All the news

Here’s a prize example of delighting the customer. Not.

I’ve had a Sunday-only home delivery subscription to the Washington Post for more than four years. That subscription comes with full digital access to WaPo (including archives).

I finally decided I don’t want the physical paper because I get all my news online and I see no reason to just send it straight to the shredder and then to the composter. So I called WaPo’s subscription line (you can sign up online, but to unsubscribe, you have to call), which—from the accents—is somewhere in the Philippines. When I explained what I wanted, the guy (I forget his nom-de-contact-center, but the woman I first got was Shirley) told me that my options are: basic digital (“complete” access, except no archives; so, not complete), at $100 per year; premium digital (“complete” access plus archives), at $150 per year.

However, because I’ve been such a great customer, he could give me a promotional rate of premium access for $101.60 per year; that rate stays the same forever. But I have to keep Sunday delivery.

I’m not going to make you go through the entire surreal conversation; I’ll just say that I’m getting the promo rate, and I have to remember to call in once a quarter to put the Sunday delivery on a “temporary” three-month vacation stop.

Gawd.

 

 

Neither friendly nor safe

Well, it’s July, so we’re on track for another round of emails from CEOs who want to remind us that they need our money. Yesterday it was from United Airlines’ “Chief Customer Officer”, Toby Enqvist. He’s pushing the same old nonsense as CEO Oscar Muñoz did in March.

  

“We’re not filthy, honest.”

Oh, poop—your flights are so predictably late that you allow the ground crew maybe ten minutes to sweep through the aircraft before you start cramming the passengers for the next flight.

Also, speaking of cramming, I see Toby doesn’t mention that UAL are back to filling every seat on the plane; none of this unprofitable social distancing for their vict, uh, passengers.

I bet they water down the solution in the alleged misters, just to stretch their cleaning budget.

Toby closes out this way, to my major hilarity:

Their “best possible travel experience” has been pathetic since at least the '90s. This pandemic brings out the best and the worst in people and corporations. I know which side UAL lands on.

Capitalism 101

Evidently, Boeing charges its customers extra if they want safety features that could have prevented the two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft. That’s kind of like Toyota charging extra if you want brakes that work.

Nearly 350 people dead. What a business model.

Visualizing...

Lest you think that only no-name amateur-hour numbskulls engage in cold-calling come-on spam (like the one I reported on last week), I assure you that actual employees of legitimate companies do it, too.

For example, here’s one I got from Tableau Software, clearly courtesy of LinkedIn:

Now, in fact, my company does deploy Tableau’s data visualization application, but I have no need for it. Moreover, I’m not in IT, nor does my LinkedIn profile in any way imply that I do. So for the life of me I cannot imagine what Adam w/Tableau thought his email would accomplish. From his LinkedIn profile (with a lot of sales jobs), it appears he sent this a month or two after he moved to Tableau. Maybe he sent the same, sadly incoherent email to lots of my colleagues in hopes of upping the number of user licenses.

I dunno, but this kind of thing is not a good look for a company that’s supposed to be a leader in business intelligence.

Entrepreneurship

I’ve marveled here many times at the completely ham-handed gambits sales/business development people deploy in an attempt to make a sale. It’s the business world equivalent of robo-calling: flinging vast amounts of emails chockers with faux bonhomie and presumptuous expectations that you’ll set up a call to buy their products or services.

Many of them are funneled through LinkedIn—the predators do keyword searches, see one they like and, without bothering to read further, they fling off an email. I don’t have my email account in my profile, but it’s not terrifically difficult to suss out possible addressing protocols and take a flyer. The results are risible, particularly when the perps are trying to be subtle.

Viz:

There’s nothing like a segue from an intro from someone claiming to be a “research analyst” for a bogus company (who can't even be arsed to drop my name into the salutation) exploring “entrepreneurship opportunities” via a “market survey” to who buys office supplies in what quantities to make me want to “take a quick call”. By replying to a Gmail account.

Monkey business

Let’s have a break from local copperheads and Rams; time for a commercial break. So I’ll give you a couple of bits of business news.

This week, General Electric—that erstwhile powerhouse of American blue-chip manufacturing—was tossed out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its place on the exchange will be taken by Walgreen’s.

