Post: #1

None of their reactions will surprise anyone here, nor will the very astute reasons contained in the slide show created by former Microsoft developer Alex St. John, the creator of DirectX.

The full slide deck can be found here; I recommend it for anyone in a position to hire tech personnel in the current market.

Quote:One of the lauded myths of Silicon Valley culture is that anyone can be a tech superstar if they have the talent. That if you just work hard enough, you too can grow up to be a lauded developer. Take game publisher and former Microsoft developer Alex St. John, who in many ways is a typical example of the kind of talent that thrived in the coding frenzy of the late '90s. Largely self-educated and self-taught, he created a Microsoft technology called DirectX (which ultimately lent its name to the Xbox) and now trains Fortune 500 companies on how to recruit the most sought-after men in the field.

Emphasis on men. And maybe some women, as long as they don't have Asperger's syndrome.

Unfortunately, lately St. John has been typifying another unpleasant aspect of the tech industry — its resistance to cultural change. St. John has been turning heads recently as some of his online writing about the tech industry has come to light — specifically his outspoken views on employees in an overwhelmingly young, privileged, white, male-dominated community.

On Saturday, April 16, St. John published an op-ed on VentureBeat in which he argues against the attitudes of so-called gaming industry "wage slaves." The long, hard hours of these tremendously overworked, bottom-salaried developers — most of whom bear the grunt work of the gaming industry, for both love and the chance of future promotion — has been well-documented. The "crunch time" before a game ships comes with the industry-wide expectation that developers will work as long and hard as they need to in order to make their deadline.

St. John sees anyone who pushes back against that expectation as entitled. "I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work," he writes. After scoffing at the idea that long hours like those worked by many developers leads to burnout, he suggests that "if you can’t love all 80 hours/week" of work, you shouldn't be in the industry at all.

The piece was universally castigated in the online gaming community, and the backlash led dissenters to poke around his website. When they did, they found a presentation called "Recruiting Giants," which St. John apparently gives to clients and hiring managers in the tech community. The document outlines what to look for when hiring engineers and high-level developers.

In many ways, St. John's attitude toward recruiting is typical: He advises employers to present both their current and potential engineers with tangible goals, meaningful challenges, and lucrative rewards. What's not typical is the way he advises selecting those engineers, especially with regard to the skills and character traits he believes employers should prioritize.

For starters, with few exceptions St. John believes they should focus almost exclusively on men. We know this because he emphasizes recruiting and retaining engineers' "wives and girlfriends," because they are the key to whether an engineer stays at a company or quits. Oy.

St. John also does a fair amount of millennial bashing, describing members of that generation as "educated idiots" who've been "spoon fed" and have overinflated senses of entitlement. In his view, ideal employees fit into one of three categories:

The young, bright upstart who's super fast, driven, and inspired to work long hours, but who hasn't adopted the "sour attitude" of his other millennial peers
The "grizzled war veteran" who's probably been promoted to a comfortable position at a bigger company but who can make a great mentor for younger employees if he's presented with the right amount of challenge to get him to leave his cushy environment
The "holy-grail … the undiscovered Asperger's engineer":

Lest you think St. John's "ideals" sound less like a path to a healthy, positive workplace and more like an objectivist manifesto, don't worry — there's (limited) room for women in his capitalistic regime, too:

The rest of St. John's presentation provides a general overview of what he views as a predominantly male tech culture where the aforementioned "spoiled kids" battle it out in a "sea of mediocrity" to advance alongside the truly deserving. According to him, the rare woman who works in tech is really only there to graciously keep things moving with her magical communication skills, which St. John seems to think all the best engineers lack.

Unsurprisingly, many people have called these views into question. And in response, St. John has doubled down on his philosophies with "Enslaving the Masses," an extended explanation of the ideas espoused in his original PowerPoint. The new piece outlines at length the idea that a victimhood mentality disempowers millennials to succeed through hard work, and that brutally honest and driven mentoring is the key to stripping millennials of their entitlement: "Kids can develop advanced computing skills at an early age very fast in the right environment (under a whip)."

He also states that women don't advance in tech because they're "fatally compromised with victimology psychosis," which prevents them from succeeding in a career in where they otherwise would "have it made." Later, he adds, "Shhhh don’t think, just put on the chains honey."

Beyond his emphasis on "recruiting the wives and girlfriends" and targeting people with Asperger's syndrome, nowhere in his presentation or follow-up statements does St. John address the need to hire diversely in a white male tech environment.

Instead, he focuses on the word "fragile," inserting it again and again into his narrative of a fictional corporate maladjustee: "You're too fragile to hear the message and you'll just sue them if you can, so you live in a confused defeatist bubble wondering why your career options seem limited," he writes, speaking directly to anyone who hasn't embraced the idea of working endless overtime in a frenzied, unhealthy environment. Better, healthier, and more socially nuanced working conditions are anathema to his goal of "turning fragile lazy millennials into useful fodder for the machines of industry."

But what seems to hover just around the edges of this idea, however hyperbolically expressed, is the principle that cultural diversity is antithetical to productivity. Silicon Valley is currently full of activists arguing that tech culture has to become less sexist and racist in order to make room for more voices. It's not too hard to see that attitude as running parallel to the behaviors St. John labels as "spoiled" and "entitled," and its proponents as "fragile" workers who need to be gently embraced by an industry too busy to coddle them.

I should note that St. John isn't alone in his views. The Harvard Business Review suggested earlier this month that negative correlations between diversity and productivity exist, and that we simply aren't allowed to see them because they don't fit our optimistic view of cultural diversification. Instead, the journal argues, we should focus on learning which "diversity conditions" lead to increased productivity.

But at a time when tech culture is trying diligently to correct its overwhelmingly white male demographic and calling for diversity as a necessary infusion of fresh perspective, this argument feels especially tone-deaf. In truth, research suggests the impact of diversity is complicated and contextual. [EDIT: no, not really: Diversity+Proximity=Conflict] People aren't corporate drones, and judging them based on their attitude and response to being treated poorly is a short stop to alienating them and yourself.

