While I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, the Bloomberg article you lead with is really misleading, at least according to the Daily Wire.
John- count me among your straight white guys looking for a job. Every single lead I have had has come from a personal contact. I have sent out maybe 150 resumes with a total of two interviews.
Randomly applying for jobs is a suckers game bc of what you note about white guys being out of favor.
Unfortunately, no one gives a shit. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for the government to form the “white guy council” for them to figure out why we are killing ourselves with the latest street drugs or blowing our brains out.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I have a terrible feeling that, one way or another, the resolution isn’t going to be pretty.
The crazy thing is, the juxtaposition of the open and obvious discrimination against straight white men with the endless lecturing about how privileged we supppsedly are. Meanwhile, blacks (and especially black females) love to recite the culturally-acceptable mantras about how you have to be so much better as a black person to get to the same place as whites, even as they benefit from special grants, SBA loans, scholarships, and DEI mandates reserved especially for them, as well as officials at all levels openly promising to make their next appointment a black female, etc. If it was just discrimination against white men purely on account of their race and gender, that would be bad enough, but it's all the gaslighting on top of it that really gets to me.
I was recently referred to a position very similar to the one I currently occupy at a SaaS company (where I feel I barely squeaked in before the aftermath of Saint Floyd's Summer took full effect) by an Indian-Canadian colleague who used to work with me here.
The company is a similar size, in the same industry, and the role would have been a perfect fit for my skills.
Having talked to some former coworkers who left my current employer, I already knew I was underpaid but not how woefully: according to the recruiter for this position, the salary range was literally double my current pay and the health insurance premiums for my entire family would have been covered.
Alas, despite being given a chance by the white, 20-something female HR recruiter (who likely just has an incentive to pass along anyone who appears competent), I didn't even get to speak with the white woman in the Bay Area who would have been my manager because they "decided to go with a late-stage candidate."
I noticed basically the same role was open on a different team, so I asked the recruiter about it and had my friend push my resume for that one, too.
This one actually got me an interview with the woman who'd have been my manager-- again, a white woman, this time an overweight, late 30s woman who studied Women's Studies and Social Work, spending half her professional career fundraising for the Social Democrat party in Canada before somehow transitioning into a SaaS technical role.
I was wary of reporting to such a person, but given the potential pay raise, I was willing to try to play nice with almost anyone.
We actually had a great 30-minute conversation where I felt I developed good rapport with her and demonstrated my abilities as a near-perfect match for the role, especially given my own personal experience as not just an employee in the space but an end user of software products in the e-com niche as an entrepreneur myself.
Go figure, I got the exact same email, word for word, from the recruiter about them wanting to go with another "late stage candidate."
Now, the positions are gone from their site, so it's possible they really did have two other candidates and I just missed it by the skin of my teeth, though I had to wonder whether I was competing against other straight, white, married males with dependents or more single cat ladies who vote for progressives.
This was a year after Amazon put me through a 2-month, 8-interview wringer (including making me talk to the same person twice), where I had great rapport with the guys who'd have been on my team, my immediate supervisor and his boss, and the subject matter experts who assessed me. I am almost certain I was shot down by the very last interviewer (the secret "bar raiser" who holds veto power over the entire chain of interviewers), who was a white woman my own age, the only one with pronouns in her signature, and who was training another woman to conduct the interview at the end of a 5-hour day where my brain was already fried.
Although I didn't get that job, I think I dodged a bullet since most of the tech companies did massive layoffs last fall, including my own, though I managed to be enough of a generalist with enough history here I wasn't redundant enough to axe.
In both cases, I received no feedback about why I wasn't selected, but it's one thing when you interview for a job where you figure out you're probably in over your head or the fit isn't that great or you make a poor showing of your skills in the interview and quite another where it feels like a position fits like a glove and would come with a sizeable raise and career advancement.
I haven't exactly been pounding the digital pavement, but if I can't even get a job when I have a referral, it feels pointless. And to be honest, I sort of gave up on the corporate world a while ago and have no desire to try to climb the ladder, especially seeing the writing on the wall for guys like me.
Which is why I've been buckling down continuing to build my own personal brand and consulting services. Would rather be done with all the woke HR departments and keeping my head down just to get a paycheck anyway.