GE was a founding member of the Dow, so this has got to bite. As recently as the 90s, under CEO Jack Welch, the company was held up as an example of how to company. One of their divisions once flew me up to Connecticut for an interview; I wasn’t offered the job but I never held it against them. However, in recent years, they’ve pretty much screwed the pooch and last year it was the worst-performing stock in the Dow.

They put out a “things are going to plan” statement after the banishment was announced, but the plan involves a lot of pulling in of horns and selling off of businesses, from the railroad to the lightbulb divisions. Sad times.

And at the other end of the business weird-shit-o-meter, yesterday the Kleptocrat might have overdosed on Ambien, causing him to accuse those wily Canadians of…well, I’ll let him speak for himself, in his own word salad:

(I'm not even going to comment on #SpaceCadetBoneSpurs' announcement that he's creating another branch of the military—separate but equal—to conquer and occupy space. And he's calling it Space Force. Because of course.)

It took GE 120 years to screw the pooch as badly as the stable genius Chaos Monkey. God help us all.

Same old s[tuff]

You know, it’s been another of Those Weeks, primarily thanks to the Kleptocrat and his cabal. They’re all in it, but at the time of writing I’m thinking primarily of the latest revelations about the extent of EPA Slimebeast Pruitt’s venal attempts to get a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife, sending his staff out to buy a used mattress from the local Hotel Klepto (ewww) and spending nearly $1600 for 2 pens (that's $1600 of our money); and the general mouth-flapping of Rudy Giuliani assuring us that the Kleptocrat is above the law.

(This would be risible if both houses of Congress weren’t under the control of GOPig sycophants, who do not possess a spine between them. But as it is indeed a Repugnant Congress, it’s fucking terrifying.)

And it’s capped off by Li’l Donnie Two-Scoops himself whining about having to go to Canada for the G-7 Summit today; he knows it’s not going to be any fun because—having pissed off every single one of our historic allies—it’s just possible that no one there’s going to give him the adulation he requires. Moreover, he’s got ants in his pants in anticipation of the big meeting with Kim Jong-Un next week, which he’s convinced will earn him the Nobel Prize. (Also, the Québec trip cuts into his golf time.) Although he doesn't think he has to prepare for the Two-Scoops/Rocket Man meet. Because: attitude.

Gawd.

And—as if that’s not whackadoodle enough—at what was meant to be a meeting between Commander Bone Spurs and his Stepford-wife VP Pence and FEMA to discuss planning for hurricane season, he unsurprisingly was unable to stay on topic for longer than 23 seconds, and blathered quasi-incoherently about his favorite-most subject, himself.

That almost wasn’t the weirdest thing about that meeting. And I’m not referring to Melania being there in a kind of proof-of-life presence. No—it’s this water bottle schtick:

By Grabthar’s Hammer, you cannot make this shit up.

(I'm not even going to talk about the buffoon the administration sent as ambassador to Germany. Gawd.)

But, speaking of shit, I have now arrived at the point of today’s post: the mysterious person known as the #poojogger, who has been crapping for more than a year in a Brisbane, Australia, neighborhood has been caught in the act. On camera.

(How long before New Balance distances itself from this customer in the manner of Sanofi decrying Roseanne’s Ambien-blaming?)

Turns out he was a q-qu-quality assurance manager for a company that runs retirement homes. Quality assurance—bwahahahaha! Exec by day, sociopath by night.

Well, actually—sociopath 24x7.

As you might imagine, as with #BBQBecky, the iconic photo of Andrew Macintosh is now featured in all manner of memes, and Twitter is having a laff riot with it. (The one about the second pooper on the grassy knoll is cherce, although the account @poojogger is starting out strong on his own.) He’s been sacked from his job, which is at least somewhat satisfying.

As we wait for the same to happen to the Kleptocrat and his Klan, we’ll have to make do with this story.

Fake friends

As you know, Facebook has been in the spotlight lately for selling influence to whoever’ll pay for it, which—in addition to crappy ads cluttering up your feed—includes allowing bad actors like Cambridge Analytica, the GOP and Vladimir Putin to screw with our political system.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a slap-on-the-sincere-face-instead-of-a-smirk-and-suit-instead-of-a-white-tee-shirt apology tour of both the US Congress and the EU’s Parliament. He’s told us he doesn’t understand how this happened, and assured us that it won’t ever happen again.

I’m not entirely reassured, however.

