Birds of a feather...

The proverb - "Birds of a feather flock together". 

Heard of it? 

In my 16 odd years of working in Indian IT industry, I have seen it go from the rebellious start to sweat shop model to now a sinking ship. 

Bad economy, rising nationalism, isolationist, autmation and a competitive far east populace notwithstanding, one ought to introspect on how is it that we went from exporting Satya Nadellas and Sundar Pichais of the world and to now almost losing our jobs in droves? Of course, bad quality is the answer. But. How did even that bad quality come to be from a time when the world knew us as a "good workforce"? 

In this humble IT worker's opinion, it is the day the HR departments across the board started an asinine and silly system called the "referral systsem". What is it? Oh, not much really, the current assholes in a company now get a company sanctioned invitation to refer their asshole friends to job openings. 

I know, I can hear you say that I am being judgmental and a little douchy even. Hear me out though.

A good team has everyone from hardworking ture to the salt kinda folks, the smart workers, the talented and assholes. Don't get me wrong, we need assholes in every team. Leave a talented guy unchecked and he soon wades into the dark twilight zone of a dreamer where projects die a slow death. We need loudmouthed, politics playing and lazy fucks that these 'asshole' demography is all about to keep these guys in check. It is a necessary evil. And that is how things were in the days gone by. When adverts would be placed in newspapers for walk-in interviews and people would show up for the group discussions and plethora of interview rounds to eventually picked to work in a certain department with certain people dependent on their talent, experience and skills. You see, an organic process. Teams came together, worked, survived and in the end the cream would always come to the top. 

However, now with this bullshit hitting the Indian market, what you have is assholes referring other assholes. Because a person working his or her ass of doesn't have the time to go referring other people and a talented guy is not going to waste his beloved edge in the team by bringing in his nemesis. Which leaves us with, who then has the time and the will to not do their job and go aroudn referring other people and make HR's life easy? The assholes. You see, assholes always have time on hand. That is their God given talent. I am digressing though, I will write a separate post on these eminences. 

What we are going to focus on is, who does an asshole prefer to work with?

Can't be a hard worker because a hard worker is like an itch that can't scratched for an asshole. Can't be a taleneted worker because asshole detest these people. Can't be a smart person because an asshole can't recognize one if they were punched in the face by one. Go on, I will wait, take a guess. 

Ten points to you if you guessed - yet another asshole. 

Yeah, thats right. The only person an asshole will refer is yet another asshole. Thats the whole point of this blog, birds of a feather flock together. And assholes, my friend, flock like no bird ever.