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From now woke Forbes:
The Real Reasons For Big Tech Layoffs At Google, Microsoft, Meta, And Amazon
Bernard Marr ContributorJan 30, 2023,01:57am EST
Between them, some of the world’s biggest tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers in recent months. …
So, what is the true reason for these mass cuts that have left tens of thousands (80% of them in the US) out of work? This was what data experts at 365 Data Science attempted to get to the bottom of when they decided to run their own analysis of the figures.
Some of the findings were perhaps not that surprising. It’s known that tech companies — buoyed by record revenues — undertook a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. Salaries hit record levels as competition raged for the top talent, and the media was full of stories of lavish perks. So, it’s not a shock to find that the median time a recently laid-off employee has been in their role is roughly two years. This could suggest that, in some ways, these cuts represent a winding-back of hiring policies put in place since the pandemic.
More surprising though, was the fact that the median level of experience held by those who were let go is 11.5 years. So, it’s not necessarily true that these are all junior workers with little experience who could be quickly replaced or possibly even have their roles automated. One possible reason for this statistic could be that longer-serving employees tend to receive higher salaries, and cutting them could help businesses meet their financial targets.
However, it is interesting to note that the roles and job functions most affected were within HR, which accounted for 28 percent of all layoffs. There are two possible reasons for this – firstly, it follows that if companies are laying off staff, they will also be cutting back on recruitment, and less recruitment means less need for HR staff.
A second, though perhaps just as relevant reason, however, is that HR is an area where some functions are being replaced by automation. …
The data collected by 365 Data Science also shows that a narrow majority of the staff who were let go (56 percent) were female.
Presumably, women were a minority of employees so 56% is a pretty big number.
This is worrying, given that the tech industry has spent much of the last decade attempting to address the gender imbalance already present within the field – particularly within technical and engineering roles. It doesn’t exactly send out a great message to potential new female hires that, as well as a pay gap and a lower likelihood of progressing into senior roles, they will have to content with a greater chance of being let go.
My vague impression is that a lot of firms, such as even Netflix, are waking up to what a huge hassle the woke tend to be.
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Is this firing of unimportant employees why tech stocks have gone up recently? The past few months have been a great time to gobble up discounted equities.
Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Joe Paluka
That was not a tweet. I promise! (Forgot to end the blockquote)
I did some HR consulting before it was common, so I’ve noticed that more corporate HR functions (and also payroll) are being outsourced to companies dedicated to handling those functions with less expense and drama. So it’s no mystery or conspiracy
Of course, out-sourcing is a plague. But not a new one.
Most HR employees are female, so it makes sense that there would be a lot of women in the ranks of the laid-off.
But I agree with you Steve, that cutting back on HR indicates that this is pushback against wokeness, since HR is full of woke cadre. Richard Hanania has written about this:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
If the company already has competent men in place, and a steady pipeline of younger ones to freshen the ranks, who gives AF what those potential female hires think anyway? They “didn’t build that”–the place was up and running long before they were looking for a job there. Who gives a schitt what they want?
Time for White men to stop playing patty cake with all of these arseholes.
Confirms what I have been saying since it was first reported. Aligns with what looks like happened at Musk-liberated Twitter. And, most importantly, very hopeful for our current ESG burden. Larry Fink’s up-is-down flat-out lying routine probably never worked, even for the educated-dumb, but now the economy is getting scary and people are starting to get serious.
Relevant. There’s an entire genre of these “my workday as an HR hag at Cosmodemonic” tiktoks, and they pretty much all look like this. Observe how she deals with the bad news.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/suggestions-needed/#comment-5775277
My impression is that yours is, shall we say, hopeful.
I hope (but don’t expect) that you’re right and I’m wrong.
Will the world really be better off in a decade when we start to hear stories like "There are so many Jews in tech because they were traditionally excluded from other professions due to antisemitism, so of course they had to make a living through usury and leeching off coder nerds. Oy vey!"Replies: @SFG, @QNS 38, @QNS 38
People have misconstrued this as them ditching woke, that’s not true.
Even if women (and minorities) were equally talented or skilled in these areas, they are not as driven as white and Asian men. They are not going to put up with the shabby treatment just because they love the work. They don’t.
Some interesting insights, Achmed. I read them as occupational nonfiction
Yes, “gender” imbalance is a HUGE issue. We can solve the imbalance problem by changing the “gender” identification of men working there. It should be easy to get the 50% to 50% desired outcome through “transitioning” enough men to meet the quota. Yep. All good. Everyone do a self-backpat.
We solved the problem, the problem is solved (tm – PBS).
Just going off of the midsize privately-held company I work for, HR people tend to be mostly women and have no real special qualifications or skills. They are just a variety of admin employee, some of whom end up getting tasked with enforcement of company conduct policies.
I have several good friends who work for Fortune 500 companies and HR there definitely has some SJW elements who have successfully imposed regular woke meetings and committees everyone is expected to participate in, set up internal message boards for people to complain or wonder if the company is going far enough in social, racial, and environmental justice, etc. These people primarily exist to cause trouble are tolerated in the fat times, but for enterprises that over hired or anticipate some rough sledding in the years ahead, the scolds are mostly going to be dispensed with.
It’s actually one of the most grating things about all the wokery – when forced to make a fiscal choice people easily jettison them and thereby prove their irrelevance to company performance, but absent financial distress they are allowed to make everyone miserable.
He tells me much the same: that 90% of his time is spent in meetings and on Zoom calls getting harangued about DIE directives. Sometimes they even fly him from his office in Asia to the States to attend these bull sessions.