Nonetheless, I thought this was an interesting ad placement in their disinformation campaign.

I mean, I just wonder how many Metro riders are convinced by this sort of thing?

Know what also isn't your friend? Facebook.

Talking business

As with all business, the tech industry basically would wither and die without a steady infusion of trends and their concomitant trendy jargon.

The one I’m thinking about today is “digital”. Everything’s gotta be digital. And everyone’s gotta have a digital strategy, no matter what line of business you’re in. Hospitals, publishers, food trucks…you gotta talk about the digital component of your business model.

What I find interesting is that if you start asking all these people what digital means in context of their business, their eyes slew off to the side, they clear their throats and the conversation kind of drifts into nothingness. Because no one really knows what the hell it means in general, much less how it’s going to affect them. They just know they have to have it.

So when I came across this on the digital Internet, I snagged it for you.

You’re welcome.

Where's the flashy-thingie?

This week scored about a 9.5 on my Weird Shit-o-Meter (to appropriate Men in Black’s Agent Jay). And that was even before the pardon of Dinesh D’Souza.

But here’s another example: the BBC reports on the top ten reasons that (British) corporations toss out for not having women sit on their boards. The pathetic lameness of these things is extraordinary.

(Here’s the list, in case you’re not up to clicking through to the Beeb.)

If I were a stockholder I’d seriously consider selling my shares, because men so stupid as to go on record backing these crack-brained excuses in the 21^st Century could not possibly run a company at a sustainable profit. And that’s before we even get to the fact that businesses with a good mix of women in leadership positions consistently outperform those packed with the XY-chromosome set.

It's 2016: do you know where your money is?

Here are some numbers from the Wells Fargo & Company widespread fraudulent practices that brought CEO John Stumpf to Capitol Hill yesterday.

- Phony accounts created without customers’ knowledge or permission: 565,443 credit cards, 1.5 million deposit accounts.

- Fees charged to customers/victims over a period of years: $400,000 and counting (including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees)

- Credit scores lowered or ruined: unknown

- Fines assessed to WFC by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: $185 million, which they’ll find between the cushions in the sofas in the executive lounge 

- Low-level bank employees fired…two weeks ago: 5300

- Senior managers (or even mid-level ones) who’ve had their salary, bonus or job security affected: bloody sod all.

Stumpf spent about an hour dodging questions at a Senate hearing, mostly from Democrats; Republicans may have been busy planning their next statement on why they’re not considering the President’s nominee to SCOTUS. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., gave Stumpf an earful, as he kept maintaining that he and other executives knew nothing about the systemic practices, even after they launched a half-hearted “investigation” into allegations…back in 2013, and that it’s up to WFC’s board to make any, you know, decisions on whether anyone with a C or a V in their title should expect a lower bonus this year. Not his.

(Warren used words on Stumpf that he is probably and surprisingly unused to hearing. "You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission." Warren has a bigger set of brass ones than all 99 of her colleagues in the Senate have rolled together.)

No, he doesn't know anything about making monetary decisions, as the CEO of a major financial institution. “I’m not an expert in compensation,” he said.

But I’ll bet he checks his direct deposit notifications religiously and accounts for every penny in bonus and executive entitlements.

I wonder if his accounts are with WFC?

Stumpf’s disclaimer and crocodile apology (“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members and to the American public. I want to apologize for violating the trust our customers have invested in Wells Fargo. And I want to apologize for not doing more sooner to address the causes of this unacceptable activity.”) follows the usual pattern for his ilk. He’s not sorry that his company of 265,000 employees embarked on a multi-year predation of the most vulnerable of its individual customers; after all, think of all those years he was raking in his salary and bonus. He’s not even sorry that they got caught at it. He’s only sorry that it’s looking like there might be some negative consequences to him personally.

He doesn’t give a rat’s about anyone else, up or down the food chain.

Those numbers at the top of this post? None of them is of the least concern to Stumpf. The only one that matters is that he keeps his $19.3 million annual package.

You know what’s really wonderful about all this? As in “I wonder what the actual fuck is going on”? That it’s 2016, nine years after all those too-big-to-fail banks and brokerages were first exposed as engaging in industrial-strength long-term fraud. (And, when caught, went all Uriah Heep in the company of their multitudes of attorneys.) 

And yet here we are again.

WTAF.

And now for a word...

