Tag: converged corporations

Bud Light Replaces the Marketing Witch

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Alissa Heinerscheid has taken a “leave of absence” and has been replaced as VP of Marketing for Bud Light.  I hope the Bud Light drinkers stick by their boycott.  A really painful loss of revenue is just the right lesson that these corporate geniuses need to experience.

And not because we hope they’ll learn their lesson.  It should be for two reasons.  One is an object lesson for the rest of the masters of the universe out there to see what happens when you stab your customers in the back.

And secondly just for pure revenge on these jerks.  Just plain spite.  I love spite.

Real People and Pods

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(Updated)

Corporate America has mutated over the course of the last thirty years into a completely different creature.  Back in the ‘90s if you worked for even a cold-blooded corporation like Raytheon and even though you knew (and they admitted) that you were nothing but a faceless cog to them that they would layoff at the drop of an earnings point still there was an honesty about what they were about and what your place in the company was.  You were there because they had measured your competency and they had work that they were willing to pay you to do.  And as long as you accomplished that work in a satisfactory manner and they continued to have that work for you to do, then you were a cog in good standing with Raytheon.

But in the last five years a very different model has existed at American corporations.  A larger and larger proportion of the company’s time and energy is invested in social justice.  And not just in the trappings and theater that corporations have up until now been involved in.  These trappings are things like sensitivity training and “celebrations” of diversity where they hand out rainbow magnets with which everyone must festoon their cubicles.  We’ve all learned to ignore all that crap because it’s annoying but relatively harmless.

What isn’t harmless is the diversity hires that don’t work.  I group this category into two cases.  The first case is the out and out hopeless employees.  A few years back we had an opening for a senior process engineer.  This requires someone with about five years of experience.  We don’t need a genius but we do need to have someone who knows the basic requirements for the process equipment that we use and also competency in the engineering knowledge that we typically need.  So, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, material science and the good manufacturing practices that the FDA expects in a biopharma plant.  My boss at the time had a found a candidate.  The candidate was a senior engineer at one of our competitors.  But more importantly she was a black woman from Africa.  He was in heaven.  She was a threefer; a woman, black and a foreigner.  He sang her praises and told me how much she would bring to the process engineering group through her pluperfect quantities of diversity.  For a minute I was afraid he would jump up on his desk and start dancing or burst into tears.  I nodded my head and inwardly hoped for the best.

Well, she was utterly unqualified.  She was completely unfamiliar with even the simplest equipment and instrument components.  One of the first thing a chemical process engineer becomes familiar with at his first job in a processing plant is relief valves.  The senior engineers love to stick the newbies with the thankless task of sizing and specifying these devices.  There are a bunch of safety cases that have to be considered that have to do with things like a fire breaking out in the area or a runaway reaction occurring.  I was prepared to have to teach her how to do the sizing calculations.  What I wasn’t expecting was that she didn’t even know what a relief valve is.  I was kind of stunned.  What I realized then was that they had hired someone who wasn’t an engineer.  She wouldn’t be able to do any of the work that her spot on the team would get assigned.  Six people would have to do the work of seven.  Luckily for us this very personable woman spent most of the remainder of her time with us either on maternity leave or sick leave.  She ended up having two and a half children before she left for her next diversity engineering position with one of our competitors.

That’s the first category, the completely useless.  The second category is not as absurd but much more damaging and demoralizing.  This is the Supergirl category.  Here they select a straight out of college young woman, preferably an attractive blonde girl, and put her in charge of a large group of qualified technical people and by dint of power point slides and corporate blather elevate her to upper management.  She has a very high-ranking male boss as her mentor who makes sure that everyone on the team understands that failure is not an option.  So, if she decides to institute a continuous improvement program that requires everyone to work eighty-hour weeks to constantly update the systems in an almost random fashion on a bimonthly basis then that is what everyone will do if they want to remain on the “team.”

And that is what will be.  For the younger people they’ll accept this nonsense because they’re trying to build a career.  But it’s extremely discouraging for the qualified people working under this wunderkind.  And not just the men.  Plenty of the senior women are outraged that they’ve been leapfrogged over by goldilocks and they immediately assume she’s sleeping with the boss.  So, morale goes straight to hell and anyone who can leave, does.  Eventually the problems this causes are laid at the feet of her boss and she gets kicked upstairs to the executive suite where the whole thing probably happens again.