Luckily he's superb at his job and blessed with an even temperament, so he laughs it off. I don't think I could handle it.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Hibernian
I hope (but don't expect) that you're right and I'm wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Batman, @Ed
Reid Hoffman of Netflix, traditionally an orthodox prog, seemed taken aback that his a few male programmers in dresses and his nice HR ladies should be able to veto Netflix being in business with Dave Chappelle.
They push the woke agenda, and don't merely swim with the tide. They are the tide!Replies: @SFG
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-message-suggests-musk-ordered-leftwing-account-freeze-2023-1Replies: @Galloway (From NI)
as a white male tradesman I worked in very many locations in the sandbox, Iraq and AFHGANISTAIN for 10 years.Y0u quickly learn that HR is all fat jerks,black females , gays You will never get any support even when you are right. White males who are non vets are at the bottom of the pecking order. you get the hardest dirtiest jobs and the first laid off.
Send the tonnage to Michigan and OSU, who are competing robustly for national leadership on the HR roster. The formula is that every X of HRs = one VP. That dynamic is ascendant in publicly funded education. Doing well by doing good.
lol if anyone, including Steve, thinks these corporate types are “pushing back” on woke.
They push the woke agenda, and don’t merely swim with the tide. They are the tide!
It’s bad enough that the little work the HR drones do does not even justify their salaries, but they also drag down everybody else’s productivity with their woke schemes.
Do you think the HR firms used when outsourcing are more, or less, woke than the internal HR staff they replace?
Do you mean Reed Hastings? Reid Hoffman is a big wig at LinkedIn.
Venn Diagram Career Choice:
Engineering, Management, Accountant, Human Resources, Sales, Lawyer
(I think that the comic’s name is Don McMillan)
The HR group where I work has declined over the years while the work force has quadrupled. More and more of HR is outsourced and the mostly female administrative staff oversees the processes.
Last year a non-diverse DEI group was started up so maybe there’s hope for administrative bloat in that direction. After a year the only public concrete thing the DEI staff did was kick off a t-shirt contest celebrating Diversity. Employees were asked to vote. I selected the t-shirt that I deemed the ugliest. I imagine in the meantime behind the scenes the DEI group is an insidious cancer amplifying HR woke organization.
Tech Firms Laying Off HR Ladies
Gee, I wonder which department has the stupidest employees at Google. Meanwhile, nonblack employees are getting sick of being bombarded with those dumb diversity videos the HR ladies are so fond of. Good riddance.
For those who haven't seen any of these types of videos, go to https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBabylonBee, and watch their videos while pretending they are not parodies.
Dumb:
Paragons of an utter lack of self-awareness.
Are there truly adults in positions of power...
who produce and propagate these videos...
in earnest?
Best viewed at 2x speed.
The ladies in HR only have power because it is granted to them by government policy, the executive suite, academia, the media and Wall Street. They are a policy tool, not the source of the policy. In the end, they do what they are told.
Corporations have “woke” (meaning anti-White) HR ladies because the executives of said corporations hate White people and a functioning civilization. Executives hold these positions because of pressure from Wall Street and elite cultural consensus.
Another reason to go after ESG and boycott Blackrock and Larry Fink. Hold your indexes with Fidelity or Vanguard, and let management know why. They don’t care about you but enough retail investors make a difference.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
I looked through some of those “day in the life of” videos.
The revenue per employee at some of these tech companies is like 7 figures. Having deadweight employees who make $250K almost doesn’t matter. A few of these employees are high value and bring in lots of money. A few of these employees will have one good idea (like Google Maps), which will create an enormous new revenue stream for the company. Maybe that’s worth it to keep more people on payroll?
Having more young females at work is something the bosses love. It enhances their dating pool. They don’t care if they do anything useful or not.
First they came for the HR Karens………………..
………………..and nobody cared…………………..
……………….because nobody liked them.
“to potential new female hires that, as well as a pay gap and a lower likelihood of progressing into senior roles, they will have to content with a greater chance of being let go.”
Lol. Total nonsense.
Corporations have "woke" (meaning anti-White) HR ladies because the executives of said corporations hate White people and a functioning civilization. Executives hold these positions because of pressure from Wall Street and elite cultural consensus.Replies: @Meretricious, @SFG, @Anonymous
I keep hearing that this Woke thing is just about to fade. And that it just started a few years ago. Maybe it’s all about the smartphones. Or maybe helicopter parents.
This is nonsense. Wokism is just the newest version of anti-whitism, which has been going on since WWII. The inability of “moderates” to see this shows how obtuse they are. If they had any concern for their own people it would be obvious.
C’mon guys! The HR ladies are mainly there to scare, intimidate, and ride herd on the secretary pool types. Rank and filers who cost the company low six figures, and who will jump ship to another competitor at the slightest raise. At my company the HR girlboss uses all kinds of Mean Girls tactics to keep em straight. Same HR lady says “how high?,” When asked to jump.
Point being: lay off the HR ladies? Are you crazy? They are the point of our spear. Judas Goat.
Human Resource? Bullshit title “job” to begin with.
They’re not ladies.
I suspect a corporation could eliminate its entire HR department and not suffer any appreciable loss; no, would actually increase morale, efficiency, and bottom line. One of the few things I learned in my brief time on the job market is that HR is not there to hire people, nor to help employees, nor to support the business. It’s an extraneous cancerous force created by the need to appease the Leviathan state.
Like everything we disparage about the Soviets (or Nazis or Maoists, etc), we have the same thing but in a more disguised, and therefore more insidious, form.
Unlike the Soviets (and Nazis and Maoists), who peaked long ago, things are still ramping up here.
Also unlike the Soviets/Nazis/Maoists, we don't have a clear and consistent name for it. Probably this is a side-effect of it operating in perpetual disguise, which is to say, operating in an additional layer of dishonesty. It used to be called political correctness, then Social Justice championed by Social Justice Warriors, and now we have Diversity, Equity and Wokery.
