How Tech Employees Became Disposable

Joe Procopio is wondering how tech employees became disposable. It's not what he claims...

Since I am banned off Medium? Anyone who wants to put this in his comments is welcome.

You can go to his post on the button below.

Tech employes started their path on becoming disposable some time before I started my very first trainee programmer job on 1982-01-18. In Australia we start our university year in February.

The deal we had was that we were to work for 32 paid hours per week at our jobs and we had 8 hours per week to attend university classes in 9-6 time that were not available after 6pm. When University was not in session, which was 20 weeks a year, we were to work 40 hours a week at our job.

Of course, we were paid pittance since we were not useful. Though, to be fair, on my first day I learned the coffee desires of my team and I was the coffee maker. I was very happy to be so. I then learned how to make cardboard folders for program listings and set about the task of printing program listings and filing them in the library cabinets properly.

A week or so after we started university I walked past the desk of one of my women peers and saw that she was doing her university assignment we had for Math101 that week. I was on my way to do my very important coffee making job for my team.

So I walked over to her desk and asked her if she was doing the Math101 assignment. She asked me if I was stupid because it was obvious that is what she was doing.

I told her I was curious as to why she was doing it at her desk in work time and could she please explain that to me. She asked me if I was a nazi and had some how become the “work nazi”. All very hostile answers for innocent questions. If she was not doing something she considered was wrong there would be no need for such comments.

So she said that yes, she was doing the Math101 homework we had been given and “what business is that of yours?” I replied that she worked for the same company I did and that she signed the same contract as I did and that she was violating her contract, so it was my business.

I asked her if her boss knew she was doing this university work and she said yes.

I asked her if she had any problems with me talking with him about it. She said no.

There was more said but let’s keep this short.

So I went to her bosses desk. His name was Richard and we all called him Dick.

I asked him if he knew his employee, aptly named Karen, was doing university work while on work time. He said sure he knew that and wondered why I was asking him about it. I said that this is considered stealing because she is paid for 32 hours a week to do as he asks her, not to do her university work.

He laughed and said “You are not married are you.”. And I said no, I was just 18 years old and currently not in any relationship so no plans to get married any time soon.

So he explained in words to the following effect. These are not his exact words. I have shortened the conversation a bit.

“When you get married you will find out that a man can not even get his own wife to do what he wants her to do. So it is simply impossible to get a woman employee to do what you want her to do. You can ask. And she can just say no. There is nothing to be done when a woman says no, she will not do as you ask.

The situation is that the government has issued quotas for women. We call them “affirmative action quota women”. We must meet those quotas or we will be heavily fined by the government. So we hire “affirmative action quota women” to avoid the fines. We can’t get them to do anything. But if we fire them we just have to hire another woman and we have to go through the whole charade again. So it’s cheaper to just keep the ones we hire and let them sit there and do nothing.

Please just think of a woman in the office as another form of taxation because that’s pretty much what they are, another form of taxation we all just have to pay.”

I asked what would happen if I did my university work while in the office. He said I would be immediately fired because I am a man and I am expected to do as I am asked by my manager.

Yes. That was February 1982. After I was told this I noticed that of all the women who worked in our office only one of them was actually doing what she was asked to do. Her name was Caroline. So I asked Caroline why she was not talking to her peers about doing what they were asked to do. She said that getting other women to do their job was none of her business. I pointed out that she would be tarred with the same brush across her career. He reply was “well that would be unfair to me”. I pointed out that while she tolerates this she will be tarred with the same brush, fair or not.

When I interviewed at IBM in September and October 1985 I specifically asked the managers I was interviewing with if IBM was subject to the same legislation and did IBM participate in hiring “affirmative action quota women”. When I was asked why I was asking I explained my current employer is subject to that legislation which means I am paying a “woman tax” out of my possible earnings and I didn’t like that idea.

I was assured by all managers interviewing me that IBM was not subject to this legislation and that IBM followed two founding principles.

1. Respect for the Individual

2. Pay for performance.

So I joined IBM in January 1986.

By October 1987 I already had my deep suspicions that IBM was doing “affirmative action quota women” and simply not saying so. Indeed, denying so. I was dragged into IBM HR for the first time in October 1987 for doing my job.

A part of my job was to review source code at walkthroughs. I was particularly gifted at this because I had what is commonly called a “photographic memory”.

The “walkthrough” is the number one error detection mechanism in large systems development. We “walkthrough” everything. The standard practice at IBM was that before you asked anyone to perform a “walkthrough” of your deliverable it must be completedto the very best standard you can achieve. Records were kept and statistics were maintained. Those with the most bugs reported would be moved to different projects or encouraged to leave. Those with the least bugs and best deliverables, could look forward to pay rises and promotions.

So “code walkthroughs” applied to source code. And I was VERY good at these. I was also very good at test case results walk throughs and finding bugs in code that looked like it was working.

I had worked on a system called COBRA 1.0. I completed the Hong Kong / China install in September 1987. I was then ill for three weeks and came back to work in October 1987. The Cobra 2.0 release was due for completion on December 31st 1987. I was asked to please help out with testing and code walkthroughs to improve the quality of what was being delivered.

