Every once in a while, you come across something that just locks the gears of your mind. All thought stops as you try and comprehend what you are experiencing. You attempt to rationalize what is happening, but you are forced to accept that what you have witnessed is unable to be explained. You then make a conscious effort to flush this event from your brain, for any more energy spent contemplating any facet of the situation will lead to a neurological ‘blue screen of death’, AKA an aneurysm.

That is the existential crisis I underwent while reading this. I know and understand perfectly well that intelligent people can and will align themselves however they want, and sometimes that means they join movements or espouse ideas that are patently ridiculous. That is not where my hang-up is. What I’m stuck on is when an intelligent person espouses patently ridiculous and illogical ideas, like modern feminism and social justice, and then doubles down on them, despite being smart enough, on paper, to see where they fail the reason litmus test. Maybe I’m being too generous and optimistic, but I would think a person in this station, that being our subject Rachel Thomas, would be able to see how detrimental it is to be a woman in the technology industry with actual credentials and then cry out for far less credentialed people to be given similar or higher positions than yourself just to meet some arbitrary ‘diversity’ quota.

Jeez, simmer down.

One of the main ideas I hate with modern feminism and social justice is the whole notion of ‘doing better’. It’s such a nebulous concept to begin with, and these flim-flams chant this mantra over and over. ‘Do better’. ‘Do better.’ How? How are we supposed to be ‘doing better’? What are the needed criteria to be considered ‘doing better’? This garbled message often masquerades as the statement ‘need to improve’ and is typically used by terrible middle managers who have a vocabulary as vast as Kim Kardashian is intelligent. It’s since been stolen by social justice movements as a means of grand-standing and ego-boosting without having to actually quantify or qualify anything. Anyone who tells you to ‘do better’ is full of shit and using the phrase as a projection of their own inability to self-assess.

I can feel the mad already.

Since McKinsley&Company were so nice enough to put the PDF of this ‘study’ online and available to all from the link Rachel provided, let’s look at the opening paragraph of this effort:

Well then.

In the entire ‘study’, there is not one single fucking link to the ‘large companies’ this firm included into their ‘research’. As irritating as that is, it doesn’t matter because this isn’t research. This company went in with the narrative of ‘how do we show that women and people of variant skin colors will result in more money for your business?’ as these slobs only looked at leadership roles and overall profit. God forbid we take other variables, such as sector, country, size of company (employee counts are never mentioned), company structure, local and national economic factors that might factor in and a myriad of other shit that would affect how a business would do. No, let’s just look at the most general of available data of three-hundred sixty-six supposed ‘companies’ across well-established first-world areas and then apply this across the globe of nearly eight billion people; this makes perfect goddamn sense.

From this list of companies in Alabama, a state with a population of just under five million houses nearly 25% of the companies looked at in this ‘study’. Note that this doesn’t include small businesses or middle-sized businesses or lesser known businesses, all which would be considered companies if we use the definition of the word ‘company‘ provided by Google. Having been to both Mobile and Montgomery, I would be hard-pressed to believe that a state as sparsely populated as Alabama houses under one hundred total different and unique businesses; my point here is that the sample size isn’t indicative of fucking anything. Additionally, because these morons haven’t stated what businesses they’ve looked at, they could have easily picked a bunch of small start ups like Uber that have exploded because they’re tapping into a new market, something that has fuck all to do with diversity.

Most importantly, these tools define ‘diversity’ based on differences in biological sex (not the same thing as gender, you dolts) and skin tone. What about different ideas and creative solutions? Screw that; all that matters is having the proper arbitrary distribution of skin colors ranging from deep space black to ghost white! This shit always cracks me up because the people who back this and come up with these idiotic infographics always do so under the guise of ‘diversity’ and ‘solidarity’ with the ‘oppressed’, yet it never clicks that the fact they are discriminating based on skin color and biological sex is, in fact, racist and sexist. To sum all this up, this ‘study’ is garbage on every level, and you can glean that from the very first paragraph. Don’t worry though, if you decide to read the actual study like I did, you’ll learn all about their ‘datasets’ and how morons think using a word like ‘dataset’ which sounds vaguely intelligent validates their bullshit.

People still use Facebook? Wow.

Yeah, we should definitely use an online service that began to tank heavily once Zuckerberg sold it and has gone of the deep end in regards to censorship recently as the model company for ‘diversity’ (read: racism). Also, as someone who has a Ph.D. from the well-known Duke University, you know what a real ‘case study’ is and that you’re using it here as a description of your rant is highly disingenuous; all you’re doing is fucking link dumping and feverishly writing butt-mad comments about them. You and people like you are the reason the English language is in the midst of dying.

Ah, the infamous self-plug.

