vxnul

Instead, he was gunned down for pointing out the nonexistence of meritocracy in the startup world. He certainly wasn't the first to figure it out, and he wasn't the first to say it, but he was for whatever reason the one who turned it into common knowledge.

I wonder where he is now and I hope his book (Farisa's Crossing, is it called?) lives up to the hype.

It sucks, and I'm sorry that you had this experience. That's basically how it works. The people who get the good jobs are the people who don't need jobs at all. The people who need jobs get the lousy ones that lead nowhere but more lousy jobs, and it is this way because the owning class can threaten us with starvation and homelessness into taking whatever terms they offer.

What is truly weird is that, if you advocate (I don't, and I'm not) for tearing down the capital-owning class using indiscriminate and total violence--and, just to be clear, I consider "indiscriminate, total violence" a terrible outcome, almost as bad as letting the bourgeoisie continue to win--you'll probably end up in jail, even in the US where they claim to love "freedom of speech"... but, at the same time, rich people can use survival pressures (threat of starvation, homelessness, and criminal medical negligence) and that's just taken as how the world works. To advocate for a final revolution against the bourgeoisie that might take 100,000 lives is a crime; to advocate (or even lobby!) against "socialized medicine" and kill far more people is legal.

It's weird how certain types of violence fade into the background while others are considered severe and deviant, to the point of receiving international scorn and attention. Worker-initiated worksite violence is a bad thing, no doubt--I am staunchy against it, since other workers, often innocents, are invariably the victims--but compared to the millions that have been killed by the US health insurance system, it's not newsworthy at all. It's just the Right is very skilled at using criminal anecdata to convince people the world that the poor are far more dangerous (and the rich, less so) than they actually are.

You'd think that a website supporting an organization so dedicated to capitalism would be filled entirely with toxic personalities, but in reality, it's only about 50% toxic. The other half are genuinely interesting people who actually want to make the world a better place (although, if they do what capitalism wants them to do, they will fail in doing so).

Google is still around. It is a third-rate search engine but a first-rate reputation engine. Boomers (we still call them that, even though they haven't been actual Baby Boomers for a long time) still use it to vet people before making hiring decisions.

For $159 per month (everything is on a subscription model) you can get the "personalized reputation" treatment by Google, so that when said Boomers are deciding whether to hire you, they see the unreliable material you paid for them to see--rather than, as under the old system, the unreliable material that emerged organically. It's a steep fee (these are the deflationary "new dollars") but it's a small price to be able to get a job and not be picked up by one of the "sweepers" and put into one of the performance improvement camps.

I wish I had overthrown capitalism in the 2020s when it was still possible.

This can be concealed to some extent if people only put the years of employment on their resume. Which is why the resume portals ask for months. It's a way of figuring out if someone has a history of getting flagged for depression, anxiety, or long COVID and then PIP'd over it.

A lot of HR people and bosses are evil and want to know not just where you worked and about how long, but what months you were there. Why? Because it's a way to figure out if you're disabled. A resume shows what the candidate wants them to know, but these portals are a way to ask the questions they want to know without revealing (as would occur in personal interactions) the degree to which they want to know.

Also, to a large degree these horrible job portals are a way of filtering out the "prima donnas" who balk at being treated poorly or having to do something mindless and unpleasant.

The hostile design is kinda the point, because it's capitalism after all.