Get a faux-vintage t-shirt with your favorite mustachioed mass murderer’s face on it.

But we're old enough we don't need the "faux" vintage - we have the real deal (well, not the murderer part, but old concert/band shirts).

You don’t want the employer to think you are the t-shirt’s original owner. The goal is to appear younger. :)

Those probably smell of cigarette smoke. Better get faux ones, you don't wanna scare them with too much authenticity.

Mario!

If video games could affect people's behavior, PacMan would've caused people to meander around dark rooms while munching on pills and listening to electronic music.

Related https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.28831488.0474/poster,840x830...

Sadly this would probably work. Bonus points if you tell people your pronouns are they/them, HR departments really can’t get enough of that.

My wife works for a company that does tons of business with a FAANG company. They’re putting together a presentation for the client about how diverse they are (“we have all of the sexual identities!”). They also told a Mexican guy he wasn’t diverse enough to give the presentation because he was (1) a man and (2) his accent wasn’t thick enough—it might not be clear that he is “diverse”. It’s over the top even by post-2020 standards.

It didn’t take long after Silicon Valley was no longer on the air for the entire industry to become more absurd than its parody.

I really don’t think any of this is sustainable either. Latinos in particular seem very opposed to this stuff & given that they are part of the fastest growing demographic in the country I don’t see how political support for policies like this can be maintained.

These politics only appeal to ~10% of the population anyway, and they aren't favored by a majority of any ethnicity. This stuff isn't mainstream because voters like it (which is why it never makes its way into any real laws), it's mainstream because the cultural and media elites like it and they don't have to trifle with a democratic process to impose it.

Corporate DEI stuff is also useful to "prove" that an employer isn't racist--current anti-discrimination law puts the burden of proof on employers to show that they didn't discriminate, and since it's not possible to prove a negative, they must instead compete to show that they're among the more 'woke' companies ("look at our DEI propaganda, how could we possibly be guilty of discrimination?").

Corporate DEI has laws backing it, but I don't think that's the full picture. Corporations have a genuine economic interest in diverse hiring even if those laws didn't exist: 1) Diverse hiring expands the labor pool, which suppresses wages. 2) Diverse labor organizes less effectively, particularly if the workers can be kept on edge around each other.

I don't doubt that it's not the full picture, but I'm skeptical about your theory. My $0.02:

Regarding (1), it only expands the labor pool if the pipeline for "diverse" labor hasn't already been exhausted. Instead we seem to see employers competing for "diverse" labor, including in some cases foregoing technical qualifications for "diverse" qualifications. This is only in the company's best interest to the extent that it's economically advantageous to appear to be striving for diversity.

Regarding (2), I really don't think most companies are to the point where they're deliberately stoking racial division as an anti-union tactic, at least not in the FAANG space. Seems like it would be a lot easier to push the political divide button which is pre-primed on account of the media.

>I really don't think most companies are to the point where they're deliberately stoking racial division as an anti-union tactic

Amazon tracks lack of racial diversity as a union formation risk metric https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403

For 2) corporations themselves may not be doing it with that in mind but when management consultants like McKinsey etc began pushing for this stuff I absolutely believe it was a consideration.

If anyone has seen Severance on Apple TV, the animosity fostered between the MDI and O&D departments is an excellent example of the strategy behind this last point.

“Management isn’t taking advantage of you; it’s the person sitting next to you with a different gender or skin color that’s the threat”

There are laws against certain types of discrimination. Corporate DEI is something else altogether (and if the anecdata elsewhere in this thread are to believed, run in direct opposition to some of those anti-discrimination laws).

I guess what I mean is that I believe this will become a political issue again & the backlash will be strong enough that cultural & media elites will no longer be able to maintain it.

My understanding is that Corporate DEI is mostly bottom up, not top down.

It usually starts as an HR initiative & then ERGs are created as a means of fulfilling goals set by the HR departments. I wouldn’t really characterize it as bottom up, although I’m sure there are plenty of companies where C suite & other divisions didn’t want this to happen & it’s being used as political leverage against them.

I recently made a move from Seattle to Dallas.

While in Seattle I was consumed by the thought that all of American academia, business, and media was consumed by idpol and other associated confusions. In Seattle, every interaction is permeated by conversations about identity, and friend groups are highly segregated by class, if not race.

Moving to Dallas completely changed my perspective. Dallas is an actual multicultural utopia. Everywhere I went, people of all kinds were doing stuff together, and not in the soft late 90s ghetto mural of rainbows and people holding hands, I mean just hanging out as if you would with friends from your neighborhood. Funny that in practice, Texas is significantly less class and race divided than Seattle.

I'm happy that latinos reject this stuff. I'm even more happy to know that it hasn't spread throughout the entire US.

From what I've gathered the few times I've been to Seattle, it isn't so much racially segregated as predominantly white. A Black friend of mine moved there to work for Amazon and hated Seattle. Eventually he got the ability to relocate to LA and is much happier now.

I was in Austin last weekend and it appeared very diverse; much less segregated than the Bay Area.

I've heard things similar about Seattle specifically that line up with what both you and the parent commenter are saying.

Maybe Seattle just sucks?

Had a similar experience visiting Texas and I’m looking forward to moving there myself soon.

I would like to push back against this, because They/Them also has plenty of risks that are usually never thought of by people who don’t use they/them or other nonstandard profiles. Many companies, especially startups, don’t have HR departments to begin with. Of those with large HR departments, many don’t have a reputation of not protecting abusers (see: Uber, Google). Most HR software, payrolls, health data, etc also assume M/F sex === he/she pronouns (this problem also happens to people with nonstandard names to some extent). Additionally, there’s no guarantee your co workers will actually use they/them around with you or somehow believe you’re less technical or less skilled purely because of your choice in pronouns.

Overall they/them isn’t really worth progressive points unless you actually are non-binary. But that comes with a lot of bullshit, see above ignorance.

This was really just a joke about how an old white guy could go “undercover” and become hireable again, I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone actually do something like this.

Explicit pronouns are actually useful for communicating with coworkers. If you communicate with people who have names that don't hint at gender (or are in a language you are completely unfamiliar with), having pronouns available helps to avoid some basic communication gaffes. Think of it as human type hinting.

In that metaphor, why is gender part of the type hierarchy in this context? Why is that the first-class classification for concrete implementations of `Person`? Why not hair color? Why not height? Why not age? I feel like everyone would have been better off if pronouns weren't even gendered to start with. But now that would be an incendiary political crusade, which I'm not interested in.

unless you're applying for a job in HR, I don't see how HR's feelings on your pronoun use would make a difference to your job prospects.

They have a DE&I gun to the head of every hiring manager in the company so it doesn’t particularly matter what you’re applying for, there’s strong pressure to hire candidates that help meet HRs goals.

I’d pass on Soviet stuff right now, at least until Eastern Europe stabilizes.

Are Che tshirts still cool? Maybe just one of those raised-fist tshirts. That's sufficiently distant from the Russian matter.

Che is great, especially if you can rock a beret.

Che tshirt, beret, plaid kilt, birkenstock sandals, and a few of those candy necklaces. This'll be my new look.