It will probably undergo further renamings before it is all over. It won't be over until enough people decide they will no longer be abused that way. Judging by recent trends, the abuse is just getting started.Replies: @QNS 38
Women are more religious than men, this is well known. And all those upper class intensely religious Christians did not abandon faith. They just switched to a new one: Woke.
Wokeness appeals to the Elites, and those wishing to join the elites, as its central tenet is HATE HATE HATE of ordinary White people especially ordinary White males. This is especially appealing in the West as the elites all abandoned their traditional religion and values unlike Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia to name a few. The original sin of Whiteness, the eternal genetic evil of White men, the hereditary blood guilt of
White people, the saved “elect” of honorary non-Whites ushering in an era of wokeness and utopia against a sea of wicket White people? That along with a smattering of gnostic “secret knowledge” of the wickedness of White people and the sacred holy redemption offered by blacks, gays, and trannies is pretty much post-Christian Calvinism. And White women cannot get enough of it — religion coupled with HATE HATE HATE of the dude who hit on her in the elevator and the dude who did not.
However this wokeness has limits. It puts the lowliest HR woman at the same potential power as the CEO, in a purity race for wokeness (ask Bob Chapek). Hastings is going to be put in his place along with Sarandros as Chappell and other non woke people are just not acceptable to either Woke Twitter, nor Hedge Fund dudes like Fink or whoever runs Vanguard. Nor will the White House find it acceptable. And the woke HR lady can go over the CEO’s head to appeal to the more powerful person and gain purity points in Woke Heaven.
It also by its nature cannot be a mass proselytizing religion like Evangelical Christianity or to some extent Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, and Scientology. Like Judiaism, and Islam especially (which has very pointedly EXCLUDED White Europeans for the most part from joining and is very hostile to Whites) it depends on the mass being not the religion upon whom punishment can be rained down on constantly. This is why you will own nothing, have no privacy, eat the bugs. Its a religious duty to punish you for not being elite. Woke God commands it.
Now there is a serious manpower shortage of skilled labor. Sure you can outsource to India, but their costs are going up and they never deliver. And will reliably steal all your IP and secrets, its what they do. China is even worse and both are on the Woke Shitlist for being pals too much with Russia, China more than India and war with China is inevitable and openly spoke of now. HR Women are like the witch accusers in Salem. After they accused the wife of the Governor, well the trials were over. Of course the victims families, mostly poorer, got their revenge during King Philip’s War. They led Metacomet’s warriors right to the doorsteps of their enemies. About 30 percent of the colonists got killed in that war.
Funny that.
My guess is that they’re not much different. But, out of sight, out of mind.
The great message – learn to code.
LEARN TO CODE, BITCHEZ!
https://i.imgflip.com/2s9tuh.jpg
Perhaps Jonathan can supply some background to this:
Ecuador man legally changes gender identity to gain custody of daughters from separated wife
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/ecuadorian-man-changes-gender-to-win-daughters-custody-battle-589643.html
An HR person should obviously know about employment law, but their main any of expertise should be psychometric evaluation to keep the morons and sociopaths out. A few well chosen questions like these would save a lot of money.
Nope. The corporate elite hate White people and Western civilization (or what is left of it). There is no pretending. The first step is to recognize the enemy.
Ecuador man legally changes gender identity to gain custody of daughters from separated wifeReplies: @Reg Cæsar, @Achmed E. Newman
Couldn’t reply directly to Erwin, and hotlinks to India disappear. As the Google teaser to this reads, “https://indiatimes.com > wtf” ?
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/ecuadorian-man-changes-gender-to-win-daughters-custody-battle-589643.html
I hope (but don't expect) that you're right and I'm wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Batman, @Ed
Woke women, the nastiest, most aggressive people on earth, took over Big Tech because male coder nerds are huge pussies. Even if the woke rot is successfully removed, it’ll create a vacuum ready to be filled by other thieves.
Will the world really be better off in a decade when we start to hear stories like “There are so many Jews in tech because they were traditionally excluded from other professions due to antisemitism, so of course they had to make a living through usury and leeching off coder nerds. Oy vey!”
Yes. Like the ubiquitous Zampolit or political commissars of the old Soviet Union (or Nazi Germany or Maoist China or…) the HR lady / DEI officer / Compliance Director is a government spy you are compelled to hire at your own expense. Spies? Who are they spying on? On you, dummy.
Like everything we disparage about the Soviets (or Nazis or Maoists, etc), we have the same thing but in a more disguised, and therefore more insidious, form.
Unlike the Soviets (and Nazis and Maoists), who peaked long ago, things are still ramping up here.
Also unlike the Soviets/Nazis/Maoists, we don’t have a clear and consistent name for it. Probably this is a side-effect of it operating in perpetual disguise, which is to say, operating in an additional layer of dishonesty. It used to be called political correctness, then Social Justice championed by Social Justice Warriors, and now we have Diversity, Equity and Wokery.
It will probably undergo further renamings before it is all over. It won’t be over until enough people decide they will no longer be abused that way. Judging by recent trends, the abuse is just getting started.
Gee, I wonder which department has the stupidest employees at Google. Meanwhile, nonblack employees are getting sick of being bombarded with those dumb diversity videos the HR ladies are so fond of. Good riddance.Replies: @Coemgen
For those of us who’ve seen these types of videos, “dumb” is a one word poem.
For those who haven’t seen any of these types of videos, go to https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBabylonBee, and watch their videos while pretending they are not parodies.
Dumb:
Paragons of an utter lack of self-awareness.
Are there truly adults in positions of power…
who produce and propagate these videos…
in earnest?
Best viewed at 2x speed.
