Full of Shit

Tried to diss Ice Cube, it wasn’t worth it, ‘cause the broomstick fit your ass so perfect.

Ice Cube - “No Vaseline” (1991)

(Opinions are my own and do not reflect my employers’)

The Reality of a Workforce of Bullshitters

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with some former university peers. We are all just under a year into the full-time workforce post-graduation. During our talk, we discovered that all of us had a similar rough start to our careers. We left four years of school just to do vigorous training, and ended up in a position where we had almost no real work to do. Out of the few people who were able to help us find meaningful work at our jobs, even fewer were willing to do so.

This is a tough position. Every day we see countless articles detailing mass layoffs across our industry. Any time I open LinkedIn, I am greeted with endless posts from the very people affected by these layoffs, desperately shouting into the void asking for work. If you would like to learn more about this job market and that phase of my career, you can read my article on grief. The point is, this industry is nothing like the one we were told to expect. With that being said, I don’t think all of this is due to new circumstances.

When you are going through the higher education system, you are hardened by the stress of rigorous education and molded into the corporate cog the industry needs you to be. This process includes a very important lie that is told over and over again. You are made to believe that every single person in the workforce is working eight full hours per day, stopping only by the clock hitting five o’clock and the desire to return home and rest. You truly believe that everyone is constantly busy doing important work.

This is, for lack of a more fitting description, total fucking bullshit. This is not reality whatsoever for the majority of people in the majority of roles at a majority of companies. Anecdotally, I would guess that 10% of people are actually busy all the time. 40% of people are not necessarily lazy, but waiting for their efforts to be unblocked by the preoccupied 10%. The remaining 50% are full of shit, suffering from perpetual burnout fueled by impostor syndrome or just laziness. They clock in, fuck off all day, and collect a paycheck on the first and fifteenth.

These parasites are everywhere and present themselves in various ways. The majority hide behind a single manager on a small team, their role never questioned by the penny pinchers hungry for people to lay off. Some know that the best way to sustain their endless income without putting in effort is to remain hidden, to conceal their lack of productivity behind the cloak of corporate abstraction. This article is not about that group of people.

The other group consists of people that carefully walk just below the line of competence. They squirm their way into management roles, disguising their lack of value behind a mysteriously nondescript title and providing nothing more than bureaucratic molasses that jams the gears of progress. They have just enough charisma to convince the right people that they bring actual value. While these people sometimes hold some level of technical knowledge and ability, their ego typically projects a feeling of self-importance that is larger by orders of magnitude.

This article is about this second group of people. This article is, to be completely honest, about one specific person that made my work life a living hell. I hope so desperately that you are reading this and that you know who you are.

American Sound and Layoffs

American Sound is a great company. Like any corporation that has profits as a high-priority goal, it makes a lot of dumb mistakes. Recently, a group of people were laid off, and there were many opinions on this. My opinion on this does not matter, for the most part. There was at least one person that I did not think should have been laid off. Other people agreed with this perspective, including the person who was laid off. In fact, they were so upset with the decision that they put the company on blast on social media. I have nothing but love for this individual and I wish them well. But my arch nemesis - who was also laid off - decided that they would repost this diss to their network.

This person does not deserve to bitch about their situation because they brought it on themselves. American Sound is a company that prides itself on its unique culture. When I interviewed with them, they told me that they are “The most anti-corporate corporation you’ve ever seen.” They don’t bother their employees with endless meetings or performance reviews, they let people get to work and expect them to work hard. If your output does not appear to scale with this freedom, you get the boot. This has burned us almost as much as it has helped us, and it also burned some people that didn’t deserve it. But this lazy, pretentious sack of shit is one of the people who deserved it. Maybe they think the receipts would truly be in their favor. I’m here to tell you they are not.

Pretentious

The first thing I noticed about this person was their pretentious attitude. I saw it everywhere, from their social media presence, to their attitude in the company’s internal communication channels, to the way they spoke to my coworkers and I in meetings. Every discussion was an intellectual pissing contest with them. They had to be the smartest person in the room no matter what, even if it meant putting down their coworkers with snarky sarcasm and patronizing comments. If I raised a valid point, I never received the luxury of an agreement. Instead, I got “yes, and…“, never just “Yes”.

How exactly did they patronize me, you ask? Well, it went beyond tone. This person liked to send links to various articles they found on the internet. One such type of article was related to artificial intelligence, discussing how artificial intelligence completely deprecated the usefulness of knowing how to code. If you have read my writings before, you know I don’t agree with this. When I provided a rebuttal to these pieces, this person refused to read them, instead responding with sarcasm and even telling me directly that they did not care to read my response. At one point this person, who was not a software engineer, decided to send me a link to a book on software engineering. Me! A software engineer!