It's alarming to see a recruiter encouraging hiring managers to value employees for their ability to grind out code rather than their individual personalities, life experiences, and quirks — in other words, for their human diversity. And that's before you consider the fact that St. John is essentially urging employers to act illegally by discriminating on the grounds of age and gender.

Ironically, St. John seems to be a prime example of the kind of older engineer he writes about — one who's too comfortable with the status quo and who needs a challenge to break out of his routinized way of thinking. For St. John, the routine seems to involve instructing people to take control of their own problems, regardless of their age and gender, and to reject the "victimhood" mentality that leads to blaming systemic flaws and discrimination for setbacks. But this push to internalize environmental factors can be bad for everyone — from minorities in a white male tech culture to anyone trapped in the status quo of "work hard, work harder."

In short, St. John's version of Silicon Valley is cold, white, and merciless. He seems to want to uphold the worst aspects of tech culture as we’ve come to know it, the ones that so many people are arguing against and trying to change. For the sake of an overworked, discriminatory tech industry, we can only hope that the voices of change — whether or not they belong to entitled, fragile millennials — ultimately render voices like St. John's the minority opinion.

Taken from the true typists point of view, this woman ignores whatever facts are thrown in her face and probably fits the description of an entitled millenial herself.

Notice too, she isn't even well researched enough to consider the slew of (mostly Indian) H1-B workers flooding tech jobs at rock bottom rates at large corporations all over America.

Alas, if she did that honestly she would learn that in spite of being hired for their technical prowess, H1-Bs often require training by the (usually white American) workers they are about to replace just to do their jobs, even then, often at mediocre performance levels. Maybe for day to day IT work a large corporation can squeak by with crummy workers manning help desks at the lower echelons, but they would be positively useless for cutting edge engineering required at Silicon Valley developer shops.

So, we're back to the "problem" of most qualified workers being sought out for the most demanding engineer positions. St. John is a businessman - if he could get this kind of performance from a female, an Indian, hell - a Martian - he'd do it, at a premium. He states this plainly in the slide deck. But all the SJWs want to see is what fits the narrative.

Post: #2

Here is my postulate of Gender Ratios in the Workplace:

The less measurable and quantifiable the output of the job, the greater the ratio of women in that job.

Attribute it to men's testosterone and results-oriented personalities, women's better ability to communicate and attraction to consensus, or even discrimination by the evil patriarchy.

Programmer? Results are measured in lines of code and quality thereof.
Finance? Dollars rule the day.
Partner in law or consulting? Sales dollars.

Neither sex is better, they're just different. And specialized to do different things.

Post: #3

(04-21-2016 11:10 AM)SlickyBoy Wrote:  St. John has been turning heads recently as some of his online writing about the tech industry has come to light — specifically his outspoken views on employees in an overwhelmingly young, privileged, white, male-dominated community.

I do sometimes muse at the utter consternation that seems to grip SJWs when confronted with the homogeneity of the tech field. The jobs are lucrative, but so are (were) the oil field jobs which were predominantly white male. Of course, a developer sits in an office, and an oil rig is physical work.

Is it because the Bay Area is an awkward melting pot, a confluence of technology opportunity and SJW principles? Because privileged white males are the most evil force in the SJW worldview?

Or is it simply that tech jobs are well paying desirable office jobs and tech nerds are easy targets to bully for a piece of the pie? 15 years ago computer programmers were undesirable nerds. Today software engineers are a host for hungry parasites.

Post: #4

A sincere thank you to the OP for posting this. Here is the text of the presentation that landed him in hot water. This is some salient recruitment advice for anyone, particularly in tech.

Quote:Recruiting, Training and Retaining GIANTS
-Alex St. John
http://www.alexstjohn.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------
State of the Market
- Huge WW competition for talent
- Any CS degree has a job
- Rapid churn in employees
- Big players with bottomless pockets for top performers
- Spoiled kids who know their value
- A sea of floating mediocrity
- Poor work-ethic and shipping discipline (Educated idiot syndrome)

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Who are you really recruiting and retaining?
RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends
- If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone
- If the relationship breaks down the engineer is gone
- The pay check goes to HER
- Why does SHE want her husband or BF to work for you?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Coding is NEVER work, it’s a calling
RULE 2: Coding is NOT WORK
- People who think it is… aren’t real software engineers
- Real engineers want a team and a mission that requires long hours and sacrifice.
- Real engineers want to live in “the zone”
- Real engineers want to be accomplishing great things through technology
- Real engineers don’t burn out until their wives or GF’s do.
- Real engineers want to be constantly challenged
High expectations, long hours, new challenges and a customer/market driven mission are motivating for real engineers.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Artificial Deadline
RULE 3: Software is abstract and impersonal; engineers are motivated by tangible goals
- You ship happy customers not software
- You are accountable to customers not dates or requirements
- Use your customers and your market to help you ship great software and reward your engineers for their MARKET achievements
*How DirectX got shipped

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Incentives
Real engineers don’t value money; they value their relationships and their achievements
- The unexpected bonus
- The money is for the wife or GF; they don’t “feel” income. Consistent income is taken for granted; they feel “Change in income”. Bursts of unexpected bonuses for achievement and long hours work well while controlling overall compensation costs.
- The “key-man bonus”. Privately offer your leaders achievement bonuses for the success of a project, everyone else will FOLLOW their lead.
- GIANTS can be worth 10X-20X ordinary engineers… are they compensated like it?
- Stock Option Programs
- Bonus Programs
- Potential money is worth more than actual money. Progressive retention programs