Women sue Twitter, claiming Musk layoffs unfairly targeted female staff: The proposed class-action lawsuit alleges that after the takeover, 57% of women were laid off compared with 47% of men
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/08/twitter-sued-firing-female-workers-after-musk-buyout
But I agree with you Steve, that cutting back on HR indicates that this is pushback against wokeness, since HR is full of woke cadre. Richard Hanania has written about this:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rightsReplies: @Art Deco
I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who worked in HR. At one place I worked, the HR director (whom I never met) was male and the 30-odd people working under him were female. I think he was preoccupied with negotiating union contracts.
IMO, the HR department can do some useful things: design application forms and interviewing script templates, post openings, act as a mailing address for the various divisions of the company with openings, keep track of prevailing wages and salaries in given occupations, select benefits plans and let out contracts for their provision, commission actuaries to assess benefit plans, contract for counselors to discuss benefit plans with employees, act as a repository for personnel records, act as a liaison to vendors providing training programs, select a vendor to provide an EAP program if it’s policy to have one, negotiate with unions if some part of your workforce is organized, and have an office for disgruntled employees to vent. They might be a source of information in re certain compliance issues, or refer the inquirer to the legal department. They should have nothing to do with hiring, firing, or employee discipline (except perhaps to advise supervisors and managers when some planned act runs afoul of labor law, union contracts, or employee contracts).
So tech firms have finally come to the realization that HR is a bogus make work program that:
Is a massive payroll expense,
contributes nothing to the production of goods or services, meaning
the department contributes nothing to the revenue stream, further meaning
the entire department is a huge net loss for a company, exacerbated by
it’s the source for a majority of the trumped up complaints about sexual harassment, hostile work environment, dress code infractions, etc. since HR is a department comprised of bossy, competitive, catty women with no real skills who dress like it’s prom night or club night.
Is Musk a super genius. Both SpaceX and Tesla are headed by women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
You all do realize that HR departments, by their very nature, do nothing but make enemies? Innocent behavior wrung through a wringer, white males attacked because they are white males, the elevation of unsubstantiated accusations to primacy, it is a feedback loop for generating hatred.
Well, Economic Reality is bitch-slapping us all ever harder, and people whose whole job is fucking with other people; they are lucky they are just getting fired.
As the Economy continues to contract, anybody who doesn’t generate real value is going away. And good riddance.
😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆💩💩💩💩💩💩
I suspect it’s less about the woke and more about who has been conked out on xannies since early 2020. Lot of talk about “work-life” balance in that demographic lately, which is code for “work doesn’t feel like having a social life anymore”.
I have several good friends who work for Fortune 500 companies and HR there definitely has some SJW elements who have successfully imposed regular woke meetings and committees everyone is expected to participate in, set up internal message boards for people to complain or wonder if the company is going far enough in social, racial, and environmental justice, etc. These people primarily exist to cause trouble are tolerated in the fat times, but for enterprises that over hired or anticipate some rough sledding in the years ahead, the scolds are mostly going to be dispensed with.
It's actually one of the most grating things about all the wokery - when forced to make a fiscal choice people easily jettison them and thereby prove their irrelevance to company performance, but absent financial distress they are allowed to make everyone miserable.Replies: @Christopher Paul, @William Badwhite
A friend of mine (also stale pale male) is an actuary for a large insurer whose name is an anagram of BRUTALITY MULE.
He tells me much the same: that 90% of his time is spent in meetings and on Zoom calls getting harangued about DIE directives. Sometimes they even fly him from his office in Asia to the States to attend these bull sessions.
Luckily he’s superb at his job and blessed with an even temperament, so he laughs it off. I don’t think I could handle it.
By that time I was working at home and figured out how to deal with the "meetings".
I would open the video meeting on the computer and put it on mute and activated the setting which typed out the words spoken at the meeting. I would minimize the screen so I could see the "words" of the meeting with no video.
That way I could know what was happening on the remote chance it was significant--while doing my other real work--including phone calls.
It got about ten percent of my attention--probably more than it deserved.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
I’d guess they take a reading of each client and adjust their tone, at least superficially, to that client’s Woke-O-Meter, but the good thing is they don’t have to be emotionally invested in it.
And their value would be in making the various functions less personal (personal in a bad way) and thus tamp down the internecine battles and resentments that plague many offices. If you get “outboarded” it’s not by that dipshit on the 3rd floor who hates your guts.
These HR vendors also would probably not be turning your HR department into a power center that runs amuck on its own, so top execs might feel more comfortable with that
Ecuador man legally changes gender identity to gain custody of daughters from separated wifeReplies: @Reg Cæsar, @Achmed E. Newman
Maybe that IS Jonathan Mason.
I knew a guy whose Dad worked in HR, but it was called “Personnel”. (That should give you an idea of how long ago.)
They push the woke agenda, and don't merely swim with the tide. They are the tide!Replies: @SFG
But if it costs them money *and* public opinion turns against wokery, non woke businesses will have a chance.
Plenty of corporations have gone woke and gone broke, but somehow they chug along. The Deep State is keeping most of them afloat. Your tax money at work.
Will the world really be better off in a decade when we start to hear stories like "There are so many Jews in tech because they were traditionally excluded from other professions due to antisemitism, so of course they had to make a living through usury and leeching off coder nerds. Oy vey!"Replies: @SFG, @QNS 38, @QNS 38
That’s a lot of it. These dudes were so happy to have some women around…
Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Joe Paluka
Been hearing that song for 50 years and never knew it was about the HR department.
At my employer, the HR employees are the ones that most frequently and flagrantly violate all HR policies. The HR Department recently wrote a “Work From Home” Policy; pretty mostly for themselves as they’re pretty much the only ones that take advantage of it.
My employer is so out of touch that it just renamed the “Personnel Division” the “Human Resources Department” last year, and gave a bunch of new titles and pay raises to the newly promoted HR ladies.
