This explains a lot about the AWS side of things. Maybe it’s turning around via purge. I’ve interviewed a fair number of ex-AWS engineers. They’ve been universally terrible. I’ve gone so far as tell the recruiting staff not to put them in front of me.
I wish I could remember all the details of a computer-based training I was required to take around 2019 at an international corporation based in Germany that took the employee through various non traditional sexual orientation scenarios and different (from America) cultural and racial perspectives, requiring us to click here and there as acknowledgement that we understand and/or agree. We tried every which way to bypass (what I considered) offensive content, but we had to sit through each part with active participation. Within that timeframe, we also saw a notable change in some previously quiet male employees sauntering through the office with full makeup and jewelry. If only they knew what people really thought.
Oof, I was a bar raiser for about 4 of my 10 years at Amazon. I too left with friction, caught in an HR snare after a direct report claimed I retaliated against her because she failed to get a promotion from L5 to L6, probably the single most difficult jump to make in any team. My director let me twist despite sitting in on the promo loops (for which, as any Amazonian knows, it generally takes 40-50 hours for a manager to prepare a promo recommendation. And, as manager, you get grilled just as brutally to justify a level increase, not something you do unless you're really supportive of it).
Anyway, I left mid 2019. The DEI train had left the station and was still gathering steam. Remember when "brown bag seminar" was changed to "lunch and learn" to avoid classist age racist connotations? Yeah, that happened about 2 months before my departure. The company is nothing remotely like the place I worked, and enjoyed working. Really hard, equally rewarding. But the PC > woke > DEI transition murdered that company.
Google was the same way but way back in 2016-2017, from my limited experience there. However, I've heard they have done massive purges and have a strict "no politics" policy at work now and have been axing DEI stuff left and right (heard through the grapevine). Gemini and Google search (IMO) are actually useful now (circa last year or so - IMO Google's product offerings were near useless 2015-2023 at least), it's easier to find "non-PC" information, there's massively less censorship, it seems to me.
As far as I can tell, it's completely illegal. But who would sue?
The engineers not picked? The attitude is (or was) if you aren't picked for job A, you will get picked for job B. So why make yourself known as being difficult. And you probably will be known. There was always a lot of churn and people kept running into each other.
Perhaps the industry has changed. For one thing, if you're "not diverse", it's not being picked for job B, C, D....
I’ve worked in Salesforce. Around that time, they started removing every white heterosexual male from the management team. Germany went very very far in this. Extremely toxic behaviour led to the entire country sales going down. Which meant that the German, then entirely female leadership was under extreme pressure. Nobody understood why hiring based on sex would be bad. They never changed. I left SF long before that time but all my male friends left or were fired during the inevitable restructuring that needed to fix what leadership broke.
Salesforce has become a shade of what it once was. I used to love working for that company.
I am hardly surprised. I recall all the arrogance of bar raising and other bullshit. How pythonic is your code Lol
Amazon was full of psychopaths and now it has dumb black psychopaths and fat Latinas. Congrats. Bezos is laughing all the way to the Epstein Island party.
Interestingly enough, when the Amazon warehouse in NY successfully unionized, a memo was sent out to all departments to do a full “racial” audit to make sure that every department met DEI requirements. They brought in, I believe, someone with the last name of Rice (possibly Susan Rice) to do a full racial audit, top to bottom of U.S. Amazon. It’s clear: this is how they keep workers from organizing, by divide and conquer aka DEI, and also, no doubt, they are able to pay lower wages to DEI candidates.
The idea that unions for a blue-collar subset of employees is somehow more disruptive than imposing DEI on an entire organization doesn’t pass the smell test.
A better explanation is that high-status people have been taught to believe, since they were planning for college (maybe 15 or 16), that DEI is right and good and true. Unions, on the other hand, are an impediment to management, and are not romanticized by the managerial class.
Being labeled “racist” or “sexist” will cost you friendships and get you socially ostracized. Being labeled “anti-union” will bear no social consequences at all, unless you hang out with Bernie Sanders.
This split between leftists who want to focus on working class people (who might be white!), and those who want to focus on race/sex/sexual orientation goes back 50+ years, and it is what defines the Old Left/New Left split.
The New Left won. Which is why Amazon looks like it does today.
Here’s an article about the SDS convention of 1969. You may recognize some names:
Well it does. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, it took their DEI assessment. Whole Foods wanted to crush unions and had a whole proven report that diversity kills it the easiest.