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Incentives
The customer, peer or executive review
- What do you do to make them feel that their work and contributions are important/relevant/noticed?
Team Mobility
- Engineers want to change jobs for new challenges, to learn new skills or to dress their resumes.
- Organizations composed of specialists are fragile. Cross-training people and keeping internal mobility high makes the organization more resilient to churn and less likely to experience unmanaged churn.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Managed Churn
People are going to move on, be in control of the terms and timing of their departure.
- Have employee reviews consistently under scheduled conditions. Doing this “synchronizes” departures around circumstances favorable to the business.
- Make sure your people know the definition of “departure on good terms”
- Between projects, NOT in the middle of a project
- With plenty of heads-up to their manager
- With a smooth handoff to a successor
- On positive terms with no negative influence to co-workers
- After 3+ productive years at the company
- Reward “Departure on good terms”

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Young the Old and the Useless
- Nothing beats youth for speed and innovation
- Hire for passion, persistence and IQ. (Grades, experience, etc. who cares, people with passion, persistence and IQ will learn)
- Work them “too hard” it’s good for them and the only way they get seasoned
- Get them as interns while early in college if possible
- No entrenched bad habits, haven’t learned wage-slave mentality yet, don’t need to be untaught…
- 5 kids/old mentor engineer is about right
- Be on the lookout for the holy-grail… the undiscovered Asperger's engineer. (usually found on open source forums)
- They have no social skills
- They generally marry the first girl they date
- Can’t make eye contact
- Resume and educational background is a mess… because they have no social skills
- They work like machines, don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Old Goats
Seasoned veteran's, married, 9 kids, severely battle scarred, seen and done it all… need balance in their dotage
- The good ones are often deeply entrenched in big organizations where they are very well paid and difficult to pry out. They’re too “comfortable” to recruit, or they can afford to do whatever they like.
- Can’t be recruited with money… can be recruited with a lifestyle change… and a challenge
- Make great mentors for kids
- Offset the expense of hiring them by hiring a lot of junior engineers to work for them

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Useless
Wage slaves… Hate em!
- Sandwiched between the young and untainted and the grizzled war veterans is a vast sea of The MEDIOCRE. Mediocrity comes in all shapes and sizes but the most troublesome form is from people who have ACCEPTED it.
- They know their market value and perform exactly to it and no more
- They are opportunistic about dressing their resumes or getting a 5% raise by job hopping
- “Balance” is their priority in life… they see their job as WORK that they need to do in order to pay their bills and pursue the interests that they are ACTUALLY passionate about
- They are generally specialists who have stopped learning. They have entrenched habits and attitudes that can’t be changed.
- The can cost more to have on a team than the incompetent because it’s often more work to fire them than it is to manage around them and they are proficient at lingering near the boundary of productivity.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The “Educated Idiot”
A great number of kids have grown up having never had a menial job, had to earn and/or sacrifice for something they wanted, played a team sport, or faced adversity they’ve overcome. They enter the work force with spoon fed educations, prestigious degrees, an inflated sense of their own value and a disastrous work-ethic.
These kids are characterized by;
- A tendency rationalize their first failures as victimization
- Give up and quit easily
- Quick to adopt “wage-slave” habits
- Develop sour attitudes towards their job and employers
- Difficult to mentor or challenge
- Inability to focus or finish
These kids are often highly sought after and snatched up by traditional employers right out of college… you don’t want them… Look elsewhere for the self-starters that have struggled
To overcome adversity and lack of opportunity, they are much more valuable and loyal if you can find them.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The NOT male engineers…
1. Technical women are often quickly promoted for a variety of reasons
- Stronger social skills make them better managers
- Better communication skills often make them better architects, technical writers, QA, or technical support people
2. There may actually be more female engineers but nobody can identify them…

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Words of advice
- Invest in the young and driven and the seasoned and wise
- Churn and burn to find an “optimal” team
- Avoid Wage-Slaves and Educated Idiots if you can identify them
- Have the discipline to push out the mediocre, it’s nearly impossible to fix an organization where they have become entrenched
- Don’t waste time managing the weak, you can’t help them
- Recruit and retain the wife or GF
- Non-Asperger’s technical women are often your best managers and producers
- Don’t promote great nerds unless they really demand it or warrant it, just compensate your top performers in proportion to their value. They often make better mentors than managers.
- Long hours and overcoming hardship together binds teams

Post: #5

Here his follow-up article after this went public (since taken down). Since it is still available as a cached website, I'm making the choice to post it.

The only reason he ended up in the hot water was for calling it like the world really works.

Quote:Enslaving the Masses
Posted on April 18, 2016 by TheSaint in Managing Millennials', Things that NEED to be said
Wow, apparently the recent Kotaku article about my “Recruiting Giants” blog article has renewed a massive interest in my views on recruiting… er… enslaving talent. Since there are tens of thousands of people bombarding my site seeking wisdom on these subjects, I thought I would write an update to that original blog. Unfortunately since these recent posts are attracting a lot of young millennials to this site that haven’t been exposed to ideas like these before, I’ve included some handy glossary conversions in parenthesis to make it easier for them to grasp the ideas in terms they can relate to.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st...errifying/

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/direc...our-826999

First, it’s a shame the presentation wasn’t video taped because you just can’t capture the full offensiveness of the message from the slides alone. I was a professional technical speaker for Microsoft for many years and the one thing you learn is that an audience has a very low attention span for a lot of spoken detail. In the end the only things they remember are on the slides. Second, never waste an audiences time by talking about stuff they can and hear everywhere else. If you’re going to stand on stage and consume thousands of people’s time talking, you’d better have something different to say. So when I do public speaking gigs, I always try to keep it thought provoking and controversial, anything less and the audience forgets why they bothered to show up.

