I can't even explain the full depth of the irony that happened at my work today... I'm legit putting this shit in a book.

But you know what? Fuck it, I will explain. I have jack shit to do.

So I have told many of you, vaguely, that I work "in tech." Specifically, I work in tech HR. The deepest circle of hell in the most damned industry.

I don't do any of the ghey HR shit though, I only do recruiting and employer branding initiatives for engineering & leadership. I don't deal with the grievance and benefits side of things--but I'm obviously in tune with those things, because they're all kinda related.

So hiring very valuable employees > keeping them happy > making them stay (so I dont have to fucking hire their replacements) is my thing. I'm very invested in the whole world of like... making a good environment where employees don't feel shitty.

So for a long time I only wanted to work in hardcore software companies. It was more challenging but more rewarding. I loved startups especially. But the issue was I worked like 60-80 hours a week. My personal life was shit because I fell for the workaholism cope.

Several years ago, when my second kid was born, I decided to get out of that game for a few years, put my career on easy mode and be with my family more. So I did what all lazy people in tech do--went into e-commerce.

I joined a big globohomo multinational conglomerate that owns like 12 brands, where I could coast on 30 hours of work a week and still be a top performer because of the sheer mediocrity that comes with an org of 60K employees.

Everything was fine for a while, but then 2020 happened. We all got sent home in February, which was whatever. But then the political nonsense started.

My office in Seattle, which is just one branch of one brand of one division of this global corporate behemoth, was at the center of the George Floyd riots AND the resulting vagrant takeover. Our building has been boarded up since May. Someone was also murdered on the property.

Like it looks like a fucking 3rd world country. If everything reopened tomorrow, it wouldn't even be safe for us to go back to work. That's how neglected parts of the city are now. We hung a BLM flag up but they still broke all our windows.

We're fully woke, you see. When all our windows were smashed and the "essential" employees who had to be on-site were terrified to go to the office, our CEO responded by sending a bizarre memo where he highlighted his (10%) hispanic heritage and said he stands with the protests.

Which is fine. Whatever. I get it. Whitey didn't want the mob coming for him. But here's where it jumped the shark: he decided to "manage out" the old white male VP of People and hire a white female replacement who would (his words) "prioritize DE&I."

So she becomes my new boss. And that in and of itself is not crazy in the world of modern HR fuckery. What IS crazy is what transpired in the following months, and how her DE&I mandate became an all consuming directive that has actively harmed the company.

She has done NOTHING as an executive except go on a crusade to eradicate "racism" from the company. There have been VERY important things that have needed to be addressed, and she has punted those to unqualified "consultants" or ignored them entirely.

So here's 1 example of a thing she punted: restructuring our fucking compensation plan. We compete against jeff fucking bezos! It's pretty important that we design our comp to uh... actually be competitive with the guy who can afford to pay people a fuck ton of money.

Like... we live and die by how much we pay our engineers. We need to pay attention to this.

But it wasn't directly related to "diversity" so... she outsourced it to a firm. And here's the thing about compensation consultancies...

These consultancies use an extremely stupid formula to calculate "average" compensation for a given market. And they are always fucking wrong. They say the average "software engineer" in Seattle makes $110K total comp (lmfao).

But they are counting every script kiddie network engineer and boot camp grad in that "engineer" category... so their "average" is waaaayyyy below reality. How do these consultancies stay in business? Because out-of-touch execs LOVE being told that $110K is reasonable for Sr SDE.

So this is an example of a thing she should have done some real work on, but it wasn't directly related to her racism mandate, so she gave it to the lowest bidding vendor. That has caused a LOT of pain for us trying to hire people.

But this is even worse, an example of something she ignored entirely because it wasn't about racism: we have a fucking mental health epidemic in our company from the lockdowns. My close coworker who attempted sewer side a few weeks ago was the THIRD this year.

Some don't realize this but *many* employees of tech firms are young, childless, and not from the city they work in. They move thousands of miles away from family for cArEeR oPpOrTuNiTiEs. It is what it is. I always noticed it. But I never thought it could be fatal until 2020.

Lo and behold, when you put a bunch of young single people with no kids and no nearby family on a yearlong lockdown where they can't even go on a date they... want to kill themselves. Shocking!

So we've had 3 young women attempt suicide. Dozens more employees have had to take leave to deal with severe mental health issues. That seems like a thing that would worry a VP of HR, right? Well, after the second suicide she outsourced a 2 hour suicide prevention webinar for us.

Our employees are literally killing themselves but hey, racism is the number one public health concern, so that's what we're going to focus on. Not like... changing to an employee insurance plan that covers more than 0% of mental health treatment or anything practical like that.

So keep in mind, this is not just me being reactionary to the wokeness or being a performative bleeding heart. It is MY JOB to obsess about employee happiness. And if your employees are EATING A BOTTLE OF SLEEPING PILLS THEY ARE PROBABLY NOT HAPPY.

And you know what, if this exec was just fucking up on these issues, I would understand. Because God knows NOBODY was prepared to deal with the sheer fuckery of this past year. We have all been stretched well beyond the scope of what our jobs "should" entail.

But she's not just handling these things poorly. She is not addressing them AT ALL because her sole focus is on driving diversity initiatives as part of a massive corporate virtue signaling campaign. And it is getting to the point of absurdity how much time & $$$ goes into DE&I.

I have been in at least one "diversity" training every single week since August with the exception of the last 2 weeks of December. I have fucking certificates in diversity now, but it doesn't stop. My calendar for the rest of January alone has over 17 hours of DE&I trainings.

This is in addition to 3 hours of recurring meetings every week where I have to talk to other divisions of the company in the US, Canada, and Europe, to discuss "best DE&I practices." Literally just talking to foreigners for hours about how to hire less straight white men.

So anyways, here's the actual story I was getting to... I obviously had no idea the lulzfest at the Capitol was going to happen today. And Wednesdays are the day I meet with my boss once a month (there is one layer between me & the VP), and I decided today was the day to speak up

Now I would NEVER question the gospel of diversity at work just because. It would be career suicide. But I reached the point where I could not in good faith continue to watch our employee mental health crisis be ignored. Call me gay but I actually care about these people.

So I had planned this convo with my boss for days, and basically I was going to say to him (paraphrased) "bruh I think it is extremely fucked up that we are paying $10M for racism training but offer no mental health benefits while employees are killing themselves."

But at the last minute, my boss cancels. And I referenced that in a tweet earlier. He told me the VP had asked all leadership to cancel their meetings for an emergency session about "what to do about what's going on in the Capitol."

Long story short: my facetious assumption that it was some pro Chinese fuckery was correct. My conglomerate is one of the 14K companies that called on congress to invoke the 25th today and get rid of orange man so he can't disrupt our relationships with China for 2 weeks.

And what really just capped off this amazing day for me is that at 8PM tonight, my VP of People went into our employee training portal (she's the only one that has access to mine, since I'm in her org) and assigned me to a motherfucking ethical social justice sourcing training...

Which after I read up on the course, is literally a training to teach me how to investigate vendors before I sign contracts with them, to make sure they are "committed to our values of diversity equity and inclusion."

She spent all day pearl clutching with the rest of the C Suite about how to preserve relationships with our Chinese slave labor factories, and then had the audacity to assign all of her reports to take a training on not doing business with companies that violate human rights LMAO

TL;DR: Burn it all to the ground.