There’s no escaping the promoted tweet these days, so on my way to blocking everyone who sticks one of their annoying ads into my timeline, I occasionally check to see what kind of responses they’re eliciting.

So when I saw this one asking people for “feedback”, I knew that the response probably wouldn’t be useful for concept validation:

And I have to say that it was pretty funny to me to see this promo:

Because the first thing I did was block the account.

Reality ping

Following on yesterday’s post that harks back to the world of corporate recruiting, I was interested by this story in the Wall Street Journal about the possibly parlous state of tech companies’ health.

It posits that you may be able to predict whether these enterprises are doing well by checking on the state of sales of ping pong tables. One of the examples used to illustrate the point comes from Twitter, which was apparently buying table tennis equipment like it was going out of style until a year ago. Then bupkis, followed by last quarter’s poor performance.

It’s a cliché—but a largely true one—that tech companies (especially those on the start-up side of their growth) in the Valley They Call Silicon ply their engineers with “free” food and games that they refer to as benefits. “Come work for [insert Disruptive Tech Name here] and get catered dinners, Foosball and the use of noise-cancelling headsets!”

Good health coverage and retirement plans—not so much.

(And if these kinds of enticement look good to you, just consider what they mean. The first two are indicative that they expect you to be around every night for those dinners, and that you’re supposed to unkink your computer-focused vision without actually leaving the premises. Although you will have to go outside if you want to call your gynecologist because of the open-plan office, which is why they’re giving you the headsets.)

The mindset as articulated by the CTO at Lithium Technologies is indeed there: having the ping pong table (or whatever is the game-du-jour) validates your credentials as a thought-leader ninja rockstar serial entrepreneur. Like all the other thought-leader ninja rockstar serial entrepreneurs. It’s part of the whole package that you present to VCs and technology journalists.

I question the correlation between their purchase and predictions about a company’s financial performance. I mean—at some point, don’t you hit ping pong saturation? Not only are they rather large (9’ x 5’), but you also need space around them to actually play. So after the first two or three—what are you going to do?

As for the CMO with his $100 paddle in its special bag—well, that’s more an indicator of individual arrogance and excess than of corporate success.

But that’s the Valley for you.

Conference capitalism

Working a booth for three days at a conference gave me a lot of time to consider the closed ecosystem of the conference venue/hotel.

In this particular case, it was the Marriott Wardman Park, but it could have been pretty much anywhere. The Marriott WP is in the Woodley Park/Adams Morgan neighborhood of the District They Call Columbia, so it’s not like it’s the only place out in the middle of nowhere. But it’s still closed.

If you don’t want to take your food and drink from the hotel, you have to walk outside to one of the eateries on Connecticut Avenue or Woodley. And if you’re dodging between seminars, workshops and sessions, that’s extra time you don’t have. (The conference provided no food to the general attendees, so you fended for yourself.)

Moreover, this past weekend we had temperatures in the 20s, with a wind chill even lower, so making that short trek was even more daunting a prospect.

The hotel was Metro-accessible, so that’s how my colleagues and I got there the first day. But on the second, one of them drove in and parked in the Marriott’s garage. He commented, “I realized the hotel’s business model: extortion.”

And that’s basically what you get in that closed eco-system. Everything comes with that we-can-get-away-with-this surcharge. If you didn’t want to bundle up and brave the arctic wind outside, you just sucked it up. A plain brewed (not even cold-brewed; whatever that is) coffee is $4, and don’t even think about refills. So is an apple or a banana. A bare-bones sandwich is $8. A prepacked salad of a fistful of greens and a slice of tomato is $10.

And parking your car for two hours is $26.

But it’s more than that. The closed ecosystem means that service is also we-can-get-away-with-this lackadaisical. Things get done (ish) when they get done. Or they don’t.

This point was driven home to me on Friday, when a colleague and I went to get one of those overpriced sandwiches at a coffee-and-prepacked sandwich stand, the only budget (relatively) alternative to the hotel bar or restaurant. It being lunchtime, the line to pay was extensive, and nearly immobile. I noticed two contributory factors:

In an age where everything related to credit card transactions is done electronically, with purchases under $20 requiring no signature, the Marriott’s sandwich stand printed out receipts and required customers to sign them. (With the line for the tip included, so at a minimum you had to zero that out and write in the total in addition to your signature.)