People who WANT to be victims

One of the biggest themes of a lot of my recent talks and posts has been about modern wage-slave mentality that has become increasingly endemic in the West-Coast technology corridors. The attitudes and behaviors associated with it are a toxic mix that is destroying the potential value of a lot of talented people. It’s a tragedy and I’m getting a lot of flack from people who eagerly embrace it as an ideology. The wage-slave mentality is characterized by several really self-defeating views;

-I am a victim of my employer and external circumstances beyond my control!
-Being easily outraged, complaining and emotionally fragile is justifiable and appropriate professional conduct
-Getting paid to think, be creative or push a mouse is “hard work”
-This is my lot and this is as good as I’m going to get
-I’m too fragile to be challenged!
These views are increasingly ubiquitous and as people embrace them they find more social reinforcement for feeling justified about these attitudes and behaviors. Most interestingly these folks get really angry and militant when you point their bad attitudes out. When I was young I was guilty of all of this stuff, most people are when they are kids, it took a lot of patient managers and experience to condition it out of me. I’ll always be grateful to the folks who put up with my nonsense when I was a kid to teach me better professional attitudes. I entered the technology world as a kid with little formal education (No college debt!). I had to work very hard (sit and push a mouse around a lot!) to find my way among a vast sea of highly educated and trained professionals. I was very fortunate to stumble into the technology industry grinder (slave market) at an early age. I worked for big dying companies, fast struggling startups, my own struggling startups and of course Microsoft in its heyday. Today it seems that instead of training the defeatist and unprofessional attitudes out of young technology professionals they are being deliberately conditioned IN to them. I know that a lot of those new generation technologists in the valley think that their brand of permissive lassitude is some form of progress, but it’s not, it’s just a lot of wealth and success in the Valley enabling a generation of people to grow up thinking that success is easy, that they are entitled to it and that there will be no consequences for embracing bad attitudes towards work. It’s a sad condition, I actually don’t think it’s curable once they’ve reached the valley and found a community of people who actively reinforce the behaviors but I’m still determined to at least try to make sure that it’s called out and characterized as clearly as possible for the tiny few who maybe eventually mange to save themselves from it.

My prescription for turning fragile lazy millennials into useful fodder for the machines of industry is as follows;

-You are NOT a victim and you should spend your energy fixing the things you control instead of blaming things you don’t. You control what YOU do and you can choose to have some control over your attitudes. You are banned from having excuses for anything!
-Being emotionally fragile is something you train to overcome, not embrace. Instead of listening for opportunities to be outraged, try just listening.
-Doing something of “Value” is not the same as doing something “Strenuous”. Modern tech jobs are not “Strenuous” if you experience them as such you need to develop some emotional fortitude.
-It’s only true of people who accept it, stop accepting that you are a victim with no further potential. The sad thing about this belief is that people who embrace it are always 100% correct, it’s self-full-filling. Nothing will ever challenge this world-view once you embrace it.
-Embrace adversity and being challenged until you become confident that you can always handle it successfully.

I’ve hired… er… enslaved… thousands of people over the years. In Silicon Valley it has become almost impossible to recruit (shanghai) without encountering these folks. The most valuable people have all been consumed by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the like and are siloed away from the rest of the community making huge salaries and avoiding controversy and drama… but also not helping to stem the tide of victimology of all the people who are less successful and valued and don’t understand why. These companies never tell you why they don’t offer you these jobs… you’re too fragile to hear the message and you’ll just sue them if you can, so you live in a confused defeatist bubble wondering why your career options seem limited. Big companies know how to screen wage-slaves out without “upsetting them”. They say polite platitudes publicly through their PR efforts to avoid being targeted for millennial rage attacks but internally they avoid hiring people with wage-slave attitudes towards work. In reality, they’re always trying to hire emotionally balanced, focused, excuse-free professionals. When we see people exhibiting these victimology mindsets we avoid hiring them!

In this context I’m often asked to give presentations to HR departments for big technology companies that struggle to find talent… er… slaves. These departments are often run by non-technical folks who have highly sanitized job descriptions they are trying to fill and are mystified when they can’t find the talent (slaves) they THINK they want. These audiences are often so conditioned to political correctness and internal process that they just can’t consider other creative approaches for finding talent in places they don’t ordinarily look.
The “Asperger’s” Engineer

For example kids and especially engineers conforming to the Asperger nerd stereotype are ripe for exploitation… they can give TERRIBLE interviews. They often have simply abysmal social skills, they can’t focus, they can’t make eye contact, they can’t relate socially. The tech world and interestingly the game industry is dominated by a lot of these kinds of folks. The “Asperger’s” nerd that can’t clear an interview screening or write their own resume can often be the most valuable kind of engineer you can hire (kidnap). All they WANT to do is code all day and be left alone to focus. When you can identify and engage them, they can be extremely valuable hires. Many mature technology companies don’t know how to identify and recruit (exploit) these folks even though they are often very valuable.


Reducing Churn

The other issue companies often struggle with is “churn”. There are a lot of reasons for “churn” in the technology industry but a major one is the relationship that male nerds have with their wives or girl friends. The nerd isn’t all that social, really likes working a lot and is very happy in their job but because they work all the time the wife or girl-friend get’s lonely. The phenomena has nothing to do with anybody demanding a lot of long hours from these folks. Real engineers love to code and don’t want to do anything else but that personality trait leads to lonely partners, especially when they had to relocate for their jobs. HR departments often try to stop churn by focusing on the male engineer employee instead of on their family situation. If the company invests more effort in configuring their work environment to support making the spouse a more integral part of the company community, the spouse is less likely to be unhappy and the engineer is far less likely to slip his shackles and escape servitude. Hence modern big-campus companies are self-contained cities (Concentration camps) surrounded by convenient low cost housing (barracks) within walking distance and easy access policies that give spouses and family as much access to campus resources like the gym, restaurants, parks, etc. as the employee. In other words companies should try to build communities that include spouses if they want to keep their engineers.