I have never met a person I have enjoyed in real life who makes a habit of quoting himself/herself and I have no clue why this egotistical behavior is accepted online. The only way it makes sense is if you are quoting something that has a reputable history of either providing information and opinion, or providing information and data; you, as a layman, Rachel, have neither of these. Hell, though I wouldn’t quote myself because I’m not so fucking desperate to get people to read my asinine garbage that I need to plug myself in my own content, it would make perfect sense if I dropped a link to another article of mine because I actually have an established opinion and a body of work. Like I said, though, I wouldn’t do this because I don’t need to feed my shriveled ego with self-promotion.

As for your ‘pipeline’ article, the first three paragraphs are you straight bragging and lamenting about how ‘tough’ you had it. The technology industry moves as fast as people innovate and create, and much of that involves grunt work like being a code monkey or a data scraper, which is obscenely boring work to the vast majority of people in the technology sector. Not only that, but the entire field is made up of people who were the objective minority in the college/university of their choice, assuming they went to post-secondary education. I know you soft-heart types hate hearing and dealing with difficult shit because it gives you the sads, but computer science is difficult. It requires you to be constantly up to date on the latest breakthroughs. You need to know multiple languages fluently. You need to know multiple systems fluently. You need to know how to take something from the idea stage to the paper stage to the full production stage. The time requirements spent just to comprehend the material are absurd to the point that it’s extremely common to see half a cohort leave to get another degree after freshman year.

Anything in the STEM field is, education-wise, front-loaded with the understanding that slogging through the long nights in the lab, the memorizing of endless facts and figures, the hours spent studying that inevitably take a toll on your socialization skills, is rewarded with a high paying, in demand job. Is it for everyone? Of fucking course not; no job is. However, trying to attribute some nebulous idea of sexism in a field that is a majority sausage-fest because of what I just mentioned is, at best, you projecting that you probably don’t really want to work in the tech industry and that you spent your time romanticising it too much. That or you’re just super salty about having a shitty first job and you haven’t gotten over it; either way, your article is garbage and linking to countless ‘studies’ done with obvious inherent bias by people in the fucking liberal arts and mass media fields isn’t going to change that.

Spared you a pointless graphic; you’re welcome.

You do know that the reason they post these press releases is because part of the vocal minority that is social justice and modern feminism are happy with just seeing ‘progress’ being made while the other part is going to be inconsolable no matter what is done, so placating those snot-suckers is a waste of time and completely inefficient behavior for a company? Oh wait, of course you don’t, because you’re still whinging about an article that has a fundamentally sexist and racist premise.

I’m not going to in-depth touch on the ‘pipeline’ garbage again. I’ll just say that you are delusional if you think the issue is sexism and not the core component materials that are needed to succeed in the technology industry. Also, the next time I read or hear a phrase relating to the technology field that involves the word ‘tech’, I’m going to punt my roommate’s dog off our apartment roof. At least fucking say ‘the tech industry’; saying ‘right out of tech’ and similar shit tells me you don’t have a grade-schooler’s grasp of the English language and, by that logic, nobody should be listening to you for anything.

It just makes you wish she was self-aware.

Source your ‘negligence and ignorance’ claim, and not with your garbage anecdotal ‘evidence’. Provide real numbers, graphs and statistical methodology that proves without a shadow of a doubt that tech companies are ‘refusing’ to hire ‘talented’ Black and Latin computer science students and are driving women out. You won’t, because there are none, but I’ll wait.

The only sane thing here is that you believe Apple is a cult, which I applaud you for since Apple is a cult and Apple fans are goddamned morons. Seriously, the iPad was invented back in the early 2000s when Bill Gates introduced the idea of tablet computing; people forget about this because the idea was generally laughed at since laptops were far more functional. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs took credit for the work the engineers at Apple did for the iPod that people gave a shit about device weight and minimalism, even though the idea had already been done before. I wouldn’t be bitching about them if they would just shut up about their inefficient devices; honestly, who enjoys having a mouse with one goddamn button? I need to shift click to right click? Go fuck yourself, Apple. Other than that, you’re just spouting more racist and sexist garbage, Rachel. I find it baffling that you can be this stupid, yet your own website is extremely interesting. Of course, your website isn’t filled with shitty social justice rhetoric that requires you to turn off your brain for it to make sense, so that’s probably why.

My sides.

It’s very clear you didn’t intend this to be as funny as it is, since you clearly don’t see the parallels between these companies just spewing lines while modern feminism and social justice do the exact same thing, but I appreciate the laugh; without it, I was getting worried I might pop a blood vessel.

