Ex-Google Tech Lead Brags About How He Used to Trash Women's Résumés | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Google Tech Lead Brags About How He Used to Trash Women's Résumés

businessinsider.com

13 pointsduck30 comments

haha I saw 'Tech Lead' and was wondering if it is the 'TechLead' guy from youtube -- yup sure is [https://www.youtube.com/c/TechLead/videos].

I used to watch his videos occasionally because I liked his dry humor and quirky takes. However his humor eventually got so dry that I am unable to tell what is a joke and what is real anymore. Looking back I think it is possible that everything on his youtube is made up.

Lately he seems to have optimized heavily towards generating youtube clicks. This seems to be a pretty obvious case of him deliberately generating controversy to drive traffic.

His humour is extremely dry. I suspect his videos about his ex-wife leaving him etc (quoted by many people recently as proof that he’s a failure or something) are actually trolling too.

I’ve gone off him after he started shilling crypto and especially after this incident. His dry humour before was mostly self-deprecating, which was funny, but I don’t find this kind of “punching down” humour funny, and it’s way too blatantly trolling/attention farming.

yeah i'm remembering why I got into his channel now - he had a lot of content on his minimalist philosophy that I found interesting.

The whole 'techlead' thing did always seem like a joke, he was definitely either making fun of himself, or making fun of the prestige of working for the big tech companies.

I haven't watched any of his recent videos but it seems like he has shifted focus to just making $$. Maybe he should have tried to hold onto a tech job :D

It’s incredible to me that people can’t see that this is obvious bait. He is just saying this to get attention, and it’s clearly working.

How do you know this isn’t his opinion?

You see, that’s the thing with the far-right grift. It’s always like dealing with Schrödinger’s cat but for beliefs. But the answer to “Are they a deeply unpleasant person or are they just in it for the attention/money?” is always both. This isn’t new. Goebbels was quite open about the fact a lot of what he did was fundamentally in bad faith.

TechLead does not strike me as 'far-right'. He spent enough time in California working for Facebook and Google that I would be shocked if he is anything other than far to mid left.

big tech companies are not and have never been far-left

It might be his opinion, but frankly I doubt it. It’s hyperexaggerated bait in any case.

The story about him interviewing people, throwing their resumes in the trash and telling them to “go have kids” is obviously BS, so it stands to reason that the rest isn’t true either.

Yeah here’s the thing: Nothing good comes from giving benefit of the doubt to the kind of piece of shit who makes such claims.

It is unlikely he trashed anybody's resumes during an interview. There would be lawsuits.

Does it matter if this is his opinion? He's a YouTube entertainer, not an employer, and his audience knows when he's trolling.

Some people simply cannot decouple their moral outrage from their ability to assess a situation. Good for a particular type of comedian, though it's not really to my taste.

This guy is trolling, and he's doing it very skillfully.

In the real world though, it's the resumes of men which get trashed. It's open and quite legal, with the Orwellian name of affirmative action.

It's also very mainstream, to the extent that a major Canadian university put it explicitly in their announcement for a tenure track position that men need not apply. [1]

[1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/research/sites/ca.research/files/upload...

“Joke’s on your, I was only pretending to be a piece of shit!”

Do people have no more sense of humour? Is everybody here changing the world and providing a future to humanity a javascript framework at a time?

This the Tech Lead! The one and only! The man has a sense of humour driest than the bottom of Death Valley.

"Why I'm so good at coding.": https://youtu.be/xqgH9j3x2OE

He also scammed people with his own cryptocurrency, dragging critics through the mud and constantly lying about the situation.

He got poor too, he says...

"How Crypto Made Me Poor... my biggest mistakes.": https://youtu.be/5A67U1M80tw

And if you are getting Crypto advice from an humoristic channel on YouTube well...

Oh, he only scammed them sarcastically? Well then, don't see a problem in that case.

https://youtu.be/pLrRt8R9zRA

It is called "By Millionaires for Millionaires", so maybe he scammed them, and if he did, he did it indeed sarcastically.

The article contains multiple tweets where he doubles down and says even weirder stuff:

> "No one asked for women programmers. We asked for women influencers and instead got 'independent women' in pants suits. Independence does not exist if you want a family. A woman should prioritize being a good mother and wife, not a coding machine. 'Mother/Wife' is a great job,"

How do literally multiple paragraphs of misogynistic bullshit pass as a "joke" for you?

Because he made a career of outrageous statements I do not take anything he says at face value. What I know, is that many of his videos made me fall from the chair several times laughing, and his business is YouTube views and selling Tech Lead shirts...

I'm confused as to how you don't understand that it's a joke.

None of those statements are literal. He does not believe those things. Nobody does. Those statements are jokes because they are absurd, unexpected and ironic.

This is equivalent to somebody writing that "birds aren't real" and people laughing, and you getting upset because birds are real. The absurdity is the humor.

Does that help explain it?

Well, you never know, because people exploit ambiguity or even just blunder into it. Sometimes people don't even know what they really mean.

Going around saying "you idiot, don't you understand the 'use-mention distinction'?" could itself be considered kind of obtuse. In real life, it is not cut and dry. People muddy the water on purpose as a deniability tactic constantly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...]

A large number of people seem to have only recently discovered this chauvinist pig.

His Twitter feed and YouTube channel are full of hot-takes, intended to shock and trigger people.

He knows exactly what he's doing. He's just another Alex Jones or Joe Rogan. Getting you to share his posts and videos to demonstrate your outrage is his goal and many are falling for it, hook, line, and, sinker.

If you take issue with what he is saying (and I hope you do), please choose to amplify the voices of the women he'd rather be silent. Don't amplify him.

That's not even remotely similar to Joe Rogan though? He has a podcast where he invites a wide variety of guests, and mostly lets them tell their stories without interruption or argument. Sometimes those guests say things people don't like, sometimes Joe himself says things people don't like (eg, alternative medicine for covid), but his controversies are because he's open-minded to a every perspective rather than intentionally shocking.

I think it would be naive to say Joe doesn’t have a specific goal when picking his guests.

yup it's the person I've had in my mind before clicking.

he has one of the most obnoxious YouTube video channels. I honestly don't know if he's a troll or an individual with serious mental problems (or both ?)

for those who don't know him, his personality or maybe just his online persona revolves around being an ex-Facebook, ex-google, ex-husband, ex god-empror, ex-insert whatever you feel like.

that got fired from all of them not because of his incompetence and toxicity but because he was too much of genius that others feared him.

Seems like this is a classic troll rather than someone with these opinions held genuinely.

Hope this asshole never needs to work again. He’s just cost all of his prior employers many, many thousands of dollars in legal review of every hiring committee he’s ever been a part of, and potentially millions of dollars in discrimination settlements, so he’s going to be radioactive to any company but those explicitly on the ideological far right.

What a misogynistic jerk. I don't know what is sadder; that he has so much of a following, or that his garbage POV resonates with a small number of deplorables in our industry. The rest of us need to do our best to push back and ensure we make our industry hospitable, welcoming, and supportive for women and all other URMs.

Needless to say, his statements are garbage and nonsensical, meant only to stir up noise and draw attention. The sad thing is, controversy more or less is beneficial for his bottom line. He doesn't need to convince anyone he's a decent human being, he just needs to convince them to watch his videos, pay for his training, etc.

Kind of depressing.

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