But then one of the two women working the cash registers picked up her cash drawer and walked away. Apparently her shift was over, and there was no replacement. Twenty people lined up were not a concern at all.

Closed ecosystem. It’s like the Mafia, but with sales tax.

To xfinity and hell

Monday’s for gratitude, so today I’m going to gripe about having to fight with Comcast. Again. Still.

Why is it that invariably whatever their agents on the phone tell you turns out to be at odds with what their billing department does? Since they charge you for your service in advance, and I ended service (for want of a better term) two weeks ago, imagine my surprise when my bill came for an entire month’s amount.

Or, roughly, ten times what their phone rep told me it would be (after trying to persuade me not to end service, just transfer it, no matter where I was moving).

Honestly, I could do without the tsuris.

Diversity has its limits

A couple of days ago, for my Ada Lovelace Day post, I briefly discussed the Grace Hopper Celebration, the Anita Borg Institute and the issue of age when talking about diversity in the high tech arena.

Specifically, I mentioned that the main thrust of even the organization and event at the forefront of the drive to increase the numbers of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has a blind spot when it comes to including women of a certain age. A number of attendees of previous GHC conferences reported with some degree of wonder that at the much-ballyhooed recruiting expos, if you look like you have a few product launches on you, you become invisible to recruiters. And, likewise, apparently to ABI event planners, who have also ignored them when they expressed concerns about this.

It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone involved in this equation that if you’ve acquired some grey hair and wrinkles in the course of your career in tech, that means you have not only skills, but also experience—valuable experience—in your field, in designing, building, testing, marketing or supporting your product or service.

Back in the mists of time, I was hoping to be able to attend GHC this year, and I registered in the pre-conference job-seeking database. As a result, I’ve received a number of emails from all kinds of companies touting their presence at the conference and proclaiming their eagerness to meet with me and talk opportunities. Hardware, software, services; telecoms, finance, consumer goods; startups, legacies—the whole megillah.

Here’s one of the most recent ones, and it illustrates that age-is-the-best-cloak-of-invisibility principle. The consulting firm Deloitte sent this email urging me (and everyone else who registered) to meet with them during the next few days and see what they can offer me.

Pretty positive, right?

Well, not so much. You’ll notice that the price of admission to the opportunity discussion is taking a “survey”. Well, fair enough. Except:

Yes—if you look at the “survey’s” (it's a registration form, really) required fields, they clearly are expecting to speak exclusively with current students or recent grads. (The “Expected Grad Year” only goes back to 2010; that gives you an idea.)

It’s also interesting that the (required) “Position of Interest” includes three essentially entry-level categories and only one “experienced” one. Clearly no mid- or senior-level women need apply to Deloitte.

What a complete joke! But, sadly, it’s a joke that obviously pervades even the gold-standard women-in-tech conference. Deloitte’s recruiters sent this out with the expectation that they’ll be perceived as real supporters of “diversity”, when in fact they’re just perpetuating the well-established canard that tech is for Millennials only.

Also, sadly, they aren’t the only company at GHC and in the workplace who are operating under that misapprehension. Welcome to my world.

To Xfinity and beyond

Thirty minutes of my life that I’ll never get back were spent on the line (mobile, since being a Triple Threat Xfinity customer meant I had no phone, as well as Internet or TV service) yesterday with Comcast.

First of all trying to find out why the hell I had no phone, Internet or TV service. (According to Charles, some piece of equipment blew and hundreds of residences in the area were in the same sad, leaky boat with me.)

Then, after I told Charles that the instant I had connectivity I would be looking up satellite and U-Verse options to their crappy service, because I just then opened my cable bill to find they’d raised it $30 for no discernable reason. (As in: no added services.)

Well, after he told me that they were “sending some guy out to replace this equipment”, and that they wouldn’t commit to an ETA for resumption of service, he asked if I wanted to talk with someone in Customer Loyalty about my account. What the hell—not like I could watch reruns of Law & Order: SVU or check whether that Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil the lion illegally has been sighted anywhere in or out of the crosshairs.

The upshot of my call is that Comcast is graciously condescending to offer me the same rate I was paying for the last year (“That was a special offer, for one year only.”), but which now includes “premium” (not really) channels I’d been paying an extra $10/month for, and they’re sending me a new DVR which is presumably better than the five-year-old one I have. And it’s $10 less per month.