And in the last year since the George Floyd fiasco things have gotten even worse.  Now straight white men have been targeted as people who can be openly harassed as bad people.  This is accelerating the exodus of qualified professionals from these woke companies.  The people who remain are a combination of either those who desperately need their jobs or those who agree with the social justice narrative.  And there are even straight white men who fit the latter case.  Canadians seem especially well suited for this environment.

But that brings me to the point of this post.  In the old days even at the most dehumanizing corporate hellholes you would still find plenty of humans, people you wouldn’t mind sharing a beer or playing a game of cards with.  In fact, everyone could agree on just how bad the company stunk.  But in today’s woke corporations they are actively selecting both by positive and negative reinforcement for pod people.  Working in a place that has a dysfunctional selection process that creates a caste system that ignores merit will create an echo chamber that normal people will find intolerable and in the long run will make the company unprofitable.

A few companies (e.g., Basecamp) have decided to reverse this trend and select merit as the basis for hiring and advancement.  Hopefully this will grow into a trend.  But until it does the corporate environment will be a bleak vista for the normal Joe.

06JAN2022 Update

Chemist

I’ve seen many of these hires as well. One of our useless hires (Previous employer) made a major mistake that could have killed people. It was a safety violation and management had no choice but to fire her. But they couldn’t just fire her! No, the Gods demanded a sacrifice! So a senior technician (White male, so who cares?) was also fired for “Not catching her mistake”. Apparently, it was his job to keep an eye on her. Who knew?

I had a wunderkind as a boss shortly after grad school so I stayed to build my career. This woman could do no wrong. Like you said, when the problems became apparent, they fired her boss – and gave her his job. A year later she went on maternity leave for 3 months and came back to a VP position. Must be nice.

 

 

07JAN2022 Update

Jason

Unfortunately, I’ve seen the wunderkind crap too many times. I’ve even been passed over because I didn’t fit the apparent “demographic need” (ie, I wasn’t female and attractive). I had been at one very large company for 6 years (12 years of total experience in the workforce) and was deemed not the right fit for a manager role that they gave to a 23 year old. To be fair, she was gorgeous. I could see the draw. Beyond that though, she ticked several other boxes as well… she was personable, easy-going, and seemed to be a real “go-getter,” etc.

She just wasn’t real bright. And the M&A role she was promoted into needed a bright person. She actually skipped one “level” and was essentially promoted twice into this role. They did offer me a transfer into the group, but it would have been a lateral move and I would have been working for this girl. I passed on the move, much to my manager’s relief.

She is now employed with the same company and has been promoted a couple times beyond that manager role to a “director,” whatever that means.

The company was trying the “woke” thing, even back in 2011 when this particular story took place. They had a women’s development group, etc. We even had meetings where they told us that they were not trying to “promote” women just because they were women even though that’s exactly what they were doing. They apparently forgot that actions speak loudly, and we weren’t blind just because we were men.

Richest Man In Illinois Says Chicago Resembles Afghanistan

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Ken Griffin is a hedge fund manager and he is thinking of getting his company out of Chicago.

“Billionaire Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, hinted Monday that he might move his company’s headquarters from Chicago, saying the crime makes the city more akin to a war-torn country.

“It’s becoming ever more difficult to have this as our global headquarters, a city which has so much violence,” Griffin said. “I mean Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem.”

Griffin said he personally saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in, adding that someone “tried to carjack the security detail” that sits outside his house.”

My favorite quotes,

“It just tells you like how deep crime runs in this city,” Griffin said. “There is nowhere, where you can feel safe today walking home at 9:30 at night and you worry about your kids coming to and from school.”  “That’s no way for our city to exist,” Griffin said.

The perception of crime has started making it difficult to recruit talent to Citadel’s Chicago campus, he said, and he can’t in good faith tell people the city is a good place to raise a family anymore.

Griffin didn’t say where he might consider moving his global headquarters to, but he was asked if New York City could serve as an “antidote to the dysfunction” of Chicago.  “You guys need some new medicine, too, because some of the same problems that we have faced is now unfolding in New York,” Griffin said. “The path New York is on is a scary path.”