Women in high-tech

Another favorite topic I hear about a lot is how to get more women into high-tech. In the US, female engineers who are not imported from other countries are as rare as hens teeth. The number one tragic phenomena I encounter when I speak at Universities to Computer Science graduates is that the few women in the programs, primary career concern is what obstacles and discrimination that are likely to encounter in the field being women. I give the same response and every time I do it, it’s as though it’s the first time in their lives they’ve ever heard this message;

Nobody wants to work in an office exclusively full of guys!

There is NOTHING technology companies, employers, managers and the industry wants more than to be able to hire and promote (auction off) female engineers. Lacking any local supply in the US, they can’t get H1B1 Visas issued by the State Department to import them fast enough. Any woman entering the tech industry has it made! Sadly the women we do get in high-tech who are raised in the US are often fatally compromised with victimology psychosis before they ever reach the work place (salt mine). The ones we get often fall short of their potential because they are so focused and concerned about their gender (shackles) that they often can’t conceive that there could be any other reason that they struggle at their jobs. Technology is extremely hard to master, it takes years to become proficient, communicating with teams about technology is an enormously complex undertaking made more challenging by the prevalence of a lot of male “Asperger’s” engineers with poor social skills. If you were raised to have a handy acceptable excuse for failing, such as “it’s because I’m a girl” and you accept it, then it becomes impossible for you to ever become great, because it’s always easier to blame others when you face hardship in your career. Even if it’s TRUE, even if discrimination is a factor in your environment, it’s a disastrous cycle to ALLOW yourself to embrace it. People who give themselves permission to fail or permission to give up for any reason (valid or imaginary), find making excuses habit forming. They never achieve their potential. It doesn’t matter if your victimology world-view is comforting, is constantly validated, or is justified, if you accept it as a reason for failure, you’ll never look beyond it to ask; “What can I do to improve myself”… or “What if the reason this person is telling me that I need to improve at my job is because… I ACTUALLY just need to improve at my job?”

Generally I tell women that successful female engineers will often be promoted to management roles (plantation manager) very quickly for a variety of good reasons. Female engineers exhibiting the hallmark “Asperger’s” nerd personality traits are less common, technical women are often more social and better communicators, they don’t JUST want to sit at a desk and code all day. There are many high coordination, high organization jobs that are very difficult to fill, for example: Customer Support Manager, Build Manager, QA Manager, Technical Documentation Manager, etc. These jobs have an odd combination of requirements that involve strong technology acumen, strong social and communication skills, high attention to detail and high organization. The person you want to fill those jobs with is that girl who always used to sit at the front of the class, had all the answers, did all the homework, got straight A’s…. and learned to code.

The short of it is that women in high-tech have it made (fetch a premium on the block), the only real obstacle many face to rapid promotion and total career freedom is letting go of the constant gender introspection and victimology to allow themselves to be challenged, to face and overcome failures and to hear feedback without a gender-victim filter in place to deflect negative feedback or criticism. (Shhhh don’t think, just put on the chains honey)

Mentoring

Finally the thing you don’t see enough in high-tech is an emphasis on mentoring (slave driver). There is often a WIDE culture gap between seasoned veteran engineers (slave drivers) and millennial kids. Kids can develop advanced computing skills at an early age very fast in the right environment (under a whip). I was fortunate enough to experience it personally by accident when I was one of these kids, now I try to bottle it to produce talent as an adult. Recruiters are always looking for that college graduate with the 4.0 GPA and 3-5 years of experience to fill their next job opening. The idea of hiring (enslaving) kids while they are still in college… not just to make coffee during their summer breaks as “interns” but as fully engaged contractors or employees is alien to most larger companies. Yet it takes many months if not years for a recent college graduate to become barely usefully functional (indoctrinated) in a high-tech environment. The biggest most famous giants of Silicon Valley (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) were founded by college dropouts and run predominantly by college aged kids all the way to enormous scales.

I tell companies that their recruiting effort should start with second year Computer Science majors attending University near corporate offices. They should recruit (poach) and assign these kids seasoned mentors at the company and the kid should be engaged by the company all the way through college (Like the Spartans did). The idea should be that the kid works at the company all the time between studies and is being groomed to glide straight from graduation to a job. If you can get the balance right the kid graduates with little or no college debt because they effectively worked their way through school (indentured servitude). Don’t worry about the kids grades or academic credentials, worry about whether the kid can learn to balance school with some continuous accountability to a job. The problem with this formula is that big companies are closed on weekends… just when college students have free time to work. The key is to get them subject to real-world work demands, accountability and pressure as early as possible so that they’re emotionally trained to manage their time, work on teams and balance a lot of competing priorities and demands. People who learn to do this early invariably become valuable employees even if they weren’t destined to be the top academic achievers in their classes. There are many many people who will thrive and excel in a real work environment who will NOT exhibit this potential in a school setting.

First career advice? Just go for it, there’s no downside

Do some time in the trenches early in your career even if your destiny is not to be a full-time coder.

Finally there is a set of advice I give kids first entering the work force (slave market). There are a lot of people who get advanced technical degrees because they hear that they lead to good jobs. This is often not the case for people who just got the degree but don’t really like programming. Software engineers who don’t code for fun, don’t like coding. People who don’t love coding are never going to become exceptional at it. There is room for a lot of different skill sets in the industry that require technical acumen without having to production code all day. If you’re young and you got that degree, even if you hope NOT to become a pure software engineer, its very valuable experience to spend a few years in the trenches doing hard core software development before moving on to more abstract roles. A few years of real experience will equip you with a lifetime of comfort and confidence dealing with technical issues and people in other roles (scars make you tough). The age to do crazy startups is when you are young and single (most vulnerable). That’s when you can take maximum career risk and the only downside is developing exceptionally valuable lifetime skills even if your startup fails. Companies value these people more highly because they are less likely to get “institutionalized” early in their careers. By “institutionalized” I mean that Universities often factory out huge batches of homogeneously educated graduates all equally unqualified to do anything very useful for many years to come. If these kids take a regular job at a big company fresh out of school, their “breadth” of skill development can often stagnate early and they become specialized for life early in their career. People who do startups early on, generally get exposed to a broader range of (slave markets) technical and social demands and subjected to higher pressure. The result is far more mature, confident, resilient, experienced and (actionable) fearless people.