I interviewed with a male HR person once, and it was obvious he was light in the loafers.
Do you know any woke corporate executives? I know plenty. They are all feckless weenies. In reality they avoid blacks like the plague–their entire shtick is virtue signaling. Despicable people. However, there are many conservative corporate execs who are fighting all this DEI BS.
I know that 2020-2021 were weird years in all sorts of ways, but just *why* did all these companies expand payroll so fast? I know that people were stuck indoors and using tech more, which maybe necessitated an expansion of infrastructure (servers, etc.) but that doesn’t explain adding tens of thousands of employees to the payrolls. Also consider that everyone was working from home and for a lot of people it was basically a meme that they were being paid to watch Netflix in their pajamas – so these companies went and said, “let’s hire 30,000 people to watch Netflix in their pajamas, and double the salary of 50,000 more”. It just doesn’t make any sense, especially considering it’s been mostly business-as-usual for all of them.
Of course two years on they are jettisoning these people – they were hired for no reason, given massive raises for no reason, and did no actual work.
I have several good friends who work for Fortune 500 companies and HR there definitely has some SJW elements who have successfully imposed regular woke meetings and committees everyone is expected to participate in, set up internal message boards for people to complain or wonder if the company is going far enough in social, racial, and environmental justice, etc. These people primarily exist to cause trouble are tolerated in the fat times, but for enterprises that over hired or anticipate some rough sledding in the years ahead, the scolds are mostly going to be dispensed with.
It's actually one of the most grating things about all the wokery - when forced to make a fiscal choice people easily jettison them and thereby prove their irrelevance to company performance, but absent financial distress they are allowed to make everyone miserable.Replies: @Christopher Paul, @William Badwhite
I spent about 10 years mid-career in a Fortune 500 corporation. In my years the HR staff approximately doubled. Part of the way they managed to increase so much headcount was many of them worked part-time. It was a very high-margin business so one additional parasite didn’t really matter much.
With one exception, they were all women. Each of them managed to attach themselves to a business unit (if I recall we had 7-8 major divisions arrayed globally) and act as “advisor”. The one attached to my division made little effort to understand our business. Nobody could figure out what they did all day or why we had to answer their idiotic questions, but somehow whenever you looked around yet another had been hired.
The head HR woman was fairly attractive, so my theory was that she’d go to the CEO’s office and hector him and he’d just agree to what she was asking for in order to get her to leave his office but still maintain a snowball’s chance of bedding her. Years after I left, the CEO retired and they replaced him with a woman who chainsawed HR down to about 1/3 of its peak size.
IMO, the questions they should be asking you are "can you forward the job description for us to post?" and "We've got 32 resumes for the position you had us post. Who's on the hiring committee so we can forward copies?" The statements you should be receiving from them are on the order of, "Open enrollment for next year's available health plans will begin next Monday. We've sent the prospectus for each in the attachments. There will be presentations from the following vendors at the following dates and times should you wish to attend". Or, we've engaged Brent Poffenberger, CFA to meet with interested employees in your division to counsel them on the allocations in their retirement account. He'll be here each day next week. If you'd like to sign up for a slot, do so with this form". Or, "I'd advise you to consult with Genevieve Blatt in legal affairs. The disciplinary problem you're having with Sheryl may be classified as a health issue, not a performance issue. Sorry"
Corporations have "woke" (meaning anti-White) HR ladies because the executives of said corporations hate White people and a functioning civilization. Executives hold these positions because of pressure from Wall Street and elite cultural consensus.Replies: @Meretricious, @SFG, @Anonymous
Right. People think ESG is about the environment but diversity gets included and it is a big part of ‘diversification’ of movies and video games the audience doesn’t like.
Another reason to go after ESG and boycott Blackrock and Larry Fink. Hold your indexes with Fidelity or Vanguard, and let management know why. They don’t care about you but enough retail investors make a difference.
But Fidelity hasn't come up in the recent fuss that's been made over ESG "investing" although they too play that game and see this for professionals. On the other hand it's not like these other companies I think, is pretty much full service as in offers lots of things for lots of types of customers, is 49% family owned and the granddaughter of the founder is the CEO. And that we, or at least I haven't heard of her is a good sign.
A simple, non-conspiracy, correct answer.
Of course, out-sourcing is a plague. But not a new one.
Each of them managed to attach themselves to a business unit (if I recall we had 7-8 major divisions arrayed globally) and act as “advisor”. The one attached to my division made little effort to understand our business. Nobody could figure out what they did all day or why we had to answer their idiotic questions, but somehow whenever you looked around yet another had been hired.
IMO, the questions they should be asking you are “can you forward the job description for us to post?” and “We’ve got 32 resumes for the position you had us post. Who’s on the hiring committee so we can forward copies?” The statements you should be receiving from them are on the order of, “Open enrollment for next year’s available health plans will begin next Monday. We’ve sent the prospectus for each in the attachments. There will be presentations from the following vendors at the following dates and times should you wish to attend”. Or, we’ve engaged Brent Poffenberger, CFA to meet with interested employees in your division to counsel them on the allocations in their retirement account. He’ll be here each day next week. If you’d like to sign up for a slot, do so with this form”. Or, “I’d advise you to consult with Genevieve Blatt in legal affairs. The disciplinary problem you’re having with Sheryl may be classified as a health issue, not a performance issue. Sorry”
I suspect a corporation could eliminate its entire HR department and not suffer any appreciable loss; no, would actually increase morale, efficiency, and bottom line. One of the few things I learned in my brief time on the job market is that HR is not there to hire people, nor to help employees, nor to support the business. It’s an extraneous cancerous force created by the need to appease the Leviathan state.
^^^This.