Well? The code I was given to walk through by the women was very low quality. I did my job professionally. I documented all the errors and explained how to fix them. The women would run crying to the bathroom and us men were very frustrated that they were so fragile that when we tried to help them make their code better they ran crying to the bathroom.

I was hauled into IBM HR and told to “go easy on the women”. I said no. I said I was a not a sexist and that I would treat women just exactly like I treated men, as women had said for many years they wanted to be treated. So I was no longer offered any walkthroughs for women. I was only offered walkthroughs for men.

The result of this was that COBRA 2.0 was a disaster of biblical proportions. I had only scratched the surface. All the additions of 2.0 over 1.0 were rubbish and didn’t work. I was sent to Malaysia to implement Cobra 2.0 in May 1988 and I could not even get it off the tapes. I won’t go into details here, but it was a disaster of biblical proportions.

The project was almost cancelled after lunch on day 1. It was only my promise to “fix it” that kept the project running. Also, I told the CFO of IBM Malaysia I had been lied to about the state of the system by my now IBM Manager. He was SHOCKED to hear me say that I gave my word I had been lied to and told that the system was properly tested and functioning in the Philippines.

At the end of 1988 I was awarded a HUGE promotion to be the System Architect of a system named PRISM 4.0 which was the internal pricing system in IBM Asia Pacific. The youngest ever man to hold such a senior position.

In December 1989 there was a very serious issue with the implementation of COBRA I did for the IBM Australia Export business.

If you want to listen to a very amusing video about it you can watch the video below.

To summarise the video.

The COBRA Billing system had been down for 2 weeks. Because it was printing the Air Way Bills as well as the invoices no PCs had been shipped out of the country for 2 weeks. You cannot clear customs without the Air Way Bill. The issue had been raised at the weekly Monday morning meeting with the head of IBM Asia Pacific that all the country Managing Directors attended.

The Managing Directors were concerned they would miss their quotas because of this problem. The Managing Director of IBM Australia was told that if anyone missed their quota because of this problem he would be fired. And that problem ended up on my desk at about five minutes past Midday that Monday.

A woman named Helen had been running around like a chicken with her head cut off for two weeks and it turned out that this problem is what she was failing to fix. I fixed it inside 8 hours.

I then had two weeks of invoices to print off on twenty pages per minute laser printers. So we were printing invoices all over IBM Offices in Sydney until 3am. We did not have many of these new and very expensive twenty pages per minute laser printers.

In short. I saved the Managing Directors job by working a solid 36 hour day.

On the Thursday we had the annual Christmas Meeting and Helen was given a $A1,500 award for “trying really hard for two weeks to solve this problem”. After I saw that award I cornered the manager who had interviewed me in 1985 and was now my good friend. I respected him very much and he respected me.

We talked very quietly in a corner of the presentation area and I said to him “You told me four years ago that IBM did not have an affirmative action quota women program. You have told me many times since that IBM does not have an affirmative action quota program. But Helen just got a $1,500 award for “trying really hard to solve a problem” when we all know she is as dumb as a box of rocks. So I think we DO have an affirmative action quota women program. What do you say?”

And I will never forget his reply. It was:

“I have been assured that if I ever say that we have an affirmative action quota women program I will be fired. So I am absolutely telling you that we do not have an affirmative action quota women program and if anyone ever asks me if I told you we do I will most strenuously deny I ever said that. If you think we have an affirmative action quota women program you absolutely never heard that from me.”

Which, of course, was his way of saying: “Yes, we have an affirmative action quota women program but I can’t say that so I am going to say something that gives me absolute deniability.”

I thought about it for 30 seconds and decided I would leave software development and told him so. He asked why. I said:

“To create very high quality software that is extremely reliable takes very skilled and reasonably expensive people. To create buggy software that crashes all the time can be done by cheap people anywhere. There is no future in software development here. I will leave my job before my job leaves me.”

By 1996 most of the jobs in the International Software development were relocated to Malaysia because bad software can be developed by cheap people anywhere.

And THAT, my dear readers, was the beginning of making tech employees disposable. When you let women in and allow women to create buggy software because they will cry and run to the bathroom if you try and help them improve their software? You are at the beginning of a slippery slope.

Firstly software development was moved to places like India. And later? Indians were moved to places like Microsoft in the US at cheap rates on H1B visas to develop buggy software that crashes all the time.

So, if the product you want is buggy software that crashes all the time? It’s only a matter of time where the cheap people who write buggy software that crashes all the time are replaced by even cheaper AIs that write buggy software that crashes all the time.

Now, if the product you wanted was high quality software that is extremely stable and reliable? Well that takes a very skilled person like me to develop.

That is exactly what my SeETL software is. At least the run time components are very high quality software that are extremely reliable. The SeETL Design Time Visual Basic code is rubbish because I didn’t know how to write C++ to read XML documents in 2004 and so I wrote it in Visual Basic and it stuck. LOL!

This is why tech people are being replaced by AIs. It is because if the product you want is bad software that crashes a lot and is unreliable? AIs can now write software like that cheaper than even the cheapest Indian programmers.

Best Regards

Peter Andrew Nolan