It has always baffled me that people who want to be successful athletes understand that sacrifices, long hours of training to failure without financial rewards is the path to EVENTUAL success, but everybody in the technology world is completely mystified by the suggestion that the same is true of people who want to pursue success and rewards for the products of their minds.

Startups are for the young, if you’re going to crash and burn a few times, do it early, do it often while the consequences are either negligible or even beneficial. Don’t worry about your paycheck worry about your skills and your equity in the company. There are only two paychecks that should matter to you in life;

Making enough to get-by (ZERO!)
Making more than you need (STILL ZERO!)
Most people, sadly spend their entire careers trying to optimize for something in-between (ZERO). The people who make it big early do it by (Stealing it) minimizing their cost of living, simplifying their lives and (subjugating others) throwing themselves into something they believe in. When you’re young, go for the equity, when you have four kids and a mortgage… that’s where balance comes in. Try to make enough (from your discrimination lawsuit) to not care before that day arrives. In the software world it’s possible to be done (used up and discarded) before 30 with a lot of work, luck and talent.

It's amazing how preaching self-reliance and responsibility is considered politically incorrect and intolerant these days. I'm glad he's being unapologetic - but he shouldn't have taken down his article.

Part 2: Intriguingly enough, his own daughter, has gone on the record against him:
https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex...en-in-tech

Quote:As his toxic waste trash fire not only is associated with my last name but also my face, I felt compelled to respond to my father’s sexist, ableist, and racist rants.
{Important disclaimer: I have not lived with or near my father for many years and I lead an independent existence. I very strongly disagree with his opinions but have unfortunately ignored them for too many years.}
I am 22, a female, white and currently moonlighting as a “wage slave.”(as my dad would call it). I work full-time in technical position (yes, a 9–5 and yes, I am never forced to put in overtime). One could say it is the sort of job that requires me to “move my mouse around a lot”. This can be particularly difficult when the “shackles of my gender” become too burdensome to bear.

Her piece has some interesting citations, but is all-too-full of millennial snark.

Post: #6

This guy offends me, but not for any of the reasons the SJWs are offended.

I hate the attitude that hiring managers in computer science constantly try to push: where the only people who have any business being programmers must love programming so much that they spend every possible minute of time they have programming, and are hence willing to work massive unpaid overtime at a salaried job. Sure, I've seen coders that have that attitude and none of them are tech millionaires. They all just get taken advantage of like that dope protagonist in The Jungle: "I will just work harder!" Essentially what this guy is trying to get with his hiring practices is someone who lacks knowledge of his own value , doesn't ask for raises, and isn't willing to quit his job if his career is stagnating. And to put icing on the cake he dismisses rational self-interest with the old "millenials are whiny and have no work ethic" trope.

It is true that game development is a thankless low-paid job due to high demand, mainly because people love video games and think making video games will be just as much fun. The reality is that aside from having a beer keg in the break room to prove how hip your company is, programming video games as one cog in a large team is about as much fun as programming a machine that scans urine samples. Except you get paid three times as much working for the urine sample company. My advice to anyone to really wants to make games is to do it themselves. There are plenty of one-man indie games on Steam that were done by a small team or even one guy, you have creative control over what you're doing, and you get to enjoy the profit of your own work rather than the cocksucker in this article.

Post: #7

My boss is elderly, and he worked for various big tech companies decades ago, before starting his own company. He subscribes to all of these ideas, as if he had written this article. There's a reasonable chance he knows the actual author. He's expounded on various aspects of these ideas over the years, so when I read the article, what I'm really seeing are all of my boss's ideas that lie behind the words I'm reading.

I've been on the wrong side of working 80 hour weeks. There have been long periods where I did this, because I believed I was building something for the future, and this hard work would help me to make my fortune. I have prospered. I've been able to move away from working those kind of hours, and my work is now so valuable to my company that I don't have to work as hard now. However, looking back, it feels like I was a sucker to work so hard, and my life was worse for it over all.

I would say that much of what the author says is true. However, I find it exploitive to work employees the way he recommends, and I've seen that people will likely burn out in the long run from being treated this way.

The kind of engineers the author is looking for are betas, right down to gammas and omegas under Vox Day's taxonomy. I don't recommend that men on this forum try to be the kind of engineers the author is talking about. I recommend we try to be the kind of guy doing the hiring.

Post: #8

Everything he's saying is true, which is why he's getting heat for it. The part about women with technical aptitude having no barriers except their own navel-gazing about gender is spot on. The sky is the limit in tech for any decently competent woman - look at Marissa Mayer and the chick from Theranos for example. The industry badly wants successful women, to the extent that they hire, invest in and promote women with questionable skills and backgrounds simply hoping that they turn out well.

Post: #9

(04-21-2016 03:23 PM)RoastBeefCurtains4Me Wrote:  I'd say that much of what the author says is true. However, I find it exploitive to work employees the way he recommends, and I've seen that people will likely burn out in the long run from being treated this way.

The kind of engineers the author is looking for are betas, right down to gammas and omegas under Vox Day's taxonomy. I don't recommend that men on this forum try to be the kind of engineers the author is talking about. I recommend we try to be the kind of guy doing the hiring.

He is giving advice as a consultant to the HR departments of tech companies, for the benefit of the recruiter on the other side of the table.

To an extent, what he is advocating is what a lot of companies do (insofar as hiring specific psychological types, dangling the carrot of bonuses, managing turnover). He's just more Machiavellian about it (employing the wife; hire aspies)...but taking it differently, he's exploiting the tech industry's love for diversity for his own gain.