P.S. Feinstein's corpse isn't even cold yet and Gavin Newsome has already nominated a black lesbian woman who doesn't even live in California to be her replacement as senator. As if Karine Jean-Pierre wasn't a warning.
My last full-time job was at Craigslist. The sole HR woman there systematically threw out every resume from white males for a number of years until the hiring managers finally realized what she was doing. She was fired, and not replaced. They function much better with no HR department at all now.
The real revolution will begin when all workers and employees refuse the old Bankster payroll model that adds so much expense and red tape to having employees. This is the only thing that will save the corporate model. Otherwise, independent local production will take over and outcompete outmoded corporations built on cheap shipping and foreign production. It's too expensive to move goods and parts over the highways now. International shipping is in crisis. What will we do without government regulation? We will develop guilds and apprenticeships that will support prices and quality (what government regulations were supposed to do). This is the anti-corporate model and it is winning. A lot of white guys are going into the trades, owning their own tools, and working for themselves, as free people do.
Maybe John Galt knows where they are. I hope they are learning how to weld, wire shit up, plumb, fix cars, etc. Maybe they are building compounds of bunkers in the spaces between the Newly Jacked cities.
Interesting observations. There are solutions, but all will be painful and terribly few may be willing to pay the price.
Personally, simply giving up hasn't been an option. Thought about it once or twice. Anyone tells you they haven't wondered if the world might be better off without them is lying. That's just part of being human. These days, agitation, unease, being uncomfortable for any reason, can be addressed by pharmacology. ASK YOUR DOCTOR IF HELPMECOPE IS RIGHT FOR YOU. The side effects might kill you or make you want to kill yourself, but by God, no one should have to suffer through character building episodes, right? The FAIR is in August and they charge admission.
Too much of this is the natural consequence of seeking equal outcome instead of equal opportunity.
You're absolutely right in the respect that these companies and institutions are going to bleed themselves to death on a hundred thousand small inefficiencies. I'm of a school of thought that efficiency at all costs is more harmful than helpful, in many ways, but at the same time, there has to be a base level of functionality in any given system before it falls together entirely, which is exactly what's going to happen to these larger companies and institutions as they accrue more and more dead weight. I think that a big solution will present itself in parallel systems. The more and more people are squeezed out, the more necessity there will be for these parallel economies to form, and there will be more and more incentive for people to engage and propagate them. All in all, this is a pretty disturbing and disheartening article, but, at the same time... you're not wrong when you say there's also plenty of opportunity ahead for those who are willing to reach for it.
Also, I'd be interested to see what the data looks like on demographics and how they hire. In my own experience, white men, as you said, hire who they must, but I've also experienced first hand that, when left to their own devices, women tend to hire women (race notwithstanding), black men tend to hire black people, but black women hire exclusively black women. I've heard other people corroborate that, but if the data exists, I'd like to see if it backs up this experience.
Great stuff. I wrote along similar lines in my series on teaching. I think it’s going to come down to networks in small towns, an integrated system of education designed to create groups of interconnected elites, decentralized credit systems, alternative methods of credentialing, and control of legal processes on the county level (elected sheriffs).
Here in the rural mountain west there is a big shortage of workers, especially skilled trades. Electrician, plumber, building trades, well drillers, mechanics and so on. Tradesmen I've talked to say no one wants to work and they can't get anyone anyway. Makes one wonder who is going to fix and build stuff after they retire. Which for some of them isn't that far off.
It takes competence and intelligence to build, operate and maintain complex systems. the diversity hires people will find that out. South Africa and Rhodesia will be the future for most of the United States.
In Russia you can expect a majority of people in corporations to speak English, so learning Russian is not really required to find a job. Russian culture is basically western, food is great, land is stunningly diverse and beautiful, people are cheerful, safety and quality of living is excellent in major cities like Moscow, Saint Petersburg or Kazan. And we still pay skilled (and not so skilled) expats more than local hires, so they can afford a decent living (medical expenses are usually covered by social package from your job). If you are married and with kids, there are a number of English schools. If you are not, there are caring and honest women looking for a husband.
It is not all sunshine, but Russia is a great place to stay while one is waiting by the river for the body of HR-department to float by.
Factoring in all of the dead and disabled young/middle aged white guys that had Fortune 500 jobs who were forced into the safe n' effective should be considered too. I know more than 10 in my professional circle.