It’s about time that these cloud people got their heads wrapped around what they’ve signed on for.  What did they think would happen when they bent the knee to BLM and allowed the police to be vilified?  Maybe if it were their children being terrified at school and their businesses being burned out they might not be so matter of fact about unleashing antifa on us.  Too bad a few of those bullets didn’t come a little closer to his face.

This Thing Just Gets More Entertaining by the Day – Basecamp – The Prequel

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While enjoying the tweets of the various Basecamp employees that were virtue signaling their resignations, I came across a tweet by someone named Casey Newton who was commiserating with the brave golden parachutists who were flouncing into unemployment.  Turns out he is a “reporter” at the The Verge and he has written a breathless tell all expose laying bare the sordid heart of “Basecamp-Gate,” as I like to call it.

And I’ve got to say the lameness of the whole thing is extraordinary.  It started back in 2009.  Now, that was back before the woke monster had terrorized all normal people into keeping their heads down and genuflecting to whatever golden idol had been thought up by the SJW’s at work.  Well, some computer geeks at Basecamp had been amusing themselves by going through the database of customers and picking out the names that were the funniest to their tenth-grade psyches.  You can only imagine the hilarity, Seymour Johnson, Dick Steele, etc.  Fast forward ten years and those employees are gone but the list surfaces and the SJW’s spring into action.  One of the geniuses points to an Anti-Defamation League incitement document that claims there is a “pyramid of hate” that provides a clear and inescapable escalation from school yard rank-out sessions all the way up to death camps.

To their surprising credit the owners of Basecamp have spent an enormous amount of energy trying to smooth over this kerfuffle.  Without dismissing the concerns of the always outraged SJW’s they have steered a middle course of acknowledging the inappropriate nature of the joke but deciding that nothing terrible happened or would happen because of this incident and attempting to move on without the necessity of firing anyone or moving heaven and earth to change human nature.

When the SJW’s would have none of it, the owners took the action they did Monday and ended the company’s involvement in social justice on the job.  And the rest is history.  From what Newton has written there were about twenty employees who were part of the DE&I council and had been politicking to expand their authority over everything from hiring to how Basecamp employees were allowed to socialize, to even which vendors the company hired.  In other words, they were the SJW rabble-rousers looking to dictate what went on at Basecamp.  And if we had the list of these twenty employees, I’ll bit it matches up almost one to one with the employees leaving the company.

So David Hansson, one of the owners, responded to the Verge post with all the details of the funny name list “investigation.”  I’ve got to say, based on their written words, these guys must be the calmest human beings alive.  Everything is so measured and rational.  Everything seems so moderate and reasonable.  Even his stance on severance packages is more than decent.  I mean these people resigning en masse is meant to be an assault on the viability of the company.  And yet he discusses it in the friendliest of terms in his post.  It’s like having Ned Flanders as your CEO.

With all the details now available it’s more than apparent that what was done by management was a bold move to save the company from a very bad situation.  When a third of the employees are attempting to subvert the CEO’s control over all the most important decision-making functions in the company, well, having them quit en masse may be the best result you could possibly hope for.

Basecamp has now provided a master class in how to rid your company of parasites.  Anyone else who has the courage and the foresight should look to their example for inspiration and details.

The Basecamp Saga Continues – The Exodus

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After announcing on Monday that employees of the tech company Basecamp would no longer be allowed to post social and political material on the company’s communication channels about a third of the company’s sixty employees have said that hey will accept buyouts and leave the company.

I read through the tweets and they mostly sounded proud that they had taken the stand.  But one of them sounded suspiciously like reality.

 

This whole strategy sounds remarkably like a very clever way to have the dead wood “choose” to go away.  My guess is that for the last year the social justice wing of the company has been horrifyingly unproductive and the owners realized that banning the problematic behavior would enrage the culprits so much that they would leave on their own.

In the current environment of woke ascendancy, telling SJW’s that they have to work instead of complain about the unfairness of life is like asking them not to breath.   And offering them a six month severance package was just too tempting.  So I think “bletchley punk” is definitely on to something.  It sounds like Basecamp’s owners are saying, “Don’t go away mad, just go away.”