Absolutely agree with being the guy doing the hiring. As far as I'm concerned, this is amoral, just another form of tight game. Using social skills to gain more of the economic surplus in a transaction by targeting niches is ok in my book... He's not holding a gun to any employee's head, is he?

He's not acting any differently than a pimp:
https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-30841.html

As others have said, his only sin is showing how the sausage is made.

Post: #10

His slides are amazing. The guy has a complete grasp on human dynamics and understands his market well. He could probably teach game with that level of understanding with a few tweaks. His understanding of the austistic nerd love life and the social ineptness but loyalty and will to work is spot on. Those are usually the guys who get discarded by the feminist HR drones to. It's unfortunate that even a great guy like that had his daughter brain washed by the moronic institutions in this country and she's already vommiting out her buzzword salads. I'd love to find out what her "technical" position is. Probably just filling in Excel sheets. She fits basically everything he said not to hire which is why she's so pissed.

Post: #11

I love this guy.

WRM

Will Read More.

G

Post: #12

I don't know what pisses me off more.

An SJW who thinks that we should hire for personality instead of productivity

OR

An entire industry simply deciding that it is normal to expect everyone to work 40 extra hours each week for free to meet arbitrary deadlines imposed by management. If want your deadlines met, fucking pay for the extra hours cheapskates.

Post: #13

There are lots of connections here to the Gervais principle series, which are a must read on office politics. In a sense, this is written from the standpoint of a Sociopath talking to a Sociopath

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
From part 1:

Quote: A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

MacLeod’s Loser layer had me puzzled for a long time, because I was interpreting it in cultural terms: the kind of person you call a “loser.” While some may be losers in that sense too, they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain. They’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. Traded freedom for a paycheck in short. They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create (since their compensation is set by Sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard). They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out.

From part 2:

Quote:So effective Sociopaths stick with steadfast discipline to the letter of the law, internal and external, because the stupidest way to trip yourself up is in the realm of rules where the Clueless and Losers get to be judges and jury members. What they violate is its spirit, by taking advantage of its ambiguities. Whether this makes them evil or good depends on the situation. That’s a story for another day. Good Sociopaths operate by what they personally choose as a higher morality, in reaction to what they see as the dangers, insanities and stupidities of mob morality. Evil Sociopaths are merely looking for a quick, safe buck.

Post: #14

(04-21-2016 06:54 PM)Suits Wrote:  I don't know what pisses me off more.

An SJW who thinks that we should hire for personality instead of productivity

OR

An entire industry simply deciding that it is normal to expect everyone to work 40 extra hours each week for free to meet arbitrary deadlines imposed by management. If want your deadlines met, fucking pay for the extra hours cheapskates.

It's just supply and demand. Same reason most of the 'creative' fields do unpaid internships, they can get away with it because the workers want to be in that field so badly that they put up with inadequate compensation.

What's foolish with this guy is that by letting this Machiavellian slideshow out for public consumption, he risks employees getting wise to the scam. A pimp comparison was made in an above post, and it's quite apt. In that vein, pimps don't get their 'hos by walking up to them and saying directly "Hello nice lady, would you like become my slave through a calculated system of emotional abuse and drug addiction?"

Post: #15

(04-21-2016 07:17 PM)BortimusPrime Wrote:  

(04-21-2016 06:54 PM)Suits Wrote:  I don't know what pisses me off more.

An SJW who thinks that we should hire for personality instead of productivity

OR

An entire industry simply deciding that it is normal to expect everyone to work 40 extra hours each week for free to meet arbitrary deadlines imposed by management. If want your deadlines met, fucking pay for the extra hours cheapskates.

It's just supply and demand. Same reason most of the 'creative' fields do unpaid internships, they can get away with it because the workers want to be in that field so badly that they put up with inadequate compensation.

What's foolish with this guy is that by letting this Machiavellian slideshow out for public consumption, he risks employees getting wise to the scam. A pimp comparison was made in an above post, and it's quite apt. In that vein, pimps don't get their 'hos by walking up to them and saying directly "Hello nice lady, would you like become my slave through a calculated system of emotional abuse and drug addiction?"

It absolutely is what it is. However, I find it ironic when those benefactors of the system call those who refuse to work ridiculous hours (for no extra pay) "entitled", when they are the ones who think that they are entitled to their employees unpaid time just because.

Fuck employers. Either pick a field where demand is enough to ensure fair and reasonable compensation from day one or learn a set of skills that allow you to be your own boss.

The promotion lottery is a silly scam that steals the best years of our lives.

Post: #16

(04-21-2016 07:32 PM)Suits Wrote:  It absolutely is what it is. However, I find it ironic when those benefactors of the system call those who refuse to work ridiculous hours (for no extra pay) "entitled", when they are the ones who think that they are entitled to their employees unpaid time just because.

Fuck employers. Either pick a field where demand is enough to ensure fair and reasonable compensation from day one or learn a set of skills that allow you to be your own boss.

The promotion lottery is a silly scam that steals the best years of our lives.

Oh totally, employers always see their employees as lazy parasites because they refuse to work for free. The best ones are the little news segments they like to put up on the business hour where they get some jackass going on about how we need to expand the visa program to bring in more poointheloos because of how awful and entitled American kids are with their expectations of job satisfaction and adequate compensation.

Every interview I go to where I hear the phrase "work hard, play hard culture" I have to resist the urge to vomit.

Post: #17

(04-21-2016 03:26 PM)scorpion Wrote:  Everything he's saying is true, which is why he's getting heat for it. The part about women with technical aptitude having no barriers except their own navel-gazing about gender is spot on. The sky is the limit in tech for any decently competent woman - look at Marissa Mayer and the chick from Theranos for example. The industry badly wants successful women, to the extent that they hire, invest in and promote women with questionable skills and backgrounds simply hoping that they turn out well.

Mmm, I got an engineering degree and the women struggled compared to the men on average.