I actively hire for bleeding edge IT workers for a huge global institution. It's not really DIE that I've seen factor in, that's all garbage lip service. It's that 90% of the resumes I see are from a select few bodyshops that cater almost exclusively to Indian/Asian candidates. Of these candidates, about 10% of the resumes are legit and maybe half of those actually might fit the role. The offshore/onshore brown-people consulting firms have simply dominated large corporation HR departments through aggressive marketing campaigns and outright kickbacks. They have engaged in massive fraud with huge pools of fabricated talent. I'm one of the few hiring directors who will grill you on hard technical tasks the first day in person which were covered during the interview process. I've lost count now of how many outright charlatans I've fired within the first few hours of day 1. The audacity is overwhelming.
Thanks for this essay. It's personal to me. I wanted to be an English professor but I didn't fit in. I've made a go of it in working class jobs such as caregiving through an agency and wine warehouse work. I've made good friends in the Mexican working class in Napa valley. In the 1980s there was no Mexican wine workforce in Napa. Now there are more than 3,000 descendants of immigrants from one small Mexican town of 500 people (I know or knew several). Now the wine industry depends on more than 50k wine workers a year, some of which are migrants. The parallel economy already exists. So many Spanish speaking Californians already work under the table and barter, it seems like the real economy. And all the corporate stock options and Bankster bubbles appear to me like the false economy to which there is no bottom. Corporate real-estate buyers like Black Rock simply hold up the fake value of real estate and use that lie to leverage more borrowing, resulting in a prohibitive cost of housing. When the corporate system collapses, professionalism will mean nothing. Those who have successfully unincorporated from the evil system will thrive, but how will all the professionals live when the corporate system collapses?
I know it's been ages since this came out and nobody's reading the comment section anymore, but in the meantime absolute evidence confirming all of this article has came to light. IBM and RedHat have been instituting racist policies, including race-based hiring quotas but also more. Here's a summary post: https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/5035886/the-ibm-red-hat-leaks-what-weve-learned-so-far Probably more will come to light. Good for cross-referencing the statistics with actual cases. :)
While I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, the Bloomberg article you lead with is really misleading, at least according to the Daily Wire.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white
He argues that Bloomberg reporters flubbed the math; I didn’t double check, but it looked plausible.
John- count me among your straight white guys looking for a job. Every single lead I have had has come from a personal contact. I have sent out maybe 150 resumes with a total of two interviews.
Randomly applying for jobs is a suckers game bc of what you note about white guys being out of favor.
Unfortunately, no one gives a shit. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for the government to form the “white guy council” for them to figure out why we are killing ourselves with the latest street drugs or blowing our brains out.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I have a terrible feeling that, one way or another, the resolution isn’t going to be pretty.
The crazy thing is, the juxtaposition of the open and obvious discrimination against straight white men with the endless lecturing about how privileged we supppsedly are. Meanwhile, blacks (and especially black females) love to recite the culturally-acceptable mantras about how you have to be so much better as a black person to get to the same place as whites, even as they benefit from special grants, SBA loans, scholarships, and DEI mandates reserved especially for them, as well as officials at all levels openly promising to make their next appointment a black female, etc. If it was just discrimination against white men purely on account of their race and gender, that would be bad enough, but it's all the gaslighting on top of it that really gets to me.
Your timing is impeccable, John.
I was recently referred to a position very similar to the one I currently occupy at a SaaS company (where I feel I barely squeaked in before the aftermath of Saint Floyd's Summer took full effect) by an Indian-Canadian colleague who used to work with me here.
The company is a similar size, in the same industry, and the role would have been a perfect fit for my skills.
Having talked to some former coworkers who left my current employer, I already knew I was underpaid but not how woefully: according to the recruiter for this position, the salary range was literally double my current pay and the health insurance premiums for my entire family would have been covered.
Alas, despite being given a chance by the white, 20-something female HR recruiter (who likely just has an incentive to pass along anyone who appears competent), I didn't even get to speak with the white woman in the Bay Area who would have been my manager because they "decided to go with a late-stage candidate."
I noticed basically the same role was open on a different team, so I asked the recruiter about it and had my friend push my resume for that one, too.
This one actually got me an interview with the woman who'd have been my manager-- again, a white woman, this time an overweight, late 30s woman who studied Women's Studies and Social Work, spending half her professional career fundraising for the Social Democrat party in Canada before somehow transitioning into a SaaS technical role.