This is consistent with my experience as a hiring manager in the legal departments of both Microsoft & Intel. I left MSFT in 2010 and left INTC in 2016, so this goes much further back than people realize. Corporate America has been discriminating against whites, especially white males, for decades. Don’t even get me started talking about the H1Bs …
Once the faucet is turned on, it can never be turned off again... do we think all those ethnics will start merit based hiring, especially the ones that got in for just being brown?
it’s still running, and it’s running like a broken toilet all over the place.
Trump’s anti-woke contribution will be, very sadly, a spit bubble in a tornado. It’ll be a sad memory just around the time they take their last victory lap on the way out of office.
It’s almost impossible to find a company with (very roughly) ‘a bunch of white guys’ doing (again, very roughly) ‘computer stuff’ anymore). I guess they’re all ‘learning a trade’ or something.
Theorem: Diversity of melanin, ethnicity, and genitalia has precisely zero to do with Diversity of Thought.
Proof (Damore, Google, 2017): Try to voice a diverse thought about melanin, ethnicity, or genitalia and see where that gets you. QED.
Precisely. It's planned demolition and demoralization to an entire civilization. Obviously. I've witnessed that and the entire onboarding and HR process of employment security is unrecognizable. Fir example: the I-9 form was apparently authorized in 1986. I've hired and been hired by and for several companies several times and never once ran across such a form or procedures. Until 2020 to the current year 2026. But when you research it through legal services or a forum and find out that evidently it's been around since 1986 and what exactly it pertains to. I'm sceptical that it's disinformation attempting to make itself relevant to the current influx of foreign Visa workers. Within the United States.
This explains a lot about the AWS side of things. Maybe it’s turning around via purge. I’ve interviewed a fair number of ex-AWS engineers. They’ve been universally terrible. I’ve gone so far as tell the recruiting staff not to put them in front of me.
You are correct if you do that cutoff for 2019 and after. Anyone who was hired before then is worth the interview.
I wish I could remember all the details of a computer-based training I was required to take around 2019 at an international corporation based in Germany that took the employee through various non traditional sexual orientation scenarios and different (from America) cultural and racial perspectives, requiring us to click here and there as acknowledgement that we understand and/or agree. We tried every which way to bypass (what I considered) offensive content, but we had to sit through each part with active participation. Within that timeframe, we also saw a notable change in some previously quiet male employees sauntering through the office with full makeup and jewelry. If only they knew what people really thought.
The people who wrote that and then enforced enforcing it on you literally got erotic jollies forcing it. It’s their kink, and it’s not ok.
It most certainly was not okay with me.
Oof, I was a bar raiser for about 4 of my 10 years at Amazon. I too left with friction, caught in an HR snare after a direct report claimed I retaliated against her because she failed to get a promotion from L5 to L6, probably the single most difficult jump to make in any team. My director let me twist despite sitting in on the promo loops (for which, as any Amazonian knows, it generally takes 40-50 hours for a manager to prepare a promo recommendation. And, as manager, you get grilled just as brutally to justify a level increase, not something you do unless you're really supportive of it).
Anyway, I left mid 2019. The DEI train had left the station and was still gathering steam. Remember when "brown bag seminar" was changed to "lunch and learn" to avoid classist age racist connotations? Yeah, that happened about 2 months before my departure. The company is nothing remotely like the place I worked, and enjoyed working. Really hard, equally rewarding. But the PC > woke > DEI transition murdered that company.
Many things murdered it. That was one of them. And I remember.
But they still efficiently deliver a shit-ton of stuff every day to millions.
Less well they they used to. I watched it degrade while I was there, and it’s gotten worse since I left.
Google was the same way but way back in 2016-2017, from my limited experience there. However, I've heard they have done massive purges and have a strict "no politics" policy at work now and have been axing DEI stuff left and right (heard through the grapevine). Gemini and Google search (IMO) are actually useful now (circa last year or so - IMO Google's product offerings were near useless 2015-2023 at least), it's easier to find "non-PC" information, there's massively less censorship, it seems to me.
Think of what they could do without the self imposed constraints.
I would love to see a thousand enforcement actions against these companies
As far as I can tell, it's completely illegal. But who would sue?
The engineers not picked? The attitude is (or was) if you aren't picked for job A, you will get picked for job B. So why make yourself known as being difficult. And you probably will be known. There was always a lot of churn and people kept running into each other.
Perhaps the industry has changed. For one thing, if you're "not diverse", it's not being picked for job B, C, D....