Me thinks there are some very real biological differences between the sexes that are leading to a difference in success in the technical field.

Post: #18

Quote:- Be on the lookout for the holy-grail… the undiscovered Asperger's engineer. (usually found on open source forums)
- They have no social skills
- They generally marry the first girl they date
- Can’t make eye contact
- Resume and educational background is a mess… because they have no social skills
- They work like machines, don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs

Corporations, especially sweatshop-labor corporations like the ones found in industries such as computer programming, television production, and film VFX, love retarded people.

They are just so... malleable. They'll work the worst hours and work 100 hour weeks because they don't have social lives or hobbies anyway, and they'll do literally anything that is asked of them, regardless of whether it's illegal or physically dangerous, because "I don't mind... I'm HELPING." They will also never change jobs and will be loyal even to employers that abuse them. They will also, as the above quote pointed out, marry the first girl they meet due to their raging thirst and gladly accept all the financial burdens that come with modern marriage, which works out even better for the corporation because then they will need this job more than ever.

These are the same corporations that are trying to destroy families, push feminism and white-knightism, and turn men into simps in order to better serve them. These are also the same companies that are actively fighting against helping retarded people in any real and substantial way because it means less chattel for them.

DO NOT work more than 40 hours a week on ANYTHING other than your own business or your own side hustles. That company you're busting your ass for working 80 hour weeks will throw you under the bus as soon as it becomes expedient or profitable for them to do so, or let's say they get a mentally unstable woman as a manager who decides she doesn't like you (true story) then you're gone.

Frankly this shit pissed me off and I'm far from an SJW.

Post: #19

He wrote a hilarious apology. http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/21/i-apologize/ ... At least this guy has the balls to not bow down to the PC crowd which is something i can respect him for. I used to run in those programming circles and in a way he's right. Programming is something you do because you genuinely love it. Otherwise its impossible to make a career out of it. Powering through late night is part of the process. I remember in high school i used to ride 5 miles to barnes and noble and sit on the carpet reading the programming books. Then as i got older i could type of the programs i saw on my computer. Thats the passion it takes to become one of the best programmers. If you don't have that passion then its hard to get far unfortunately.

Post: #20

(04-21-2016 06:54 PM)Suits Wrote:  I don't know what pisses me off more.

An SJW who thinks that we should hire for personality instead of productivity

OR

An entire industry simply deciding that it is normal to expect everyone to work 40 extra hours each week for free to meet arbitrary deadlines imposed by management. If want your deadlines met, fucking pay for the extra hours cheapskates.

AFAIK, Netflix pays their software engineers ~400K a year. He's talking about the cream of the crop that's paid top dollar to work fucking hard and turn out diamonds.

Post: #21

(04-21-2016 09:32 PM)Peregrine Wrote:  

(04-21-2016 06:54 PM)Suits Wrote:  I don't know what pisses me off more.

An SJW who thinks that we should hire for personality instead of productivity

OR

An entire industry simply deciding that it is normal to expect everyone to work 40 extra hours each week for free to meet arbitrary deadlines imposed by management. If want your deadlines met, fucking pay for the extra hours cheapskates.

AFAIK, Netflix pays their software engineers ~400K a year. He's talking about the cream of the crop that's paid top dollar to work fucking hard and turn out diamonds.

As far as I'm concerned, in anything above $80K, you'd better be prepared to work 60+ hours a week and be available whenever they need.

I'm only talking about the jobs that pay just enough for a basic standard of living.

Post: #22

"It's alarming to see a recruiter encouraging hiring managers to value employees for their ability to grind out code rather than their individual personalities, life experiences, and quirks — in other words, for their human diversity."

Is this a joke? Did they actually say this? In other words "It's alarming to see people hiring the best person for the job… We should be hiring based on your preference in craft beer and how straight that neon purple fringe is…"

Post: #23

I'm sure he says a lot of truth, but this Alex St. John guy is clearly a nasty psychopath piece of shit. He basically has zero moral qualm with possessing the lives of all these men as his cubicle drones, consuming their youth for his own benefit whilst they get a pittance. And he calls them entitled -- not himself. Real foul piece of shit that guy is. He even wants to entrap them by bringing their girlfriends into the company -- that's old school shogun hostage stuff.

The SJWs can have him, he is no ally of ours.

Post: #24

(04-21-2016 11:15 PM)Suits Wrote:  As far as I'm concerned, in anything above $80K, you'd better be prepared to work 60+ hours a week and be available whenever they need.

I'm only talking about the jobs that pay just enough for a basic standard of living.

For the reference, it is very common to be able to earn 100k+ and not work over 40 hours a week if you're good at what you do and telling people to fuck off when they waste your time.

I know a lot of worthless people that make that, or more. Actually, people that generate negative value.

Getting your own gig is the real goal.

That's the sad part of this whole thread. People willing to throw 80+hours a week at an employer instead of getting their own thing going on. Maybe it's sad because I have been struggling with figuring out how to monetize my expertise outside of an employer. But, many others have done it before me, and I can do it too.

Take SpaceX, for instance. Cool tech, no doubt, but they work their employees to the bone (over 100 hours a week from the rumors I've heard) and sometimes don't even pay 80k.

On the long term, it's not worth it. On the short term, if you can gain enough knowledge to make a break for it, it is worth it. But, if you're putting in those hours as an employee when you're 30+, it seems you've done fucked up. Unless you've got a family to feed and no other real options. But, I hope you unfuck your mess somehow.

Post: #25

(04-22-2016 01:11 AM)philosophical_recovery Wrote:  Take SpaceX, for instance. Cool tech, no doubt, but they work their employees to the bone (over 100 hours a week from the rumors I've heard) and sometimes don't even pay 80k.

People need to understand that:

Engineers = Blue collar workers + technical skills

They are the intellectual workhorses of major corporations. A workhorse with a high speed mind is still a workhorse.