So, basically, because I called them on their greedy monopolistic arrogance, they’re being the good guys because they’re not screwing me as much as their business model calls for. But I’m sure they’ll make up for it by screwing someone else; probably 40 someone elses.

(As an aside, I was somewhat surprised but not a little pleased to discover that one of my neighbors not only has an unsecured "guest" Wi-Fi network, but that they're also clearly not using Comcast as their ISP. So I was able to follow the tweets about that lion-murdering bastard after all.)

But that’s not really why I’m writing this. My all-too-typical conversation with Comcast reminded me of something I saw a couple of weeks ago around Sunnyvale:

I see plenty of security service notices in the yards of million-dollar houses here in the Valley They Call Silicon. But this is the first one I’ve ever come across from Comcast. And my first thought when it registered in my brain was, “Wow—who’d contract with the company with the crappiest customer service record ever to provide a critical, time-sensitive response service? Who?”

(This is precisely what I wonder every time I see a TV commercial for Comcast home protection services.)

Plus—if these people’s alarm system is connected to the cable infrastructure, it was kaput along with everyone else’s phone, TV and Internet.

Business modeling

Here’s an interesting thing about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)— you’re not buying a permanent license to use it; you’re paying a monthly (or yearly) subscription to have access to it. The approaching-senility set may recall, in the dim-dark past, subscribing to things called “magazines” (or even “newspapers”), which arrived at their doorsteps either by delivery or mail. Back when mail actually got delivered.

SaaS is like that, only it’s an application showing up on your computing device.

There are a number of attractions to SaaS in the enterprise world: you don’t have upfront costs of buying a huge license at an even huger price, and you don’t have to have the hardware and platform infrastructure (also expensive) to run the application, since SaaS is most often hosted at an independent data center somewhere. Also—new releases just propagate themselves in the ether, and tech support for users is generally handled directly by the software vendor, not the client company.

Basically, SaaS means that companies don’t have to have IT staff to install, maintain, upgrade or support these sometimes very complex software systems. In return, the client company pays subscription fees—usually based on the number of users licensed to access the application—on a monthly or yearly basis.

To lure consumers and small businesses into their software capabilities, some SaaS companies give free access to basic versions of an app with limited capabilities. Kind of like drug dealers hanging out by a schoolyard and handing out little tastes of crack. You get accustomed to the functionality. Then—if you want more—you gotta pay.

Well, I’ve been working with someone who really likes Evernote as a collaboration tool—note taking, document sharing, that sort of thing. So I signed up for a free account using my junk email address. (That’s the one I use for Meetup, Dice, email lists and everything else that I don’t want cluttering up my blog, personal or job-seeker email accounts.) Yeah, it looked fine.

Then my friend sent me something through Evernote using my personal email account, so I had to log in using that one instead of my junk mail account.

Both of those activities were about a month ago.

Last week I got two come-ons from Evernote, offering a special deal if I buy a year’s subscription. But notice the difference in how much they want me to sign up.

The offer to the junk mail account—which I opened, played with for 30 minutes and then never accessed again—is six months free with a one-year subscription:

In the offer to the account associated with actual exchange of information with a paying subscriber I only get an extra month with a one-year subscription.

Now this is something I find very interesting—and I see it throughout the business world. They’re so busy trying to woo a new customer, they basically blow off the one who’s already using their product or service. What I find interesting is that they don’t really bother to disguise that at all.

Equality bytes

There’s an interesting oxymoron involved in applying for employment in the United States. Well, there’s a ton of them, but today I’m going to talk about this one: the Equal Employment Opportunity questions.

Employers have to report data to the Feds on percentages of employees of various racial/ethnic groups, sexes and disabilities; also whether you’re a veteran (of the Armed Forces) or not.

Interestingly, I’ve recently seen more than two choices for sex (or gender, as they politely like to refer to it these days), especially for companies around the Bay Area. It’s nice to have options.

Now, while it’s mandatory that employers report this information, it’s voluntary for applicants to supply it. I routinely check the “decline to state” boxes. They try various ways to trick you into giving the data, but there has to be an option to refuse to “self-identify”.

Now, here’s the oxymoron:

The drop-downs for each of those categories is a required field. So it’s mandatory that you respond to it, even when your response is “none of your dag-blamed business.”