This was not the last time they did this. In fact, they did this multiple times! One that stands out especially painfully was when I was helping design a database system that needed an efficient way to manage edges between graph-like entries. I proposed an ECS-like approach to data entry. Again, if you’ve read my writing, you know that I have rigorously studied ECS and other data-oriented approaches to software for years. This person immediately decided that this approach was not appropriate. I asked politely if I could just send a simple write up on why I think the approach might be worth further consideration. Their response? “No thanks, I read the Wikipedia page.”

The Final Straw

Maybe it’s worth noting that this person was, in essence, a glorified IT helpdesk guy. But make no mistake, their title did not reflect this responsibility whatsoever. At one point I asked our IT-related chat how I could set up a small containerized server app in our Microsoft Azure instance. An easy job as any technically competent superuser would know. They, of course, first responded with a joke. I asked them if they were going to help or not, and they responded by interrogating me on the profitability and usefulness of the project I was hoping to deploy. Needless to say, I regretted asking for help in the first place.

When I finally was fed up enough to give up on conversation, I told them to redirect their questions to the president of the company, whom I was doing the project for. Now, I think any person with two brain cells to rub together can understand the true message hidden underneath that redirection: “Fuck off.” This person, however, did not. Instead, they actually called the president of the company to talk about the project. A project, mind you, that I had spent over a month on at this point. A project I was hoping to turn into the kind of work I do for the foreseeable future of my career. While this phone call was happening, they decided to send me a link to a google search - not a result, a google search - for alternative products that, in their eyes, already solved the problem I was looking to solve.

At the conclusion to this phone call that I did not know was happening, they messaged me on teams once again. They said not to worry, that they had a great discussion with the executive, and they would like to have a phone call with me to discuss “our project”. Our project. When I saw those two words on the screen from that person, I immediately called the company president. I don’t think I have ever called someone on Teams faster than that. During that call I exploded about this person, about all the shit they had subject me to up to this point, and told the executive that I was not willing to work with this person ever again. To my surprise, he said that I was not the first person to come to him with these concerns. Over the course of this hour-long phone call, I learned so many interesting things about this individual.

Unmanageable, Ungrateful, Unlikable

Turns out this person was hired after being laid off elsewhere. Probably for being a useless employee and huge piece of shit, but that is beside the point. They were hired by my boss, who was a long time friend of theirs. My boss went up to bat for this person, putting his own ass on the line to talk this person up and hire them for a position that didn’t really exist yet. All so this person could get a paycheck and find a new livelihood. Hell, I bitched to my boss multiple times a week about this person, and he defended them at every single turn even when I believed his actions were not defensible. It’s what a person does for their friends, and I don’t blame my boss for that.

What did this individual do in return? When the work they were brought on to do last minute didn’t pan out, my boss offered them additional IT work that we did need. This person refused to do that work! Instead, they did nothing! They opted to be an asshole in group chats and do nothing else. That was this person’s way of repaying their boss for the favor they received. Soon, my boss started being asked a particularly stressful question. “What is So-and-so actually doing?” Unfortunately, So-and-so would not provide my boss with a satisfactory answer. Eventually he was left with no choice but to lay off those perceived to be underperforming. This person was, as you could guess, at the top of that list.

It’s easy to forget that other humans are typically forced to make these painful phone calls. My boss spent that entire day laying people off. He is not one to share when he has had a particularly difficult day, but this time he couldn’t hide it. Some of those people didn’t deserve to be laid off, some of them (obviously) did. In neither case could I imagine that it’s very easy to tell someone that they will no longer be receiving a paycheck, especially when that someone is a long time friend.

I can understand being upset that you no longer have a job. I can understand being angry at your employer, yourself, or even your coworkers. I cannot understand shooting the messenger. I cannot understand telling your friend that you know that there was nothing personal about the decision, and then going out of your way to distance yourself on social media platforms. I cannot understand reposting unconventional diss-posts on LinkedIn from others affected by the same layoffs due to completely different situations. I cannot understand what this person did, or why they did it.

A Message to You

Like I said before, I hope you are reading this. I never did think you were as smart as you said you were, but I think you are smart enough to know that you are the person I am talking about. I hope your blatantly obvious insecurity didn’t allow you to look away, forcing you to read every word, even if your ego didn’t let you accept them. I don’t expect you to learn any lessons from this article, quite the opposite. Just know this: I don’t know you. I don’t care to know you. I hope I never see your stupid fucking username show up in my feed again.

In spite of that, I know and am confident in knowing that you are full of shit. Even worse, you are a horrible employee, a worse coworker, and an even worse friend.