You always have time to re-skill if you commit serious blocks of time , but your personal identity won’t be malleable in the way a 20 year old is when selecting a degree and career.
This limits what success looks like for your switch. Are you looking for a different work life balance? Learn something new? That can work.
Becoming the face of security in an organization? Not likely.
The logical conclusion is the approach taken for native Americans, providing each tribe payments at certain ages, special programs, and scholarships.
The outcomes haven’t been great, but not due to lack of opportunity. It’s as much money and DEI programs can fix. Fixing lives requires solutions that don’t scale.
You interact with executives as if they are your coworker?
> sycophantic servant
The misunderstanding is that you believe a servant is someone held in chains and beaten with a whip. A master is someone with power and authority, and servant is someone who works for them.
Reading this thread I’m realizing maybe Americans better understand organizational politics, and this social technology is an unappreciated contributor to productivity.
I agree this kind of thing is performative, but let’s steel man the other side. You are looking for a place to spend 8 hours a day doing your most skillful craft, and you don’t want to know what the organization is trying to achieve?
Yes I understand it’s performative, but why wouldn’t you take 10 minutes to indicate you are doing that kind of serious thinking?
It’s like asking a boss for guidance without doing groundwork to make a recommendation.
> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world
I would explain this as commitment signaling. I don’t know if they really believe it, but they want to show they are part of the team and the talking points.
Adults use language in a less literal way than introverted engineers may be comfortable with.
if we are in a dangerous political situation I wouldn’t know because trump alarmism has been turned up to 100 since 2015, so I have to discount what your saying to “mild political irritation”.
If you meet a Chinese person can you tell if they are from a minority group that was enslaved in Vietnam as recently as the 70s, or an upper class Han family?
What’s more true is that people around the world are facing adversity of extreme severity, but due to proximity and cultural barriers we don’t hear about them.
And if you don’t care about these other forms of identity and mistreatment , then you are really saying DEI is a repayment for a particular historical wrong doing, and not an effort for greater empathy, fairness, or new ideas.
All the Fox News criticisms suddenly become relevant: which descendants were actually impacted, how much do we owe them. Let’s pay it off and stop talking about it.
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not what we are trying to achieve.
I know this topic has been beaten to death, but the shallow symbolic form Diversity takes in practice (college recruiting photos) confirms it's merely political.
Here are a few forms of "real diversity" I have run into that you will never see initiatives for at big tech, and it would not necessarily be taboo to publicly discriminate against them:
- Number of siblings
- Asian ethnic minorities (Miao, etc)
- Discriminated indian castes
- Parents vs childless
- University degrees
- American 19th century religions (JW, Mormon, 7th day adventists, etc)
- Military experience
- experience in manual labor jobs
- Sunni and Shia Muslims
- Russian ethnic distinctions (russkiye vs rossiyane)
Obviously we can't create programs for every possible form of identity. But you can look at 2 asian men and say there isn't any diversity, when actually their life experiences couldn't be more different.
Similarly, you can have all the skin colors in a room, but if they are all upper middle class, secular humanists, from the same handful of Universities, they aren't bringing new perspectives.
This limits what success looks like for your switch. Are you looking for a different work life balance? Learn something new? That can work.
Becoming the face of security in an organization? Not likely.