It's one of those things that has a kernel of truth surrounded by an offensive and exaggerated wrapper, and which people love to use as a bludgeon to say that you're denying reality if you try to argue against it.

Yes, you recruit and retain the significant other... too. The engineer (who may have a husband or a boyfriend!) actually does have a significant say as well. They both count.

Stuff like "The paycheck goes to HER" is bullshit and demeans both the engineer and the significant other.

If you ignore all the crazy shit, then yes, what's left is true.

The problem here is not that an unhappy spouse will cause the employee to leave, but rather that the author makes the assumption that the employee will be male, and that the male will have a female SO.

EXACTLY. So many people on this thread have not even noticed that women are not considered as candidates!

I think for that the rule 1 would have to state: "You don't hire female engineers. End of rule 1."

There are some rules about male engineers but that doesn't preclude hiring women engineers. It just might have been that it's harder to form rules for them because of historically smaller sample to learn from.

Because it says explicitly:

> RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends"

Reading is fundamental

The implication being that you don't recruit or retain female engineers at all.

No the implication is that that's not how you manage female engineers, it's just how you manage male engineers.

He says later that female engineers will go get promoted into non-engineering roles soon enough anyway. The implication there is you don't need to worry about retaining them as engineers as they won't stay that way.

BTW this isn't an endorsement of either his views or his approach. I mean the general thrust of the presentation could be renamed "ways to stiff your staff".

There are bits of it that ring true e.g. the different motivations between newbies, lifers and the rest. The majority though is clearly intended to be provocative.

One could imply that if one were searching out reasons to get offended over a tongue-in-cheek powerpoint, which in fact features another slide specifically about female engineers.

You mean a new job, or a new wife?

Yup. Other bosses just call this "work life balance" and are praised that they pay attention to it.

I'm sure the guy wrote a lot of worse things but this one is not particularly deranged.

This is also the guy who sent out the email saying that if you're going to the hospital, make sure to take your laptop with you so you can keep working. I'm guessing employee work-life balance is not very high on his list of concerns.

Yes. I've read other stuff he wrote. Pretty crazy. I just hope all the people that come in contact with this guy or others like him, are in position to show them a finger.

Wife, or job?

Difficult to say, I've seen it go both ways. Depends on how much he likes the wife.

Well in Alex St. John's case, his messy divorce led to him getting fired from Microsoft by performing a George Costanza [1]:

>But perhaps the most telling element of all of this is St. John’s own experience. In an interview by Christopher Redner [2], St. John himself suffered burn out at Microsoft to the point where he “got himself fired”. “He would pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated.”

>According to a Shacknews interview from 2007 [3], St. John was going through a “messy divorce” at the time. He wanted to get fired rather than quit, because that ensured he’d retain his stock options for Microsoft.

[1] http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-g...

[2] http://www.informationtechnologyleaders.com/stvid.html

[3] http://www.shacknews.com/article/46338/alex-st-john-intervie...