Just so you know, no person, man or women, needs ‘support’ in order to advance. If you do, then you weren’t ready to ‘advance’, whatever the fuck you mean by that, to begin with. I can only assume you mean promotions and leadership positions, to which I say: self-advocate. You can present yourself as a valuable asset with coming across like a cunt, and so many of you modern feminists don’t get this; you complain about people calling you bitchy yet refuse to learn from your female peers who are fucking crushing it and climbing up the corporate ladder without being massive cockholes to everyone. Again, if you can’t advocate for yourself and what you do, you don’t deserve to advance. If this were a millenia ago, this would be a perfect example of Darwin’s law, but of course the modern human would rather be an emotionally unstable sack of flesh potatoes than harden up because ‘that’s hard’.

Saved you from another ham-fisted, useless graphic.

Those are neat qualifications, it’s too bad I don’t give a shit since bragging about knowing a simple and ubiquitous language like C++ and about having a Ph.D. in Mathematics doesn’t make your argument any more structurally sound. Also, did you really link to your own fucking article twice in the same goddamn rant? How fragile is your ego? Also, ranting about your personal struggles that are likely due to you having the epiphany that you don’t like the line of work you’ve been in for the better part of your life is not the same thing as debunking, and that’s because debunking requires you to actually prove what you’re saying is false as false. You did not do this in your ‘debunk’ that was read by ‘about 200k people’ (there’s no measure anywhere that shows this on the website). Why are you still bragging? Hell, why are you even bragging about any of this to begin with? Fuck, you’re so egotistical; I feel sorry for your husband.

Again, beating a dead horse here obviously, but those aren’t ‘studies’ and you aren’t ‘disheartened’ because if you were, you’d be actively trying to make learning STEM field subjects more entertaining than it presently is. Instead, you’re just cashing in on social justice outrage because it’s easy to do.

 

Follow along as I spew some bullshit!

I always love how modern feminists and social justice crusaders never provide actual names. It’s always ‘many X’ or ‘tons of Y’, like a generalized quantity statement is good enough to prove an idea rooted in hyper-nuance. More importantly, since you clearly know what the root issue is, why not tell us now? Why spread it out over a list of ideas? Oh, I know why! It’s because you’re full of shit and you don’t actually know why women are leaving the technology industry, but you want to setup a shitty cliffhanger so all the middle-aged mothers and angry, fat, rainbow-haired feminists who feel the same excitement from your ‘research’ that they get from looking at something shiny will come back whenever you get around to continuing this series.

You goddamn adult-sized infant.

I will not stop saying that ‘people of color’ is a fucking absurdly racist statement and anyone who uses it in full sincerity is an unbelievable bigot and assuredly retarded.

‘Research’ isn’t a Google doc that is editable by everyone. Thank god I’m not a Dukie because I’d be ashamed that someone like you got a doctorate from my university. Your sources that ‘prove’ this are also utter garbage; I’ve had half of them open in my browser as potential future articles and none of them disappoint.

Your ‘27%’ link goes to an infographic that does not cite its data or provide any sources, thus it is useless. Also, is this 27% and 32% of all women in the technology industry because if that’s the case, these ‘suffering women’ are in the vast minority, effectively proving that your bitching about a non-problem. Additionally, why did you, again, link to the same thing twice? Do you have no short-term memory? The ‘Women in Tech: The Facts’ source you provided is as garbage as the ‘study’ done by McKinsley&Company; no real research just looks at the top companies which make profits hand over fist and can therefore afford to put unqualified people in positions they shouldn’t be in just to meet your shitty quotas and then says it should apply to all businesses of all sizes across the world. All of this ‘research’ just shows that the people you’re quoting are obscenely stupid and only have their doctorates and status because they got them when the world was a fuck ton less complicated. Every university represented on the sum curriculum vitae of these people you’re quoting should be ashamed that they allowed such stupidity into their halls. Lastly, in that Harvard Business Review article you linked, they provided no examples of this apparent bias that men receive more useful and ‘actionable’ advice. I would give Stanford the benefit of the doubt here, but considering both of the article’s writers are directly related with fields that co-mingle with social justice heavily and they have provided no sources of their ‘study’, I’m going to call it agenda-pushing bullshit.

Way to not source the graphic I removed, you fucking plagiarist.

‘Unstable to use’? What the fuck kind of equations are you using that small numbers make them ‘unstable’? If I were a smarter man, I’d say that’s your shitty attempt at an ‘out’, and because I am, I’m calling you out on it. I mean, the fucking link you provided is written by an East Asian woman. Oh, but she’s not in ‘upper management’ so that doesn’t count and she’s still an oppressed person. Fuck you.

As for that source, one of the girls interviewed works for a goddamn open-source software company. It’s fucking open source; how much money do you expect someone to make when they’re creating software that the user can take, make it better on their own time and then redistribute it? You know, I wouldn’t even doubt there is a slight bias, but the fact that you, Rachel, and every other mongoloid out there is making it seem like it’s a catastrophe is what’s killing me. It also doesn’t help that I’m a goddamn Latino and I have always earned what should be the appropriate salary for the jobs I’ve worked; in fact, I would say that I’ve been consistently over-paid. Then again, my degree and work is involved in engineering and design of engineering-related systems, and not being a goddamn code monkey like Raquel Vazquez in your stupid source. News flash: being a code monkey doesn’t make that much money anymore, so it’s no surprise that people who end up being code monkeys aren’t making the money they thought they would by getting a computer science degree. Save money and get some networking certifications; I know plenty of people of all differing levels of education that have done this and are making stupid amounts of money.