Employers already know what a huge hassle HR departments are and would jettison them immediately if it weren’t for the fact that these departments cushion them against snivel rights complaints and whatnot.
Another reason to go after ESG and boycott Blackrock and Larry Fink. Hold your indexes with Fidelity or Vanguard, and let management know why. They don’t care about you but enough retail investors make a difference.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
It’s appalling given Vanguard becoming a giant through offering very low fee index funds, but while like BlackRock they’re publicly backing off, they enthusiastically play the ESG game. On their own ESG products page they boast:
Then again I suppose there’s a demand for it and these funds are in theory segregated from everything else they offer. Much of which by the nature of index funds has to invest in ESG and DIE poisoned entities to begin with. Per Wikipedia etc. Mortimer J. “Tim” Buckley is the Vanguard Chairman and CEO, son of an Irishman who “was the Chief Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiac Surgical Unit.”
But Fidelity hasn’t come up in the recent fuss that’s been made over ESG “investing” although they too play that game and see this for professionals. On the other hand it’s not like these other companies I think, is pretty much full service as in offers lots of things for lots of types of customers, is 49% family owned and the granddaughter of the founder is the CEO. And that we, or at least I haven’t heard of her is a good sign.
Unless you were applying for a job in the HR department, the person(s) interviewing you should have been the prospective supervisor / manager / colleagues.
He tells me much the same: that 90% of his time is spent in meetings and on Zoom calls getting harangued about DIE directives. Sometimes they even fly him from his office in Asia to the States to attend these bull sessions.
Luckily he's superb at his job and blessed with an even temperament, so he laughs it off. I don't think I could handle it.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Hibernian
Before I retired my employer had tons of useless and time-wasting meetings of all kinds.
By that time I was working at home and figured out how to deal with the “meetings”.
I would open the video meeting on the computer and put it on mute and activated the setting which typed out the words spoken at the meeting. I would minimize the screen so I could see the “words” of the meeting with no video.
That way I could know what was happening on the remote chance it was significant–while doing my other real work–including phone calls.
It got about ten percent of my attention–probably more than it deserved.
I had three monitors and would have had four but I didn't want to completely block the view of my back yard with dogs and birds and the occasional fox.
The revenue per employee at some of these tech companies is like 7 figures. Having deadweight employees who make $250K almost doesn't matter. A few of these employees are high value and bring in lots of money. A few of these employees will have one good idea (like Google Maps), which will create an enormous new revenue stream for the company. Maybe that's worth it to keep more people on payroll?
Having more young females at work is something the bosses love. It enhances their dating pool. They don't care if they do anything useful or not.Replies: @Anon
Google Maps was an acquisition, not internally developed. I can’t think of any innovation by the useless lunchers offhand, but who knows.
The first is probably the main reason. If your job is recruiting new people and your company is not recruiting, then they are not going to keep you around doing nothing.
As for automation, I can’t think of any HR functions that have been replaced by automation recently. Basic HR functions (payroll) were automated decades ago. Things like keyword filtering of resumes have also been around for a long time. What new breakthru in automation has been implemented RECENTLY that would allow you to suddenly reduce the headcount in the HR dept?
Doing things like having an AI give you “diversity training” is something that is far off in the future. First they have to figure out how to get an AI to grow hair of a type that requires a lot of maintenance in order to look presentable and then they have to teach it to complain about its hair and people constantly wanting to touch it and only THEN can it give diversity lectures. They are not even up to step 1 yet.
To summarize many of the comments, there seems to be a growing split in the HR function:
1) Vital, sophisticated tasks that are increasingly being handled by specialized vendors with specialized software
2) The Internal Woke Patrol, mandating diversity and stamping out toxic white manhood, whatever the consequences
Hopefully, as BigTech lays off (presumably) a lot of H1B visa holders, those folks and their entire entourages will be deported back to their home countries.
Corporations have "woke" (meaning anti-White) HR ladies because the executives of said corporations hate White people and a functioning civilization. Executives hold these positions because of pressure from Wall Street and elite cultural consensus.Replies: @Meretricious, @SFG, @Anonymous
They are political officers aka. commissars.
In communist countries every organization, club, association, etc. had at least one political officer assigned to it, to monitor the members for deviations from political orthodoxy. This applied to everything from army battalions to chess clubs.
Of course, in a real communist country, the managers of (say) a factory couldn’t fire the political officers. So in this respect the U.S. is still better off.
However, if these companies now start coming under political pressure to not fire/take back these people, watch out.
The Deep State will make sure their corporate paypigs always push the cultural marxist degeneracy.
Plenty of corporations have gone woke and gone broke, but somehow they chug along. The Deep State is keeping most of them afloat. Your tax money at work.
The median level of experience held by those who were let go is 11.5 years, so a lot of those people would have been born in the mid to late 1980s.
Bari Weiss was born in 1984. When she left the New York Times in 2020, she characterized herself as being a free speech advocate, who was getting targeted by the younger generation, whom she characterized as social justice warriors. These younger people would have been born in the mid to late 1990s.
So, it seems that the average person getting laid off is too old to be part of that ultra-woke cohort. They would have been born in the wrong decade.
She is the archetypal Obese Karen from HR who got a 'status' gig because of an ethnic preferment network.
In a genuine meritocracy she would be a Junior Busboy... but with Yanklish credentialism, that's probably now referred to as a "Project Engineer Level IV" or even "Associate Vice President - Tableware Logistics", and has its own cell in the org-chart.Replies: @Art Deco
Don’t think payroll was ever an HR function, automated or no.
It’s nice to get some good news.
Some one should do a book on how the grunts of the payroll department metastasized into the wokel Borg.
What will the HR ladies do after they are laid-off? A few commenters said “learn to code” and I appreciate their insightful, cleverly sarcastic comment, but of course that’s not the real answer. It’s probably too early to have empirical data, and one can only make an educated guess, but what is the educated guess?
