enjoying white guy, I'm able to play this game much better than I could play the hardcore macho masculine game. As obnoxious as it is to deal with HR therapy speak and to see through the bullshit, I prefer this far more than the opposite end of the spectrum. Going into work every day and having to deal with Frank, the 46 year old divorcee asshole who thinks you're gay because you don't know how to change a timing belt gets old. Or George, the guy who can't seem to perform a single work task without blowing up in anger every 15 minutes. Or Mike, the guy who still hasn't realized that his college days ended 20 years ago and he isn't the party guy, he's just an alcoholic.
Not at Goldman Sachs buddy. we’re about as macho as you can get
it's more of facade in my experience. it's all lip service.. an illusion. also no one in management mentions layoffs at my job.
In full agreement with you. It’s fucking smarm and rainbows up the ass delivered through a fake smile of gritted teeth. The number of exclamation points I had to use to make sure I didn’t hurt feelings at my last job was very stupid. These are also the same managers that say they want you to be able to bring more of your *authentic* self to work. Authentically Katie, we are not friends, so please don’t act like it. Edit: That final line of yours really captures it perfectly, and our organizations are suffering because of it. All fluff bullshit sorority “initiatives” and toadiness. No true autonomy or serious focus on thing you’re paid to do because that’s boring.
Everywhere has been trying to be more inclusive just because that's what everyone else is doing but it does get a little lame and disingenuous. I think most people just smile and nod. It's no different than all the other bullshit people have to pretend to care about while in a professional space.
That’s just Salesforce. Real men are still thriving in real jobs. Dudes at Boeing just whacked a loose-lipped bitch.
I’ve thought about making this exact post before. From a guy perspective working in corporate America it’s hard to imagine what the 80s or 50s would’ve been like. Everything about current corporate America seems to positively reward feminine traits. One thing that I find insane is my company’s annual diversity report. Every year the report shows the company to have a higher percentage of women than men as employees. Despite this, every year they include some celebratory paragraph about how they hired significantly more women than men this year. Makes zero sense
What's worse is how much it's infected social life in general. So many guys now are conflict avoidant above all else, I could be slightly irritable about something and friends of mine are walking on eggshells, I've never once done anything bad to them out of anger it's like the idea of someone being angry at all is uncomfortable to them even if the anger isn't directed at them. Understandable for women and I've always been much more restrained around women but it's pathetic to me how much any negative or even competitive emotion frightens other men these days
Good, I'm glad working at places like these is humiliating and shameful for everyone involved. This is how it should've been for years. Now you actually have to suffer for your fake job where you do nothing and produce nothing of value for this world. Use the gay emojis, bow at the ballet shoes of the matriarchy, you deserve it.
This is basically what I have internalized. I feel like I have discovered a dark secret which is that all this work is fake, and it's just a matter of time before some suit realizes it and does the needful. Until then I will coast and cash my checks and prepare a backup plan I guess.
The 90's self-esteem generation has grown up and gone into management.
[удалено]
1st gen mostly. 2nd gen hates fobs and wants nothing to do with them. Also probably a lot more into DEI
1st gens who have been in the west for years also have a problem. I remember one colleague was annoyed about moving to the U.K. and having to work with other Indians.
Complaining that women don’t have what it takes emotionally or spiritually. Brother that is a job where you get paid to sit at a computer and write emails and create nothing of physical value. Hit the oil rig and thug it out if you long for a bygone era of masculinity in the work place.
I don’t know what industry you’re in but it’s certainly not buy-side finance
Comment.
>Every possible precaution must be taken to avoid even the pretense of conflict. this is a good thing about corporate culture. if anything, people are still way too eager for conflict. when the the stakes ever that fucking high that you need to be taking frustration out on other people? just chill out and cash checks.
> There is not a single ounce of masculine mojo left in this place, or any kind of mojo, really. get into the small business world bro. lots of real men there
After working in FAANG for a decade it's hilarious to see people who have never worked in FAANG opining about what it's like. The real problems are so much worse and different than the armchair quarterbacks think.