Don’t invent imaginary friends for me, you nutter.

Again, ‘people of color’ is racist.

‘Think abotu what it would take for them to be ready for a promotion next year?’ Fuck man, I don’t know. What is it with you bleeding hearts and your inability to improve yourselves and work your tails off so that management takes notice of your work? What you’re asking for here is for upper management to tell ‘oppressed people’ that they are going to promote them provided they do X, Y, and Z, and then give them the goddamn checklist. A promotion is not something that is guaranteed, you entitled brat, it’s something that’s earned. Of course, you modern feminists and social justice warriors don’t know shit about this because none of you have actually had to suffer real hardships and adversity in your lives and have been handed everything, so you naturally think this shit applies in the real world (hint: it doesn’t). If I were a betting man, I’d say you’re projecting really hard about the real reason why you became ‘disenfranchised’ with the technology industry.

Also, ‘more training’, whatever the fuck that means, is grounds for promotion. Yeah, just do more tutorials and you’ll get that sweet corner office. ‘This is help that white men are more likely to receive’? As a Latino male to you, a white woman who is objectively better than me by the stats you provided, eat a dick. For someone with a math doctorate, you sure like to engage in Flat Earth-level conspiracy thinking.

How about no?

I don’t know why I assumed your first link was to your own article, but I wish my luck wasn’t wasted on shit like this and was used instead better things like raffles of free candy. I have never had a ‘painful’ interview, but I’m also a laid-back, type-B person who doesn’t get flustered very often. You, Rachel, come across as completely type-A, as do most social justice/modern feminists types, so I guess an interview would be painful when you’re busy breathing into a paper bag to calm yourself down at the prospect of being judged by strangers in the best attempt at ensuring their staff is full of quality people.

Of course founders hire people that remind them of themselves, because all people do that. People, in general, hang around with people that are similar to them; you act like you don’t do the same, despite the fact in other posts you’ve blathered about the girls you’ve enjoyed teaching who share similar interests and beliefs as you. Plus, you’re ignoring the fact that a company doesn’t just hire people based on the skills they provide. Personality is a huge factor, and if I were in my old position which involved being on the hiring interview team, I would gladly hire the candidate who was more personable and relatively knowledgeable rather than the candidate who was more knowledgeable but completely devoid of personality. You’re basically saying recruiters should be treating people like machines and conduct interviews like someone comparing two potential new computers, and yet you’re bitching about more diversity. Which is it? Also, that last line reeks of projection, again. Get over the fact you weren’t picked, my god.

You don’t need funds to pay someone you hired; this from a Math doctorate.

‘People of color’ alert; what are we at now, like four or so? Christ almighty.

Kate Heddleston uses a goddamn MacBook Air for her ‘software engineering’. You know, that’s something that’s been bothering me this entire article. What programs have these people written? Seriously, if they’re so adamant about coding, why not write a small program to integrate all these ugly links into some sort of e-binder that Rachel could’ve posted at the end of the article that contained all her ‘sources’. Reading Kate’s ‘About Me’ has me confused all over the place. ‘Customer facing products’? What in the hell? Why can’t people say ‘websites’ any more?

More to the point, men work more hours on average than women. Spending more time at the office to ensure the work is done is a sure-fire way for your boss to say, ‘Man, X is staying late, doing great work and still manages to find a way to have a life outside work. I should talk with the board about seeing if there’s a spot open and promote X to that spot’. In all the articles I’ve read about women complaining about the work environment being hostile or unfriendly or difficult or all the ‘adversity’ women face (yeah, face so much adversity you have time to bitch about facing adversity), never once have I ever seen these women go into detail about what they did/do at their place of employment. Sure, I see women talk about their work experiences, but they’re always stupidly general and vague, as if their experiences aren’t that bad, but they need some way to ensure their victim bucks keep coming in.

To warp up, you don’t need ‘onboarding’ or, as it should be called, hand-holding, to be good at your job. The job you are asked is right in the damn job listing; if you’re ever confused, fucking ask. Rachel, the amount of kid gloving you expect of people is astounding and it makes me think you didn’t earn your Ph.D. by doing actual research, you earned it by combining being supremely mediocre with whining and complaining, most likely about being ‘oppressed’. In any case, my head hurts from this magnificent train wreck of an article, so I’m going to go climb inside my stove because burning alive will certainly be more enjoyable than more of this shit.