Of course two years on they are jettisoning these people - they were hired for no reason, given massive raises for no reason, and did no actual work.Replies: @clifford brown
Big FAAG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google) treated the lockdown as a chance to moonshot their businesses and scaled massively under the theory we were entering into The New Abnormal. Basically, they were all copying each other out of fear that if they didn’t, they would be surpassed by the new tech hegemon that was willing to take the leap. A few years back, the Big FAAGs were all going to go into the car business because Tesla was all the rage. Also, Facebook completely lost its mind over the past two years going into virtual reality because its autistic CEO does not like dealing with real people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_ShotwellReplies: @Unladen Swallow
Business side is run by them, tech side ( which is what matters at both companies ) and biggest shareholder remains Musk.
Their radio ads in Chicago emphasize accounting and payroll, and that may be all the ones who run radio ads in Chicago do.
Engineering, Management, Accountant, Human Resources, Sales, Lawyer
(I think that the comic's name is Don McMillan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myelf23RsmYReplies: @Hibernian
Very true, but not very funny. Not uproariously funny, anyway. How much dope had the audience smoked? Or how much were they paid?
He tells me much the same: that 90% of his time is spent in meetings and on Zoom calls getting harangued about DIE directives. Sometimes they even fly him from his office in Asia to the States to attend these bull sessions.
Luckily he's superb at his job and blessed with an even temperament, so he laughs it off. I don't think I could handle it.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Hibernian
Liberty Mutual.
Are these tech companies REALLY laying off employees – or are they simply firing Americans, and replacing them with cheaper foreign labor? Of course the corporate press will never ever check…
A bomb installed in the 2017 tax bill for PAYGO purposes which was supposed to be fixed by now as the game has been played for decades has not been, and it's going to hit a lot of companies either starting up or moving into new fields hard.
Appears to require "Research and Experimentation" expenses (not R&D credits) for something new before it becomes a business or line of one to be amortized over five years if done in the US, fifteen if foreign. Vs. expending it as you go. Best but not very good source I have for the moment is this Hacker News discussion, you'll have to sort out a lot of chaff and probably have some background in this field.
On the other hand, like the SALT deduction limit in the same bill, this is the Republicans punishing their sworn enemies who want them dead.
By that time I was working at home and figured out how to deal with the "meetings".
I would open the video meeting on the computer and put it on mute and activated the setting which typed out the words spoken at the meeting. I would minimize the screen so I could see the "words" of the meeting with no video.
That way I could know what was happening on the remote chance it was significant--while doing my other real work--including phone calls.
It got about ten percent of my attention--probably more than it deserved.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
It’s even easier if you have two monitors – one to keep up with the meeting, and the other to get something done.
I had three monitors and would have had four but I didn’t want to completely block the view of my back yard with dogs and birds and the occasional fox.
https://careers.temple.edu/hr-resources/our-functional-areas/
“Who cares?” is the only correct answer
Lol. Total nonsense.Replies: @George o' da Jungle
I have worked in IT for 20+ years. There have been just as many females working at the places I have worked at as men. They were programmers and had other technical positions. At each place that I have worked at, women were in management and even in upper management. Currently, my boss is a woman, and her boss is a woman.
In the earliest days, it was assumed that programmers would be mostly female, like telephone operators. It was a nice clean office job that required a lot of patience and no physical strength - perfect women's' work. Prior to electronic computers, "computer" was a human job title. Computers were the ladies (well known now from the "Hidden Figures" movie although not accurately portrayed there) who sat all day with adding machines and populated ballistics tables and such. In the early days, it was assumed that these women would be transitioned over to being programmers and as long as computers were mainly in the hands of large institutions this was mostly true.
But, at some point, boys got access to computers, either thru accessing their school computers or later with PCs, and boys really naturally took to programming while girls didn't. So once computers were democratized, the "natural" distribution of programming talent was overwhelmingly male.Replies: @George o' da Jungle
Speaking of tech firms, why have you steered clear of Twitter’s implosion? I thought you were a champion of free speech.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-message-suggests-musk-ordered-leftwing-account-freeze-2023-1
Sometimes it is; sometimes it’s with Finance. Usually HR has something to do with it because of their involvement with classification, compensation, and benefits.
The Goolag is laying off lots of people that can’t be replaced with “cheaper foreign labor,” and in some cases can’t be replaced at all. Also severely paring down or ending some units.
A bomb installed in the 2017 tax bill for PAYGO purposes which was supposed to be fixed by now as the game has been played for decades has not been, and it’s going to hit a lot of companies either starting up or moving into new fields hard.
Appears to require “Research and Experimentation” expenses (not R&D credits) for something new before it becomes a business or line of one to be amortized over five years if done in the US, fifteen if foreign. Vs. expending it as you go. Best but not very good source I have for the moment is this Hacker News discussion, you’ll have to sort out a lot of chaff and probably have some background in this field.
On the other hand, like the SALT deduction limit in the same bill, this is the Republicans punishing their sworn enemies who want them dead.
Will the world really be better off in a decade when we start to hear stories like "There are so many Jews in tech because they were traditionally excluded from other professions due to antisemitism, so of course they had to make a living through usury and leeching off coder nerds. Oy vey!"Replies: @SFG, @QNS 38, @QNS 38
“…male coder nerds are p*ssies” lol.
Will the world really be better off in a decade when we start to hear stories like "There are so many Jews in tech because they were traditionally excluded from other professions due to antisemitism, so of course they had to make a living through usury and leeching off coder nerds. Oy vey!"Replies: @SFG, @QNS 38, @QNS 38
….just to be clear, I agree with that perspective.