I was wary of reporting to such a person, but given the potential pay raise, I was willing to try to play nice with almost anyone.
We actually had a great 30-minute conversation where I felt I developed good rapport with her and demonstrated my abilities as a near-perfect match for the role, especially given my own personal experience as not just an employee in the space but an end user of software products in the e-com niche as an entrepreneur myself.
Go figure, I got the exact same email, word for word, from the recruiter about them wanting to go with another "late stage candidate."
Now, the positions are gone from their site, so it's possible they really did have two other candidates and I just missed it by the skin of my teeth, though I had to wonder whether I was competing against other straight, white, married males with dependents or more single cat ladies who vote for progressives.
This was a year after Amazon put me through a 2-month, 8-interview wringer (including making me talk to the same person twice), where I had great rapport with the guys who'd have been on my team, my immediate supervisor and his boss, and the subject matter experts who assessed me. I am almost certain I was shot down by the very last interviewer (the secret "bar raiser" who holds veto power over the entire chain of interviewers), who was a white woman my own age, the only one with pronouns in her signature, and who was training another woman to conduct the interview at the end of a 5-hour day where my brain was already fried.
Although I didn't get that job, I think I dodged a bullet since most of the tech companies did massive layoffs last fall, including my own, though I managed to be enough of a generalist with enough history here I wasn't redundant enough to axe.
In both cases, I received no feedback about why I wasn't selected, but it's one thing when you interview for a job where you figure out you're probably in over your head or the fit isn't that great or you make a poor showing of your skills in the interview and quite another where it feels like a position fits like a glove and would come with a sizeable raise and career advancement.
I haven't exactly been pounding the digital pavement, but if I can't even get a job when I have a referral, it feels pointless. And to be honest, I sort of gave up on the corporate world a while ago and have no desire to try to climb the ladder, especially seeing the writing on the wall for guys like me.
Which is why I've been buckling down continuing to build my own personal brand and consulting services. Would rather be done with all the woke HR departments and keeping my head down just to get a paycheck anyway.
P.S. Feinstein's corpse isn't even cold yet and Gavin Newsome has already nominated a black lesbian woman who doesn't even live in California to be her replacement as senator. As if Karine Jean-Pierre wasn't a warning.
My last full-time job was at Craigslist. The sole HR woman there systematically threw out every resume from white males for a number of years until the hiring managers finally realized what she was doing. She was fired, and not replaced. They function much better with no HR department at all now.
The real revolution will begin when all workers and employees refuse the old Bankster payroll model that adds so much expense and red tape to having employees. This is the only thing that will save the corporate model. Otherwise, independent local production will take over and outcompete outmoded corporations built on cheap shipping and foreign production. It's too expensive to move goods and parts over the highways now. International shipping is in crisis. What will we do without government regulation? We will develop guilds and apprenticeships that will support prices and quality (what government regulations were supposed to do). This is the anti-corporate model and it is winning. A lot of white guys are going into the trades, owning their own tools, and working for themselves, as free people do.
This is happening in medicine as well. The system is going to implode from incompetence and wokeness, which has no place in that arena.
Maybe John Galt knows where they are. I hope they are learning how to weld, wire shit up, plumb, fix cars, etc. Maybe they are building compounds of bunkers in the spaces between the Newly Jacked cities.
Interesting observations. There are solutions, but all will be painful and terribly few may be willing to pay the price.
Personally, simply giving up hasn't been an option. Thought about it once or twice. Anyone tells you they haven't wondered if the world might be better off without them is lying. That's just part of being human. These days, agitation, unease, being uncomfortable for any reason, can be addressed by pharmacology. ASK YOUR DOCTOR IF HELPMECOPE IS RIGHT FOR YOU. The side effects might kill you or make you want to kill yourself, but by God, no one should have to suffer through character building episodes, right? The FAIR is in August and they charge admission.
Too much of this is the natural consequence of seeking equal outcome instead of equal opportunity.
