λ Tony’s blog λ

I just finished watching some segment on some night time television show about discrimination in the workplace. Some woman was spouting off about how women are discriminated against, underpaid, forced to work excessive hours and yaddy yaddy ya. If you watch television more than I do (which is not hard), you’ve probably seen the drill. Nevertheless, I have been prompted to stand up for my former colleagues at a work place that shall remain unnamed (hint: starts with ‘I’, ends with ‘M’ and has a ‘B’ in there somewhere) who themselves are discriminated against every working day and continue in silence afraid of the otherwise adverse consequences. These consequences are not an option when under certain duresses by a multi-national corporation. I have the liberty of not suffering from these duresses, coupled with the prompt by that I’m-so-clever woman on TV, so I thought I’d write my piece.

My former workplace is a “software development lab” and I worked there for 4 years, up until February 2006. This means that its employees are supposedly versed in “developing software”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Furthermore, those who are the most highly paid are also the least skilled. Of course, this is difficult to measure, so I will throw out this conjecture; every single one of the highest paid 25% would fail the FizzBuzz test. The top 10% would not fail because of some minor error (like a lot of people do), but would fail miserably — probably not even capable of even producing something (we all remember those people from uni right?). The top 50% would not be able to do it in any language, but one from the infamous Blub category. I’m sure that these problems are faced by many companies, with incompetent management managing incompetence according to their own incompetent measures and so on (insert Marxism rant here), but this is not the key point.

Imagine the following; you are male and you have been working for a company for 4 years, straight out of university. You have produced measurable results and contributed significantly to the success of your employer as a software development company. You are paid piddles — the very lowest paid software developer in the entire region — but you accept this because of other work conditions such as security, flexible hours, etc. You are generally competent at your job, but management fails to see that as per usual and you also accept this fate as well.

However, this particular employer prides itself on diversity and in particular, its employment of women in the software development field. This means that you share your workplace with more women than you would otherwise down the street with some other employer. This is a great thing you think! Of course, who wants to be locked in a cage with smelly blokes all day anyway? Not to mention those wonderful insights that women can offer and typically at crucial moments given that women are different to men. Anyway, there are advantages to having a diverse workforce and you accept this also.

But then you have a sneaking suspicion that something isn’t right. The women around you are not exactly competent at their task, failing to comprehend even the most basic of things. Can you imagine, you are working away when someone asks you “what does telnet mean?”? Puzzled at this lack of knowledge, you provide a pointer to some documentation on what telnet means but then you are pushed further to provide more information by this seemingly uninitiated sponge of a person. After months of similar requests, you finally give in and state bluntly to this person that this “sponging” is not acceptable and you recommend using initiative to find fundamental and trivial information on unfamiliar topics. You are then accused by management of “not being a team player” — so typical and expected. But, the insult is not over — some information has leaked somehow and you now know the salary of many of your colleagues. The women, many of them incompetent, out of university for just 1 or 2 years are paid siginificantly more than you!

It seems that your employer has employed women who have no friggin’ idea what they are doing, simply because they are women. In other words, your employer is prepared to pay a salary simply for the publicity that doing so will provide, not because of the contributions of the person being paid. If women didn’t have anything to whinge about yesterday, they certainly do today. At least, if I were a woman and this revelation were made clear to me, I’d be sickened. Of course, the money might magically suppress this sickening feeling for some people.

Yes, you heard right — the absence of a penis between your legs earns you more money at this particular employer, regardless of your competence at your job! There is no disputing this, since even your well established colleagues (not straight out of uni) cannot deny it. Even those who are in line to take on the role of management. Admitting to this blatant discrimination is a Career Limiting Move (CLM) for them, just like this blog post is probably a CLM for me (the sacrifices we make to tell it how it is eh?), but they concede to this point, unable to find acceptable reasoning (perhaps they need more practice?). It’s quite clear that you do not work for a “software development lab” after all, but instead a publicity facade and that it is you who is not competent because of what you have dangling in your underwear. Yes sir, your employer discriminates against men and there’s bugger-all you can do about it except hope that defectors like myself will write posts like this, which will only serve, at best, as a release (or part thereof) for your frustration and not a means to end the nonsense.

Now, I can imagine that many of my ex-colleagues, after reading this, are probably going to be squabbling over which one of them I am describing, but I have to admit, I am describing one in particular with almost perfect application to many others. I wonder if they will agree on just who it is.

So my advice to women, instead of jumping on television and talking crap (I could imagine many intelligent women cringing at what this particular television segment was portraying), go find a job at your local Diversity Award Winner! Skills required: none! Salary: You name it. That is, if you could live with yourself.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 8:38 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.