In a recent article, I wrote about the cognitive dissonance of women who believe that their professional success is due to their own ability as opposed to affirmative action and quotas. Some women are indeed so deluded that they do not even realize that theirs is a make work job that is merely seen as a cost of doing business. Companies who compete for public projects have to have women and minorities on board, so they get hired, almost regardless of competence. In any case, for them the hiring bar is a lot lower than it is for men.

In my professional life, I have encountered several examples of women who were just not cut out for their job. They would not know that, though. One woman I know of got promoted to the position of manager in a large tech company. She had joined that company as a software developer as a fresh graduate with a degree in Information Systems a few months prior. I know that she was a poor student; in her last year, she finally managed to pass a first-year introduction to programming. Yet, she got readily hired. Apparently, women can’t get fired once they are hired, so she now spends her days bossing nerds around. What is even worse is that a guy with that kind of tech-lite degree would not even have gotten an interview.

At my first real job, I was part of a small skunkworks team. It would have been a fine job; I liked the work and the freedom we had was quite extraordinary. We were just three guys, doing our thing. We basically got paid to come up with ideas and develop prototypes. One fine day, my manager told me that he got approval to hire another person for our team and, just like last time (when I was hired), he’d like the team to comment on CVs. We’d also get to have a final say in who gets hired. When I came on board, I had three rounds of interviews. First, there was an external recruiting company. After they had OK ‘ed me, I met two senior employees in that organization, and after they were fine with me, I sat down with the team. Of course, that team did not have the power to pick their candidate of choice. However, they could veto any candidate. It seemed like a fair albeit a drawn out and potentially tedious process.

After a few weeks, I wondered what the status was. It could well have been that funding for that position got yanked in the meantime. But that was not what had happened. Instead, I was informed that the position has been filled already. I was a bit taken aback by that, but before I could say anything, my manager went on to elaborate that “a woman had applied, so we hired her”. Apparently, women had to be hired preferentially. She only had an interview with him; we were not even part of the discussion. I was quite annoyed by that. The very same day, I applied for a new job, quickly found one, and I was gone before that woman came onboard. At my new job, our team had not one but two female managers. Apparently, they had so many sick days that two women were needed to do the work of one man. That was when I realized what an incredible shit show the modern workplace is.

A third example is an acquaintance, more an acquaintance of an acquaintance. Her story is that she came to Germany to rejoin her husband, an engineer from the Middle East. Her spoken English is horrible, based on the few words I exchanged with her; her German is non-existent. Back then she was in her late 30s or early 40s; she never worked, instead spending over a decade raising a son. In Germany, she wanted to work, though. Quite frankly, I was shocked when I learned that she almost immediately got an internship as a software developer at a top company, despite only having the most rudimentary skills in that field. It’s a company that is seen as pretty selective, at least when men apply. I was so baffled by that that I followed up on her a few months later as I was curious to learn how that internship went. What happened was that people were essentially hand-holding her, giving her almost complete pieces of code in which she had to insert a few lines (she couldn’t even do that), as opposed to what people normally do, i.e. find solutions to problems from scratch or finding out that there is a problem in the first place. As far as I know, she did not manage to break into the industry, but that she has gotten multiple chances over much more qualified men is sickening enough.

There is not much point getting upset about those stories as a guy. It is simply an example of how corrupt our society is because dominant corporations are not exposed to competition. If you do business with government or, worse, are government-funded, you can burn heaps of money and you’ll be fine, at least until things come crashing down. Yet, such is reality in Western-style socialism. Sometimes, I sit and wonder what a beautiful kind of society we could have if only productive people could vote or, better, if we scrapped democracy altogether and erected an authoritarian system with strong leaders. It took a few smart and hard-working leaders to transform China, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea from third-world countries into first world ones in one generation. Meanwhile, our Western leaders are working hard at turning first world countries into third world ones; it’ll take them about two generations, maybe three, but we’re getting there eventually. Hiring quotas only hasten the demise as any quota entails that you are not hiring the most competent person you can find.

Did you enjoy this article? Excellent! Here are some further steps to consider:

1) If you want to read more from Aaron, check out his excellent books, the latest of which are Sleazy Stories II, Sleazy Stories III, and Meditation Without Bullshit.

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