Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead
ft.com
ft.com
In a startup that's evolving its culture, there are a number of engineers who did very little engineering work but participating interviews all days long. They turned down a candidate if the candidate got promoted every two years or if the candidate produced "too many successful projects" in their opinion. Why? Well, in the eyes of these culture warriors, such candidates apparently "worked too hard", and therefore "were not good fit of the company's culture 2.0". They were also the same people who asked a few top performers to not work so hard because "they put too much pressure on co-workers". And in the same startup, droves of engineers would take weeks of sick days off because they "were traumatized by the outcome of US election".
In another so called hot tech company, if someone was promoted to a leadership position, be it of management ladder or technical ladder, the immediate question asked in employee all hands or in internal mailing list would be "why did not an XXX get promoted", where "XXX" can refer to any minority people. And huge rants from dozens if not hundreds of employees ensued. No critical review of the qualification of the promoted. No specific name of alternatives. No inspection of the demographics of the hiring pipeline or the employees. If the promoted is not of XXX, then by default there's a diversity problem. By default there's an equality problem. By default there's an elitism problem.