Maybe this could become known as the Coin/base/camp gambit, tell employees that they have to work and then hold the doors open as they leave.  You can even hand out vegan muffins to them as they leave and tell them to have a nice day.

Of course it’s also possible that the owners didn’t anticipate this much attrition.  But I think not.  Stay tuned.

The Post Woke Corporation

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In a previous post I linked to Vox Day’s discussion of the software company, Basecamp’s decision to eliminate political and social commentary from the company’s communication systems.  Vox Day has been at the forefront of criticism of the way social justice warriors (SJW’s) infiltrate and as he calls it “converge” a company so that human resource decisions and even general company policy is based not on what increases the profitability of the organization but instead on the socio-political goals of these SJW’s.

Vox has written several books on the subject (1, 2, 3) and has thought about this phenomenon and has himself been the involved in an organization that was converged by SJW’s and destroyed from within.

Within the last two months two companies, Coinbase and Basecamp in competitive parts of the American business world have both recognized that their companies were being hijacked by people who were more interested in social justice than in doing their jobs.  It’s probably fair to say that neither company’s founder was even remotely “conservative” in his social or political leanings.  But each was interested in the health and profitability of the company that he had founded.

Both of these technology companies are embedded in an employee ocean that is decidedly woke in its sensibilities and culture.  Therefore it was a bold move to makes these decisions.  It was sure to anger many of its employees, trigger media attacks and even elicit some resignations.  But what the leadership recognized was that if these SJW’s were allowed to consolidate their positions in the company hierarchy and dictate policy, the damage would just continue to get worse.  And the damage would involve larger and larger proportions of paid employees who did no useful work but spent their time carving out resources to further their agenda.  They would bloat the Human Resources departments with their friends and create committees that did nothing but apply pressure for the hiring and promotion of protected identity groups to the exclusion of individuals who were qualified to get work done.

Reading the letter from the SJW who obviously triggered this whole decision it’s easy to see what was happening.  This lunatic was “… just getting started with the DEI Council, just putting in place inclusive processes and structures for decision-making, with our first steering committee meeting to happen sometime later this month or early next.”  She was designing a process that would allow her and her cronies to dictate company policy and justify it on the basis of “diversity, equity and inclusiveness.”

This explains the following action, “The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David.”  It wouldn’t surprise me if the whole problem at this company is centered around this one renegade employee who was trying to carve out a little empire for herself.  She’s currently on “medical leave” and it will probably involve a lawsuit to get rid of her but it would seem to be the best course of action.

What I think is interesting is that some effective action against SJW encroachment is happening in smaller, more dynamic companies.  The old guard companies, like Coca Cola and GM, allow these psychopaths full rein to dictate company policy and virtue signal to the outside world who is in charge.  Possibly the executive suite thinks this is just the price of doing business with the federal government and its endless diversity dictates.  Maybe their attitude is just “Après moi, le deluge.”

Perhaps these smaller companies have watched how Silicon Valley became an SJW preserve and realized that their companies were too small to survive the parasite load that this SJW infestation entails.  Or maybe it’s simply pride of ownership that won’t allow them to watch the degradation of their brain child.  Or maybe they read Vox’s books.

In any case, there is the possibility that we are seeing the beginning of a new phase in the woke phenomenon.  Maybe it is the reaction phase.  If management and employees begin to acknowledge that there is a cost to allowing the wokesters to infest a business maybe we’ll see other companies imitating the actions by Coinbase and Basecamp and announcing that social justice is not an allowable business activity.  That, in and of itself, isn’t a complete solution to corporate convergence.  There is already, as mentioned, federal hiring guidelines that force companies to hire people they can’t use.  But at least preventing these identity groups from constantly haranguing the employees about their mental illnesses would be a decided improvement.  It’s too soon to call this a trend and with the Dementia Joe administration ready to punish any normalcy that might still exist in the country it may be strangled in the crib.  But any sign of health is still welcome in this crazy world we find ourselves in.  And who knows, maybe even the millennials are realizing that living in a woke world is not all that much fun.

So kudos to Vox for documenting and advocating for companies to protect themselves from this blight.  And kudos to Coinbase and Basecamp for showing some wisdom and a lot of courage.