Blaming a coding bug on DEI is the dumbest thing ever.
Have you met any coders? We are all weird as shit. We get paid like doctors to talk to melted sand. Two thousand years ago that gene was expressed as “person who talks to trees.”
Pop the hood on any team of half decent programmers and you’ll find a bunch of tatted up, pierced, pride flag wearing anarchists from all walks of life with views on gender and human sexuality that would instantly vaporize the conservative mind.
The conversation about the mass IT outage caused by CrowdStrike has been frustrating because of bigotry and its inversion of reality.
I have decades of experience with deploying software updates to 100s of millions of machines. I’m also directly experienced in corporate DEIB work and the ethical decline of big tech.
Blaming a coding bug on DEIB is preposterous.
Being anti-DEIB is what leads to mass outages and parts falling off of planes. Look at Boeing, which embraced open hostility to neurodivergent engineers who actually knew how things worked, purposefully driving them off and outsourcing their jobs. This is a common practice in the rot economy.
What we’re seeing today isn’t just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder.
CrowdStruck
A common refrain in every failure, from Marvel to Warner Brothers to Boeing, was this: “Leadership doesn’t know what they want,” and “leadership doesn’t trust the people who know what they’re doing to do their jobs.” It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking and datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse. It’s not that games are worse, it’s that leadership fucking sucks.
the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think | by Doc Burford | Medium
“People who constantly blame DEI for anything that goes wrong are frequently the cause of things that go wrong.”
Of all the stupid and uninformed takes I’ve seen re: Crowdstrike, including a good helping of conspiracy theories, the absolute stupidest is blaming “DEI engineers.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if people who constantly blame DEI for anything that goes wrong are frequently the cause of things that go wrong.
Unironically narrow executive over-optimizing on short term gains and efficiency(which as you noted probably correlates with people who constantly blame DEI) is in fact frequently the cause of things that go wrong.
What we’re seeing with Boeing, CrowdStrike, and so many other companies is the rot economy at work.
This is the cost of the Rot Economy — systems used by billions of people held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure maintained with the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over safety and profit over people.
Jack Welch kickstarted the rot economy. We’re seeing the full fruits of his influence decades later.
The prevailing power dynamic of our economic age, Welchism has at its heart the conviction that companies must prioritize profits for shareholders above all else, that executives are entitled to enormous wealth and minimal accountability, and that everyday employees deserve nothing more than their last paycheck. Welchism ascribes moral worth to material success, bestowing millionaire CEOs with the veneer of virtue, almost entirely irrespective of their actions. It thrives on downsizing, dealmaking, and financialization. And the Welchist worldview adopts a Darwinian attitude toward the labor market, a smug conviction that those who don’t make it are to blame for their own misfortune, that the poorest among us ultimately deserve their fate. The closest historical analog to Welchism is probably imperialism. The empires of yore had a comparable multinational reach to today’s biggest corporations, a similar willingness to confer absolute power upon their rulers, and the same tendency to exploit their subjects. Yet unlike imperialism, which has largely faded into history, Welchism still thrives today. Forty years after Welch took power, his warped worldview is still shaping our economy in ways large and small.
There is capitalism in America before Jack Welch, and after him. His career serves as a line of demarcation, a split between the past and the present. Look at the trend lines for any number of key economic indicators—wages, mergers and acquisitions, manufacturing jobs, union representation, executive compensation, corporate tax rates—and it’s clear that right around 1981, the year Welch took over, things started to go off the rails.
DEIB is a scapegoat for broken capitalism.
Blaming DEIB is part of the process of resentment,
Further Reading
- Neoliberalism
- Conservatism
- Resentment
- Southern Strategy
- Lost Cause
- Segregationist Discourse
- Meritocracy Myth
- Moral Panic
- Lowering the Bar
- Minority Stress
- Racial Weathering
- Policing
- Toxic Masculinity
- Bodily Autonomy
- Biological Essentialism
- Stigma
- Shame
- Ableism
- Eugenics
- Administrative Burden
- R-Word
- Empire of Normality
- Autism Grievance Parent
- Power
- Privilege
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- Tech Ethics
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Empire of Normality
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Eugenics
- Deficit Ideology
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Resilience
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 14 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Disability Double-bind
- Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
- Pathology Lite
- Empire of Normality
- Harm Reduction Theater
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