Culling the Herd

There are a number of bloggers I read that I spring a few bucks for their paywall writing, like Zman’s behind the green door.

He had a piece last week on companies getting rid of all the hu-white guys with institutional knowledge.

The other day I learned that my contact at a longtime customer had been let go, allegedly for performance reasons. He was a man in his fifties and had worked for the company almost all of his adult life. He started out at an entry level spot and moved up as the company grew from a small business to a mid-sized business. The company’s success was largely the result of his work over the years.

This is not the first time I have seen this. In my corporate life I saw a lot of old guys get farmed out for made up reasons. The real reason is corporate America does not like old people, especially old white people. I recall sitting in a meeting once and noticing that only one person had grey hair. That was the vice president. Thinking about, the only gray beards in the company were senior executives.

Zman

Or they may not hire them in the first place, like OceanGate. They found those 50 something white guys that know how to build subs uninteresting.

That came to mind in this most recent case of firing the old guy. Hours after I learned of his demise, I started getting frantic calls from people asking me how something was done or why it was done. I have spent a lot of time recently explaining why things are done the way they are done, because they fired the guy who knew all this. It is my job to help them, but I do not know all the answers.

Zman

Man, oh man, I’ve seen this over and over.

I’ve had customers that were absolutely awesome to work with. Then, someone young and stupid comes along and covets their job. Thinks they can do it better. So the older dude is escorted out of the office, and Mary wet-behind-the-ears takes charge. Chaos happens, and we, the vendor, get blamed.

Talking with one of their sensible people, he asked me what I thought was going to happen and I told him to expect lots of blunders. Because no one remembers why things are done a certain way, people will want to change things, just for the sake of change, and then they will learn why their way was not done in the past. They will be reinventing a lot of wheels in the coming months.

Zman

Worse yet, bet they’ll “Re-Imagine!” the process.

I’ve openly said, and still say, I’d never be a 50 something year old dude cowering in my cube waiting for the hammer to drop. I really won’t now because I’m over 60 and I’m past caring. What I’ve found from friends of mine that have gotten the ax is they end up better in the long run. The companies they left? not so much.

My dentist used to be in tech. He got let go and decided to get into dentistry as something more stable. The man drives a McLaren. He’s one of the best medical pros I know. He asked how I was doing, still being in Tech. I said I was fine. I’m in a good spot where they want to ‘re-imagine’ training as eLearning. So as the new portal comes online, I’m going to get busy. I have two of the top 10 courses, income wise, in my corral. I can always use this knowledge and skill for pursuits other than tech.

He said a lot of his tech patients are suffering. I’m going to guess there’ll be more than a few dudes my age that’ll get the boot. As I said above – it’s a thing. Get rid of the old expensive guy.

My sister was having a conversation with her boss about hiring help. This is in a law firm, BTW. He asked how hard could it be? A monkey could do that job, after all.

Her response was epic – “Who’s going to train the monkeys?”

The answer, in Tech, is no one.

This is why the ruling class is betting it all on AI. They think the robot revolution will solve the problem of diminishing IQ and demographic collapse. Maybe they are right, but the more likely answer is someone with an apostrophe in his first name asks, “why is this beeping?” and unplugs something vital. The robot revolution comes to a screeching halt and takes the institutional center with it.

Zman

Heh…

If you get a chance, check out his content behind the green door.