So, I don’t really know how accurate that EEO data is on a national level. I just know that they’re going to have to interview me in person to make any guesses about my particulars.

Boys will be idiots, Part Duh

It’s interesting that, in span of a few days, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a 17-year-old advocating for girls’ education, and just before Ada Lovelace day (the annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM), the CEO of one of the über-tech companies of all time opened his mouth at a conference all about women in STEM…

And Microsoft’s Satya Nadella told his audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration last Thursday that women who do not ask for raises are showing their traditional superpowers and building up karmic credits that will pay out through the HR systems of whatever organization they work for.

No, I am not making that up. Here’s what he said when asked for advice on how women who are uncomfortable about asking for salary increases should approach the process:

“It’s not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for raises have. Because that’s good karma. It’ll come back. Because somebody’s going to know: ‘That’s the kind of person that I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to really give more responsibility to.’ And in the long-term efficiency, things catch up.”

It’s not enough that women in technology companies (and elsewhere, no doubt) are being told by their managers to be “less abrasive” and to “step back” and “let others shine” if they actually speak up to, you know, contribute to corporate success. (While men are given suggestions on what technical skills they might want to develop.) Or even that women who ask for raises are seen as “unpleasant”, while men doing the same are not viewed negatively.

But now the CEO of Microfreakingsoft flat out tells women: don’t ask for a raise, Babycakes, and the very act of not asking will ripple through the great, all-knowing halls of your corporation, and your superpower-strength forbearance will in the end pay off. Because “the system will give you the right raises as you go along.”

Just state your request—silently—to the universe, and your increase will drop from the branches of the cosmic salary tree.

Oh, please. It’s bullshit advice like this that has meant that women have to be twice as good as men at whatever technology we’re talking about to get half the respect and 78% of the pay. Not to mention grinning and bearing through the fratboy brogrammer cultures. Tech companies up and down the Valley They Call Silicon are reluctantly releasing demographic data (prodded by the Anita Borg Institute, which organizes the Grace Hopper Celebration) that reveals again and again that most of their techies are young males (primarily white and Asian).

(Moreover, if you look at what Nadella said, if you just smile and show how hard you work, “someone is going to notice”…and what you’ll get is more responsibility. He says nothing about more actual, you know, money. And that’s the system as we currently know it.)

And you have to ask: is this the advice Nadella gives to men in tech; just wait for your work to be rewarded? Hell no, it isn’t, because the entire industry is roaring with its males continually and loudly competing for more recognition and money. Because they all know that size matters, and you measure size by how far your ego gets you as well as by your salary, bonus, stock options and the rest of it.

That “I am a ninja” mentality is the “traditional superpower” of men in most businesses, but certainly in technology.

It was great that Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College (which is all about STEM, and which until about 35 years ago was male-only) shared the stage with Nadella. She stepped in and politely disagreed with that piece of advice, and shared a couple of experiences of her own, where she didn’t advocate effectively for herself. Which just goes to show you: if a woman as astute and respected as Klawe has problems with negotiating salaries, we all have a lot to learn.

Some time after Nadella left the stage in Phoenix someone must have pointed out the shitstorm that was erupting around the Internet, and he issued first a tweet saying he’d been “unclear” about the issue:

Then the PR folks got to him and he issued a statement saying he’d been “wrong” in his answer, and that—man or woman—“if you think you deserve a raise, just ask.”

Yeah—no, not so much. Because the whole point of the question he was asked is that women are much less comfortable about or inclined to ask for a pay raise than men, and studies show that when they do ask, they’re much more likely to not get it and to in fact have a black mark laid against them for doing so.

So, Nadella’s “just ask” is kind of like Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” campaign: catchy to say but both ridiculous and meaningless in the execution.

Although it does sound marginally better than his original response.

In a way, I’m glad Nadella was such an idiot, making that statement at a conference on women in technology. It shows exactly how systemic that attitude is—the one that says, “Oh, we value women in our organizations…as long as they shut up, smile at our antics and work.” Because the CEO of Microsoft—which reported earlier this month that 29% of its global workforce is female (and in the tech arena, only 17% are women)—really thought that was a fine answer to a question about an issue fundamental to hiring and retaining talented people.

It also raises the question of how well the CEO of Microsoft grasps the technologies of today. Because it’s almost as though he didn’t know that Twitter exists.