A few years ago, when the scamdemic was being ramped up and companies told their employees that they should work from home, the societal consequences were probably not quite as expected. Fuel to the fire was provided by die DEI agenda, according to which you needed to stop hiring white men and instead increase the number of women and non-East-Asian minorities in your company. The discrimination against white was so bad that only 6% of additional hires in the 100 largest publicly traded US companies in 2021 were whites, and it surely was not because every white man or woman was already gainfully employed.

When you get told to hire people for which you have no use for, it can be difficult to find work for them. Sometimes, they get put on projects that go nowhere or perhaps you spread women and minorities across existing teams, hoping they contribute a little bit this way. In reality, though, a non-trivial amount of women seemed to not do any work at all. There was a glut of videos on TikTok in which Stacy and Shaqueesha broadcasted to the world what they did for a living. The world learned that Big Tech paid women lavish six-figure salaries to enjoy catered lunches, wine on tap, on-site yoga and massages, and sunbathing on the roof. Sometimes, they “vibed” a bit with their female colleagues, congratulating them on working so hard and doing so well at their job.

There is the rumor that Elon Musk decided to fire 80% of Twitter because he had seen one too many of such videos. As it turned out, a lot of people really seemed to not do any work at Twitter, or elsewhere. In fact, some people make negative contributions because they want to be “part of the conversation” and happily waste everybody’s time, or dream up bizarre procedures that slow everybody down. I recall having to deal with a clueless “product manager” who insisted we only wrote tests for the “really important” part of the code as this would “deliver the most business value”. She was so annoying and persistent that we had to escalate this to the department head. What was worse was that she was not even good-looking. The blonde in the video below, for instance, is cute enough, but probably did not add a lot of value apart from that:

Happy Mother’s Day to the Product Mommy who single-handedly caused the 2022 recession, the most impactful work she’s ever done pic.twitter.com/7wXfDDpzW6

— Jason Levin (@iamjasonlevin) May 12, 2024

There is a really bizarre aspect of female psychology, i.e. the need to broadcast what you do, all the time, while being so unbelievably entitled that you think you deserve everything good you got. Of course, for all negative consequences somebody else is responsible. They are completely oblivious to the consequences of boasting about supposedly working from home. Instead, they were taking swims in the pool. Probably they took a lot of dick on the side, too, while they were on the clock. What did women like the above think would happen after posting such moronic videos? In particular in owner-run businesses, managers would be fuming if they heard about that but even in publicly traded companies, executives also got angry at that.

When the TikTok trend of women bragging about getting six-figures for not working was at its peak, my manager once sent me a few links to relevant videos, asking if I am aware of this phenomenon and, more importantly, if I believed that we had people like that on our payroll. In this particular case, we ended up laying off a few people. They did not post videos about their leisurely working days, but their output was so minimal that management decided that this was clear breach of contract. Yet, without this TikTok trend, probably nobody would have looked that closely. These people could have stayed under the radar otherwise.

In particular if you work in larger companies, or have been engaged in project-based work, you probably know that sometimes there is not that much to do. For instance, perhaps the work on a project is done, you have finished the final presentation, but there is still about a week left until the date of that presentation. It does not make sense to add anything to the project and a bit of mentoring or preliminary work on your next project, which you could not even bill to the customer, also does not keep you busy for eight hours a day. Thus, you take it easy for a few days, perhaps reading some vaguely work-related articles online for a few hours or taking longer lunch breaks. This is all understood to be normal. Everybody else is doing it too. However, guys would not boast about getting paid for not doing any real work for a week or two. They just view it as a somewhat restful period before the next ramp-up.

The tech craze could perhaps have gone on for a bit longer had all those women simply kept their mouth shut. Their desire of getting likes and views, as well as the hope that Chad might “slide into her DMs”, made them do it, so presumably we cannot even blame them. It is just their female nature that causes them to make questionable decisions. I would not even be surprised if women who were laid off after posting such videos had no feelings of remorse at all. After all, in the moment it surely felt right to them.