You're absolutely right in the respect that these companies and institutions are going to bleed themselves to death on a hundred thousand small inefficiencies. I'm of a school of thought that efficiency at all costs is more harmful than helpful, in many ways, but at the same time, there has to be a base level of functionality in any given system before it falls together entirely, which is exactly what's going to happen to these larger companies and institutions as they accrue more and more dead weight. I think that a big solution will present itself in parallel systems. The more and more people are squeezed out, the more necessity there will be for these parallel economies to form, and there will be more and more incentive for people to engage and propagate them. All in all, this is a pretty disturbing and disheartening article, but, at the same time... you're not wrong when you say there's also plenty of opportunity ahead for those who are willing to reach for it.
Also, I'd be interested to see what the data looks like on demographics and how they hire. In my own experience, white men, as you said, hire who they must, but I've also experienced first hand that, when left to their own devices, women tend to hire women (race notwithstanding), black men tend to hire black people, but black women hire exclusively black women. I've heard other people corroborate that, but if the data exists, I'd like to see if it backs up this experience.
Great stuff. I wrote along similar lines in my series on teaching. I think it’s going to come down to networks in small towns, an integrated system of education designed to create groups of interconnected elites, decentralized credit systems, alternative methods of credentialing, and control of legal processes on the county level (elected sheriffs).
Here in the rural mountain west there is a big shortage of workers, especially skilled trades. Electrician, plumber, building trades, well drillers, mechanics and so on. Tradesmen I've talked to say no one wants to work and they can't get anyone anyway. Makes one wonder who is going to fix and build stuff after they retire. Which for some of them isn't that far off.
It takes competence and intelligence to build, operate and maintain complex systems. the diversity hires people will find that out. South Africa and Rhodesia will be the future for most of the United States.
In Russia you can expect a majority of people in corporations to speak English, so learning Russian is not really required to find a job. Russian culture is basically western, food is great, land is stunningly diverse and beautiful, people are cheerful, safety and quality of living is excellent in major cities like Moscow, Saint Petersburg or Kazan. And we still pay skilled (and not so skilled) expats more than local hires, so they can afford a decent living (medical expenses are usually covered by social package from your job). If you are married and with kids, there are a number of English schools. If you are not, there are caring and honest women looking for a husband.
It is not all sunshine, but Russia is a great place to stay while one is waiting by the river for the body of HR-department to float by.
Factoring in all of the dead and disabled young/middle aged white guys that had Fortune 500 jobs who were forced into the safe n' effective should be considered too. I know more than 10 in my professional circle.
I actively hire for bleeding edge IT workers for a huge global institution. It's not really DIE that I've seen factor in, that's all garbage lip service. It's that 90% of the resumes I see are from a select few bodyshops that cater almost exclusively to Indian/Asian candidates. Of these candidates, about 10% of the resumes are legit and maybe half of those actually might fit the role. The offshore/onshore brown-people consulting firms have simply dominated large corporation HR departments through aggressive marketing campaigns and outright kickbacks. They have engaged in massive fraud with huge pools of fabricated talent. I'm one of the few hiring directors who will grill you on hard technical tasks the first day in person which were covered during the interview process. I've lost count now of how many outright charlatans I've fired within the first few hours of day 1. The audacity is overwhelming.
Thanks for this essay. It's personal to me. I wanted to be an English professor but I didn't fit in. I've made a go of it in working class jobs such as caregiving through an agency and wine warehouse work. I've made good friends in the Mexican working class in Napa valley. In the 1980s there was no Mexican wine workforce in Napa. Now there are more than 3,000 descendants of immigrants from one small Mexican town of 500 people (I know or knew several). Now the wine industry depends on more than 50k wine workers a year, some of which are migrants. The parallel economy already exists. So many Spanish speaking Californians already work under the table and barter, it seems like the real economy. And all the corporate stock options and Bankster bubbles appear to me like the false economy to which there is no bottom. Corporate real-estate buyers like Black Rock simply hold up the fake value of real estate and use that lie to leverage more borrowing, resulting in a prohibitive cost of housing. When the corporate system collapses, professionalism will mean nothing. Those who have successfully unincorporated from the evil system will thrive, but how will all the professionals live when the corporate system collapses?
I know it's been ages since this came out and nobody's reading the comment section anymore, but in the meantime absolute evidence confirming all of this article has came to light. IBM and RedHat have been instituting racist policies, including race-based hiring quotas but also more. Here's a summary post: https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/5035886/the-ibm-red-hat-leaks-what-weve-learned-so-far Probably more will come to light. Good for cross-referencing the statistics with actual cases. :)