Like everything we disparage about the Soviets (or Nazis or Maoists, etc), we have the same thing but in a more disguised, and therefore more insidious, form.
Unlike the Soviets (and Nazis and Maoists), who peaked long ago, things are still ramping up here.
Also unlike the Soviets/Nazis/Maoists, we don't have a clear and consistent name for it. Probably this is a side-effect of it operating in perpetual disguise, which is to say, operating in an additional layer of dishonesty. It used to be called political correctness, then Social Justice championed by Social Justice Warriors, and now we have Diversity, Equity and Wokery.
It will probably undergo further renamings before it is all over. It won't be over until enough people decide they will no longer be abused that way. Judging by recent trends, the abuse is just getting started.Replies: @QNS 38
May I say that I have always been beyond appalled at the term “social justice warrior.” Yes, I typed it in lower case to show my disdain for the term in general. It is the “warrior” part that galls me. The ONLY characteristic these clowns share with actual warriors is dedication to their cause. Mimes & clowns are also dedicated to their “cause.” That’s why I prefer the term “social justice clowns.”
Being feckless weenies does not contradict them allegedy hating beauty, strength, and truth.
Almost Right.
I hope (but don't expect) that you're right and I'm wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Batman, @Ed
Netflix still has the diversity edict for its shows, that a main character or plot line must involve a non-white or gay. What Netflix has done is tell employees if they don’t like working on shows they disagree with or have some problem with shows Netflix greenlits they can leave.
People have misconstrued this as them ditching woke, that’s not true.
Have never worked in a place where anyone in HR kept books or cut checks.
You are correct. He was one of three people I interviewed with that day. The other two were a supervisor and potential co-worker. Regardless, I didn’t get that job.
Your workplace is rather atypical. As a whole, IT is about 70/30 male/female. 30% is a significant number but it’s not half.
In the earliest days, it was assumed that programmers would be mostly female, like telephone operators. It was a nice clean office job that required a lot of patience and no physical strength – perfect women’s’ work. Prior to electronic computers, “computer” was a human job title. Computers were the ladies (well known now from the “Hidden Figures” movie although not accurately portrayed there) who sat all day with adding machines and populated ballistics tables and such. In the early days, it was assumed that these women would be transitioned over to being programmers and as long as computers were mainly in the hands of large institutions this was mostly true.
But, at some point, boys got access to computers, either thru accessing their school computers or later with PCs, and boys really naturally took to programming while girls didn’t. So once computers were democratized, the “natural” distribution of programming talent was overwhelmingly male.
Typists. Entering data into a computer involved typing and so typists would have been the first people trained for the work.
There was an article in NYT:
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html
Conclusion: AI does legal research (by any quantifiable measure !) much better, faster and cheaper than all those warm and very expensive human bodies.
There was similar article in NYT or WSJ (I forgot which) about human-based vs AI-based HR.
Conclusion: AI-based HR screens applicants, measures work performance, resolves grievances and fires employees (i.e. complies with ALL federal/state/local labor laws) much better than your vicious HR gal. And costs much less.
Those articles were published 13 years ago.
Owner of the small construction company does not need all this AI BS. It takes him exactly 2 minutes to watch the guy, his tools and his work to make hiring/not hiring decision.
But in large companies AI-based HR is the future. It is a new reincarnation of Edward Deming’s Quality Control of mid-50’s.
In my experience females are always a majority in HR. It makes sense that a cull in HR would affect more females as a percentage. Also, their pay grade would be lower than workers who actually create the revenue creating product (whatever it is). It takes firing more HR droids to match the savings from fewer cuts in the productive workforce.
Weiss has so little self-awareness that she might actually believe her own characterisation.
She is the archetypal Obese Karen from HR who got a ‘status’ gig because of an ethnic preferment network.
In a genuine meritocracy she would be a Junior Busboy… but with Yanklish credentialism, that’s probably now referred to as a “Project Engineer Level IV” or even “Associate Vice President – Tableware Logistics“, and has its own cell in the org-chart.
Just today at work I said the absurd power of HR was going to be greatly reduced in my lifetime. Giving the stupidest people the most power is such a first world problem.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-message-suggests-musk-ordered-leftwing-account-freeze-2023-1Replies: @Galloway (From NI)
If only Musk did it to all of them, and then got off Twitter forever. A man can dream.
In the earliest days, it was assumed that programmers would be mostly female, like telephone operators. It was a nice clean office job that required a lot of patience and no physical strength - perfect women's' work. Prior to electronic computers, "computer" was a human job title. Computers were the ladies (well known now from the "Hidden Figures" movie although not accurately portrayed there) who sat all day with adding machines and populated ballistics tables and such. In the early days, it was assumed that these women would be transitioned over to being programmers and as long as computers were mainly in the hands of large institutions this was mostly true.
But, at some point, boys got access to computers, either thru accessing their school computers or later with PCs, and boys really naturally took to programming while girls didn't. So once computers were democratized, the "natural" distribution of programming talent was overwhelmingly male.Replies: @George o' da Jungle
It was more than one position that I was talking about, it was several different positions at different companies.
She is the archetypal Obese Karen from HR who got a 'status' gig because of an ethnic preferment network.
In a genuine meritocracy she would be a Junior Busboy... but with Yanklish credentialism, that's probably now referred to as a "Project Engineer Level IV" or even "Associate Vice President - Tableware Logistics", and has its own cell in the org-chart.Replies: @Art Deco
She’s a graduate of Columbia University, she can write, and she can turn in copy on time. She also has more critical distance from her social matrix than about 98% of the opinion journalists in America. No clue why you see her as a service employee with minimal skills or why two people fancy that’s an apt description. Also no clue why you think Rupert Murdoch and Gerard Baker were running an ‘ethnic preferment system’. She’s not obese, either.