I’ve worked in Salesforce. Around that time, they started removing every white heterosexual male from the management team. Germany went very very far in this. Extremely toxic behaviour led to the entire country sales going down. Which meant that the German, then entirely female leadership was under extreme pressure. Nobody understood why hiring based on sex would be bad. They never changed. I left SF long before that time but all my male friends left or were fired during the inevitable restructuring that needed to fix what leadership broke.
Salesforce has become a shade of what it once was. I used to love working for that company.
Thank you for your courage.
I am hardly surprised. I recall all the arrogance of bar raising and other bullshit. How pythonic is your code Lol
Amazon was full of psychopaths and now it has dumb black psychopaths and fat Latinas. Congrats. Bezos is laughing all the way to the Epstein Island party.
The salient part is how everyone goes along.
Interestingly enough, when the Amazon warehouse in NY successfully unionized, a memo was sent out to all departments to do a full “racial” audit to make sure that every department met DEI requirements. They brought in, I believe, someone with the last name of Rice (possibly Susan Rice) to do a full racial audit, top to bottom of U.S. Amazon. It’s clear: this is how they keep workers from organizing, by divide and conquer aka DEI, and also, no doubt, they are able to pay lower wages to DEI candidates.
Of course. And the DEI+Union people have only themselves to blame for this dynamic. I have a couple of unpublished drafts on this topic.
I’ve heard this before, but I don’t buy it.
The idea that unions for a blue-collar subset of employees is somehow more disruptive than imposing DEI on an entire organization doesn’t pass the smell test.
A better explanation is that high-status people have been taught to believe, since they were planning for college (maybe 15 or 16), that DEI is right and good and true. Unions, on the other hand, are an impediment to management, and are not romanticized by the managerial class.
Being labeled “racist” or “sexist” will cost you friendships and get you socially ostracized. Being labeled “anti-union” will bear no social consequences at all, unless you hang out with Bernie Sanders.
This split between leftists who want to focus on working class people (who might be white!), and those who want to focus on race/sex/sexual orientation goes back 50+ years, and it is what defines the Old Left/New Left split.
The New Left won. Which is why Amazon looks like it does today.
Here’s an article about the SDS convention of 1969. You may recognize some names:
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/war-council.htm
Well it does. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, it took their DEI assessment. Whole Foods wanted to crush unions and had a whole proven report that diversity kills it the easiest.
It’s called Divide and Conquer, the oldest trick in the book. The British Empire used it as core policy.
This is consistent with my experience as a hiring manager in the legal departments of both Microsoft & Intel. I left MSFT in 2010 and left INTC in 2016, so this goes much further back than people realize. Corporate America has been discriminating against whites, especially white males, for decades. Don’t even get me started talking about the H1Bs …
Once the faucet is turned on, it can never be turned off again... do we think all those ethnics will start merit based hiring, especially the ones that got in for just being brown?
That is an excellent point, and is another essay...
Thank you for elevating—cogently confirming what everyone knows. Mark my words. In God’s good timing, this bullshit will end. Godspeed
it’s still running, and it’s running like a broken toilet all over the place.
Trump’s anti-woke contribution will be, very sadly, a spit bubble in a tornado. It’ll be a sad memory just around the time they take their last victory lap on the way out of office.
It’s almost impossible to find a company with (very roughly) ‘a bunch of white guys’ doing (again, very roughly) ‘computer stuff’ anymore). I guess they’re all ‘learning a trade’ or something.
Theorem: Diversity of melanin, ethnicity, and genitalia has precisely zero to do with Diversity of Thought.
Proof (Damore, Google, 2017): Try to voice a diverse thought about melanin, ethnicity, or genitalia and see where that gets you. QED.
Precisely. It's planned demolition and demoralization to an entire civilization. Obviously. I've witnessed that and the entire onboarding and HR process of employment security is unrecognizable. Fir example: the I-9 form was apparently authorized in 1986. I've hired and been hired by and for several companies several times and never once ran across such a form or procedures. Until 2020 to the current year 2026. But when you research it through legal services or a forum and find out that evidently it's been around since 1986 and what exactly it pertains to. I'm sceptical that it's disinformation attempting to make itself relevant to the current influx of foreign Visa workers. Within the United States.
I guess I'm not worth your time, good to know. Will avoid your company like the plague.
And yet, here you are.
I have zero problem with Mark. It's people that toss out an entire company's employee base that I have issue with.
Everyone knows a horror story about Amazon and yet the beast continues to feast on the lifeblood of Americans
At my old company, this manifested in the form of only hiring Chinese. Which honestly was not the worst way it could have worked out.